Paul Di Resta has apologised to his United Autosports team after crashing out of his maiden 24 Hours of Le Mans in the twentieth hour of the race.
The Scot felt a podium finish could have been on the cards had he not lost control of his Ligier at the Porsche Curves, with the damage caused too much for him to recover to the pits. He was taken to the medical centre as a precaution as it was a head-on impact with the wall, but he was quickly released.
Di Resta, who was sharing the car with Filipe Albuquerque and Phil Hanson, says it will take some time to get over the crash.
“Massive apologies to the team, who busted their asses and their balls all night to try and make up what we had, the issue [with a missing GPS sensor] in the first hour,” said Di Resta.
“We were on the edge all the way, but I’ve got to apologise for making a costly error that’s ended our chances. It looked like we could have been on the podium, but you can always say what could have been.
“We had decent pace when we had been pushing, we had to be aggressive. For someone like me it’s going to take a few days to get over, because it hurts when you let people down.”
Di Resta was struggling to get heat into his tyres ahead of the incident, but despite this, he refused to blame this for the crash.
“I was struggling a bit, because as soon as I left the pits the safety car came out, just never really got [the tyres] up to temperature,” said Di Resta. “I’m not going to put it down to excuses, because I’ve more than enough experience under circumstances like that.
“It’s just a law of averages, sometimes you blow it and I blew it today.”
