Mark Webber is bracing for an Audi resurgence in the second half of the World Endurance Championship season.
After an intense battle with Audi for the first two hours of Nurburgring 6 Hours, Porsche prevailed with Webber, Brendon Hartley and Timo Bernhard cracking their first win of 2016.
Both Porsche and Audi rolled out fresh aero configurations to prepare for the final five races on the calendar with Mexico next in line from September 2-4.
The #1 Porsche 919 beat Audi’s #8 R18 e-tron quattro by almost a minute to arrest a run of reliability issues which have dogged the crew since Hartley’s Silverstone crash at the opening round in April.
Webber’s entry is therefore buried down in eighth in the standings on 28.5 points, 77.5 adrift of team-mates Marc Lieb/Neel Jani/Romain Dumas.
Audi’s lead car of Oliver Jarvis/Lucas di Grassi/Loic Duval is meanwhile just 33 points from the lead in second place.
Buy tickets
“We’ve still got work to do. The tracks coming up I think might suit Audi a bit better,” Webber said.
“We know that they are right on us (in terms of performance).
“They definitely learnt a lot about their car with the new aero package. It was the first time both teams could go into battle with these new configurations.
“Mexico is a very, very different layout. Very high altitude so we’ll see how the capacity of the engines go there in terms of diesel (Audi) and petrol (Porsche) and turbos.
“We’ve got our work cut out to get some more wins.”
Webber praised his pit crew for its slick work throughout the encounter.
“Our pit stops were very fast so we would always get some time back in the pit lane. Our guys were doing a good job there,” Webber added.
“Overall we just had too much pace for them. The slow puncture which Brendon had during his stint didn’t help our equation.
“In general I think the results were very fair. For Porsche to win with car #1, we are long overdue.
“We’ve had many, many huge leads but through technical or something else we haven’t been able to pull the job off.
“It’s particularly satisfying. They are in same family but we like to beat Audi.”
Discussion about this post