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Do take five minutes to read this story. And read it with your fingers crossed. If what it contains comes to pass, then don't book anything in for the middle weekend of June 2010, because you'll want to be with me, watching Aston Martin and Jaguar compete for overall victory at the Le Mans 24 Hour. I'm deadly serious. Read on.

Things happen at 5.00am in the morning at Le Mans; a moment, remember, only just the right side of the continental divide that separates the optimism of the first 12 and the anxiety of the last 12 hours of world's greatest motor race.

David Richards is explaining just what happened to the 007 Gulf Racing Aston Martin DBR9 (referred to as the 'double-oh seven car' inside AM Racing). "24-hour racing is the ultimate lottery; the remaining great challenge. You just can't prepare for every eventuality with a race that only happens once a year. You can do as many race simulations as you want, but you can't cover for human failure.

"It was Andrea's [driver Andrea Piccini, the old hand in the 'fresher's team' car with ex-F1 drivers Heinz-Harald Frentzen and Karl Wendlinger] error that caused the off, and hit the stones that knocked off the alternator belt." Richards, Chairman of Aston since last year, has been the boss of AMR since the DBR9s first wailed around Le Mans four years ago.

"When the car came in with the flat battery, we quickly charged that on the stand, but the driver had his foot on the clutch, and the alternator drives off the gearbox, so it appeared the battery wasn't charging. We changed the alternator, it cost the car two laps. We didn't need to, but that's the kind of mistake you make at five o'clock in the morning."

The flip side of that is the peformance of the 'senior team' in the 009 car you see here, shot exclusively for Top Gear, still wearing the grime
of its second consecutive victory over the bullish 'Team America' Corvettes. A great racing team,
any great racing team, is built not around the team principle but around its drivers, suggests Richards, who is, er, team principal at Aston Martin Racing.

The faultless performance of the winning crew would tend to suggest he's right. Never less than absolutely on-it for 24 hours (the Vette was less than a lap behind), the car went as well in the pits as it did on the track. Look closely at the pics - beyond the oil and rubber and rainwater, there's not a scratch on the winning DBR9.

That was all David Richards answering the question, which I paraphrase now a little, 'How the hell did Peugeot spend all that money, build a car that fast and still not win?' His answer, typically candid, typically straight, typically warmly expressed, is all based around his theory that at Le Mans it's all about the people, not about the cars; you can prep the cars to a level beyond the obsessive, but you can't make human beings think straight.