Corvette team still asks ‘What If?’
What if the last couple of hours at Le Mans last year had been run in the dry? What if the safety car had not come on course for nearly an hour (much to the delight of Audi’s Emanuele Pirro … among others), only to leave with 10 minutes to go in the race? And what if Fellows had been able to catch the leading Aston Martin? Would he have been able to pass for the lead?
No one will ever know. The Corvette C6.R finished a lap behind the class-winning DBR9 of David Brabham, Darren Turner and Rickard Rydell. At times, Fellows was cutting nearly 30 seconds a lap off Brabham in the final three rain-soaked hours.
“It would have been very interesting," O’Connell said. “We were strong in the wet. You don’t know how hard Brabham was pushing. But that late in the race when someone is eating away at your time, it’s hard to say how it would have shaken out. It would have been a much better finish to that race. But you look at the other guys’ perspective and they were saying, ‘We shouldn’t be racing in this.’"