Le Mans 24 Hours, 6-7 June 1998

Retirement for Mercedes at Le Mans

After a promising start, there was disappointment for AMG-Mercedes at the Le Mans 24 Hours. Bernd Schneider had taken pole position with the brand new Mercedes-Benz CLK-LM but a steering pump problem led to an engine failure that ended his race in the second hour. Bernd had been running strongly, and the fuel efficiency had seen them running a very competitive strategy with longer stints compared to their rivals. " Naturally l'm disappointed," said Bernd. " I thought we had a good chance to finish after all our good testing results, where we didn't have any major problems. So to retire after one hour is really upsetting. We just have to wait a year to show what we can achieve here.'

The second car, of Jean-Marc Gounon, Christophe Bouchut and Ricardo Zonta, was also running competitively in the hands of Gounon at the start, but at the two hour-mark, with Bouchut behind the wheel, it too started experiencing problems with the power steering, and was retired. " We had a very good strategy,' said Jean-Marc. " We were not going too aggressively at the start, just looking after the car and trying to save the tyres so that they were good for two full stints. The package was great, high top speed with a good balance in all corners. I was very confident after my run, so the result is a big disappointment for the team since they did a super job, and l'm sure our car was one of the best out there. The preparation was good - to be honest I don't know what we could have done differently. Today just wasn't our day."  Christophe Bouchut added : " When I took over the car from Jean-Marc I drove very carefully bearing in mind Bernd's retirement. It was fine in the beginning, then the red light came on the dashboard, and the steering became heavy. We changed the servo pump in the pits,  but when we restarted the engine, the oil pressure dived so we had to retire.

Norbert Haug, Mercedes-Benz Motorsport Chief said : "Both cars retired with engine failures which were the result of broken steering servo pump drives. We never experienced such a problem during the 10,000 kms of testing we did. I 'm very sorry for the AMG crew and our drivers. They have worked faultlessly and are not responsible for the retirements."