Tomas Enge’s long stint as part of Prodrive’s sportscar operation yielded great success. He won the GTS class at the Le Mans 24 Hours with the Ferrari 550 Maranello in 2003 and claimed the Le Mans Series LMP1 crown in 2009 aboard the Lola-Aston Martin. But despite not managing to add to his Le Mans win tally with it, he holds the Aston Martin DBR9 GT1 in even higher esteem and selects it as his favourite car.
The first Czech to race in Formula 1 when he joined Prost for the final three grands prix of 2001, Enge describes the Aston as “a step higher than the Ferrari” in terms of refinement. That’s unsurprising given the DBR9 made its debut four years later than the similarly V12-motivated Ferrari, which Enge took to class pole position at Le Mans every year from 2002 to 2004.
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“The 550 was fast, clearly, but the Aston was much easier to drive - the centre of gravity, the stiffness of the chassis was better,” he says of the car with which he scooped the GT1 class at Petit Le Mans in 2006 and twice finished fourth in the FIA GT1 world championship.
“Obviously, the car wasn’t faster than the Ferrari because every year we got a smaller and smaller air restrictor. Every year we got more and more downforce that [meant] we couldn’t go faster on the straight in Le Mans.
“But the handling of the car, the seat position, the comfort around [was better], except we didn’t have any airflow in 2005!”
Conditions for the DBR9 GT1’s Le Mans bow were “massively hot”, Enge recalls, which is an understatement. The drivers almost cooked inside the cockpit, and the components couldn’t take the heat either.
“After the first stint our car didn’t have a radio because it was so hot that the radio failed,” says Enge, who spent 2005 racing full-time in Indycar on the Indy Racing League side of the split. Afterwards, Prodrive technical director George Howard-Chappell was forced to rethink its ergonomics.
Source: Autosport