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I have to agree with Ayse: the general public will only remember the big races, and the LM24 is the biggest of all in sportscar racing. Wins in big races are wins in big races, and that's what people who aren't anoraks like us will remember, and that's what history will record.
Did Mazda luck in the LM '91? To an extent, yes, by getting a favorable rules package and the Mercedes-Benz entries running into troubles that knocked them out or delayed them. But that's endurance racing. Luck is a big factor, but you can make your own luck to a degree, too. Mazda knew that the 787 can be pushed to it's limits for much of the race, and by lobbying got rules that helped them and exploited loopholes in the rules. But if it wasn't for that, their intensive endurance testing that assured them that they can drop the hammer for 24 hours, and that using that to pressure M-B and Jaguar, they probably wouldn't have won. Mazda made their own luck by putting themselves--though rules lobbying and intense preparation (Oreca helped that program, remember)--in to position, and then capitalized when opportunity presented itself, but they had to put themselves there to begin with.
In LM '08 and '10, Audi ran a relentless pace that kept Peugeot up on the tap, and if it wasn't for that, perhaps the rod failures wouldn't have happened. But Peugeot gambled on that and lost, in much the same way that Audi gambled on trying to make the R18 areo efficient with that greenhouse. You have to gamble sometimes in racing to get ahead, and it's risk vs reward, and the bigger the risk, the bigger the reward. Peugeot lost LM '10 because they wanted to win, and it was just a step too far. Audi had issues outside of LM last year because they wanted to win LM, and depending on one's POV, Audi may've won the battle, but lost the war in the ILMC to get that LM win, or they saw LM as the war in '11, and won that war.
At the end of the day, we can have the benefit of hindsight and we can run down all the wouldas, couldas and shouldas, but the final result is the final result, and none of us can change that.
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