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For me Allan McNish has been the finest sportscar driver of his generation precisely because he's had the ability to push harder than anyone else when it mattered.
I remember chatting to an ex-McLaren mechanic at Le Mans in 2008, and commenting that I was rooting for Audi, because ultimately it would be unfair in McNish only had one LM victory to his name, and the same year's PLM performance was one of those edge of seat drives that ends up welded in memory.
Fast forward and I've long said that if last year Le Mans was won by 13 seconds, over the 24 hours you have to find those seconds somewhere, and sometimes they can be found in the first hour. In that light, I felt McNish's manoeuvre was ambitious when he started it, and obviously it was, but I'm not going to criticise him for it.
That said, the baton will always pass, and (IIRC) Jim Roller from RLM said that the current #1 Audi squad picking up that number one squad baton was one of his Le Mans take-aways. That may well have happened, but for me I'd rather see an Allan McNish still with that rage to win that means he'll push in exactly the same way that led to the error late on this year than someone who sits back and turns his R18 into a carbon fibre bath chair.
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