Allan McNish yesterday celebrated what he called the greatest victory of his career as he, Tom Kristensen, of Denmark and Dindo Capello, of Italy, won the 76th Le Mans 24-hour race.

For the Scottish driver, the win was his second in the endurance classic while for Kristensen it was his record-breaking eighth win at Le Mans. This time the pair, along with Capello, managed it in an Audi R10 TDI which was outpaced by the faster Peugeot 908HDi FAP of Jacques Villeneuve, of Canada, Marc Gene, of Spain and Nicolas Minassian, the Frenchman.

The Peugot trio were leading until rain arrived at the halfway point of the race during the night, bringing conditions that suited the Audi, while the Peugeot team fell prey to reliability issues and errors. From having looked on the cards, Villeneuve's dream of becoming the only man alive to win motor racing's triple crown - the Formula One world title, the Indy 500 and Le Mans - was washed away with the change in the weather.

By the end of the 381st and final lap, Kristensen took the chequered flag with a lead of four minutes and 31 seconds over Minassian in a race that saw 55 cars start but only 35 finish. “I think this is the best race I've ever been involved in,” the 38-year-old McNish, who won the race with Porsche in 1998, said. “I've been in these sorts of scraps before but nothing has ever felt like this, or this good. I'm very, very pleased and extremely proud. We did it with our backs against the wall, but we did it.”

Wolfgang Ullrich, the head of Audi motorsport, paid tribute to his team. “It was a really great race. Le Mans hasn't seen such a race in many years. We did it by staying calm and we used our technology to win,” he said.

For Audi this was their seventh win at Le Mans in the past eight years and their fourth victory on the trot. However this year they faced arguably their biggest challenge from the Peugeot, the French manufacturer, who dominated qualifying by filling the top three places on the grid.

The winning trio took the lead after 14 hours and then managed to hold on from there, including through a nailbiting final hour when Peugeot took the gamble of sending Minassian out on slick tyres only for it to pour with rain over parts of the 13.269km circuit. “Our information was telling us that it would be dry through to the end so we tried to continue with the same tyres without changing them,” Michel Barge, head of Peugeot motorsport, said. “It was a premature decision and one that was not perhaps completely the right one.”

Audi had one fright a couple of hours from the end when Kristensen tangled with a backmarker and spun the car. Fortunately,2 he was able to escape without significant damage and pressed on to maintain his lead.

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