Endurance Racing: 24 Heures de Mans / Le Mans 24 Hours 2011

28 finished. 28 "retired." Why is "retired" in quotation marks? Because "retired" suggests a voluntary act. A number of those that did not finish were anything but volunteers.

Le Mans is special. Little teams get to mix it with the big boys. Amateur (not "amateurish") drivers mix with former Formula One drivers. Everyone has an equal chance of achieving the primary objective: getting to the end of the race.

Therefore the fact that the mightily fancied Aston Martin team lost both of their cars within three laps of the start is a bit of an embarrassment: they simply broke down. Much less was expected of the Group Lotus entries: but one finished. The other did a lot more laps than the Astons.

But the big news was up at the very glamorous, pointy end: the Le Mans Prototype Class 1 cars (LMP1) of Audi and Peugeot. The Pugs were slower than the Audis but the Audis were more thirsty and so needed to stop every 10 laps the every 11 for the Peugeots. By the end of the race, the difference between the leading 908 and the class-winning Audi was less than 14 seconds.

Audi hit the news when hearts jumped into mouths an hour in. A Ferrari pulled out of the pits. An Audi tucked in behind it for a corner knowing that, on cold tyres, the Ferrari may not go exactly where the driver pointed it. And, in endurance racing an avoidable risk is one that should be avoided. McNish, in a second Audi, came blatting down the straight, saw his team-mate going wide and slow into a corner and kept his foot in. Then he saw the Ferrari but it was too late. The Audi was invisible to the little red car, just as the Ferrari had been invisible to McNish. A surprisingly light touch (later, the Ferrari was pushed out of the gravel, drove back to the pits, had bodywork repaired and re-entered the race) while McNish's Audi slid sideways across the gravel and into the tyre barrier, deforming the armco but, more importantly, overturning and reducing itself to its component parts, except for the crash cell. A design issue: if a car has gull wings, no one can open the doors if it's upside down. As marshals scrambled to get the car the right way up, people the other side of the barrier dusted themselves down: a wheel, carbon fibre bits and lots of other stuff had crossed the barrier and littered the service road where media and others were standing.

The crash should not have been survivable. McNish got out and walked away. Had he not been driving a tin-top, then there is little doubt that landing upside down on the barrier before bouncing back into the gravel would have been fatal.

Audi were shocked - and so was everyone else that saw footage of the crash.

But just a few hours later, a second Audi had an accident that, once again, would - if there is any logic in the world - have proved fatal. The impact was so hard that 27 Armco posts were ripped out. The safety car ran around for two hours while it was fixed.

But, aside from near tragedy, this year's race was special because it was just that: instead of the individual time-trial that the event sometimes gets reduced to, the 2011, 79th, running of the event was a genuine race. At one point, all four classes had four cars on the same lap, and any one of them could have won. Pit strategy, driver hours and technical issues all played their part and in a 24 hours race, they are all magnified far beyond a more normal event. And yet, aside from the fact that every single person in the pit lane (and once suspects most of the 250,000 people who turned up to watch) was emotional about the fate of the Audi drivers (and some others who had serious but not so dangerous) crashes, and even the Peugeot team were gracious about Audi's eventual victory in difficult circumstances (how do you go back to work when you think one of your team has just been killed and then find out that he's OK. And then do it again a few hours later?), the greatest thing about this year's Le Mans is that there was - for 24 hours - genuine racing and tension with the result being in doubt even during the last lap.

Brutal. And brilliant.

Oh, and Peugeot were second, third and fourth, their fifth car having had a shunt that incapacitated it out on the circuit.

In LMP2, the tiny English team of Greaves Motorsport finished first.

The biggest shock of the day, however, came 28 minutes before the end of the race. Usually, as the race winds down, it become a procession and often cars end the last lap in a kind of gentleman's agreement not to race to the line. After all, when there is at least a lap between them, why bother overtaking the leader just to go around again? For the leader, far ahead of the competition, the last lap is, in effect, a parade lap.

Not in 2011. At 14:32, the Stewards declared a special arrangement: in the light of the close competition between Peugeot No. 9 and Audi No. 2, (which the organisers helpfully pictured with the French car in front of the German) the cars would not stop immediately after they passed the finishing line but, instead, would complete a lap of honour. They did. And they deserved it.

It's almost unimaginable to be saying this: that 24 hours' race was EXCITING.