Aston Martin Racing boss David Richards has hit out at the Le Mans stewards over the exclusion of Stuart Hall from the race, saying that it put too much pressure on the remaining drivers.
"I think the stewards need to consider this in future years," Richards told AUTOSPORT. "When you take a driver out of a car you do put an extraordinary pressure on the other two drivers and the amount of work they have to do - especially if they're not professional drivers and it's early in the race."
Hall was summoned the the stewards and excluded from the rest of the event after hitting the Bruichladdich Bruneau Radical-Zytek of Tim Greaves during the fifth hour of the race. This left Peter Kox and gentleman driver Harold Primat to share the driving duties.
Primat lost control of the #009 Aston in the Porsche Curves shortly after dawn and wrecked the car.
"He [Primat] had an alarm come on, a temperature alarm, and he smelled something in the car. Those things, put together with the tiredness, just distracted him and he spun. I'm sure if he'd have been fresh he would have coped with that situation.
"We had actually been discussing having the doctor see Harold when he got out of the car to see if we felt it was OK to go back in again. It's a lot of pressure on a chap to do that."