Another stunning come from behind win has given Audi its seventh win in the 2008 American Le Mans Series.  Lucas Luhr and Marco Werner celebrated a narrow victory in front of their team mates Christijan Albers and Emanuele Pirro. It was Pirro’s final race for the team.

Starting from row five of the grid, the Audi drivers were able to take advantage from the enormous torque of their TDI engine  at the many  restarts brought about after the Safety Car was deployed no less than twelve times – the most occasions all season.  

 Werner crossed the finish line the eventual winner only 1.941 seconds ahead of an emotional Pirro who had tears in eyes following his last race in the Audi R10 TDI.

 It was the seventh outright victory for Audi in the eleven-round American Le Mans Series. Acura/Honda and Porsche each scored two victories. Lucas Luhr and Marco Werner celebrated their eighth win of the season in the LM P1 class. The two Germans had already secured the title in the LM P1 Drivers Championship. Pirro finished third in the Championship while Christijan Albers finished his first sportscar race on the podium.

The setting sun, a sports prototype, ahh! Le Mans

 Tony Kanaan and Franck Montagny scored Andretti Green Racing’s second LMP2 victory in three races with a tense 0.054-second win over fellow Acura team de Ferran Motorsports. Finishing third outright Kanaan and Simon Pagenaud, who teamed with Gil de Ferran, exchanged the class lead twice within the span of a lap with 15 minutes left as two Acura ARX-01bs finished first and second for the third time this year.

It was a tough weekend for pole sitter David Brabham and team-mate Scott Sharp in the Patrón Highcroft Acura.

A great start saw Brabham take the early race lead but the first of the 12 full course cautions came with just six laps of racing complete, eliminating his advantage.  Three cautions in the first 35 minutes saw Brabham lose ground due to low tire pressures.

The American driver Scott Sharp took over from the Australian 50 minutes into the race, joining the field in 19th position overall and ninth in class. Sharp delivered an impressive stint on a circuit where he has rarely raced and endured six full course cautions in his two hour drive.  Halfway through his stint he began to suffer from steering problems and by lap 68 was forced to pit under green flag conditions after working his way up to 11th overall.  The Patrón Highcroft crew worked quickly to replace an electronic connector to the power steering, but five laps were lost in the process, putting any chance of victory out of reach.

The team will now prepare for 2009 and a move to the LMP1 class.

Corvette Racing’s Olivier Beretta and Oliver Gavin successfully defended their GT1 victory from last season with a 12.858-second win over teammates Johnny O’Connell and Jan Magnussen. It was the third win of the season for the Beretta/Gavin duo, but the championship went to team-mates O’Connell and Magnussen.

If the team wins three straight at the circuit, next year’s victory will come in GT2 as Corvette has announced plans to enter that class in the second half of the 2009 season.

“The engineering work is done and we know the rules,“ said Corvette Racing program manager Doug Fehan. “The car will probably debut at Mid-Ohio, and then we anticipate running the full season in 2010. We are going to try to dominate as quickly as we can. This team is not one that takes its time. Everything we do is a race, and our goal is to dominate. “

A win to Ferrari in GT2, Next year they'll have the Corvette's to contend with.

The appearance of the factory ‘Vette in GT2 will no doubt have current GT2 teams worried, but for now they got on with some more great racing that saw Tafel Racing close the season with a victory for Dirk Mueller and Dominik Farnbacher in the team’s Ferrari F430 GT. The pairing won for the fourth time this season as they beat Risi Competizione’s Jaime Melo and Mika Salo in their Ferrari by 5.648 seconds.

The chequered flag brought to a close a brilliant year of racing for the ALMS, As other North American road race series continued to struggle, the ALMS consistently provided fans with spectacular racing, good grids and with Acura’s move to P1 an evolving series that seems to be making a lot more sense than Formula One these days.

With the success of this year’s European series and the continued pre-eminence of the World’s Greatest Motor Race the 24 Hours of Le Mans the International Sportscar scene may well be the last bastion of hope in an increasingly gloomy motorsport landscape.

with ALMS, Patron Highcroft & Audi Media.