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Le Mans 2008 - The Tourists' Story - Page 8

The Night (and a Surprise Meeting!)

 

It was while I was at Tertre Rouge that I sent a text to Paul Truswell as he had posed a question on Radio Le Mans about not knowing what the weather was like at various points around the circuit.  Being the anorak that I am, I kept a record of that text and I know that I sent it at 4.39 am.  At this time, it wasn’t raining very hard at Tertre Rouge, so I sent him a text to tell him.  As it happened, within a few minutes the rain worsened but despite that, although the rain remained consistent, to me, the track never seemed to get really wet at Tertre Rouge. 

The Flying Lizards #80 Porsche was still plugging away, way down on the field, after it's early accident with the #76 Porsche     Likewise, the Lola Aston #10 was running well after the accident that befell Jan Charouz early in the race     The #16 Pescarolo was still running well     No, Tom Kristensen doesn't have a serious vibration on his #2 Audi - it's just the car at Tertre Rouge on a slow shutter speed!

Olly Gavin in the #64 Corvette. The car fell behind the GT1 leaders when it lost a lap to a failed alternator part when Max Papis was driving     The #35 Pescarolo was establishing itself as the 'best of the rest' in LMP2 behind the two Porsche Spyders     The Bruichladdich Radical #26 was delayed in the early stages when the seat belts popped open twice for Gunnar Jeannette

It was as I was about to send this message to Paul that I noticed I’d received a test from Allon.  |I just assumed he’d woken up back at the hotel and was texting me to see what was happening in the race.  It was only when I read his text that I realised he hadn’t gone back to the hotel at all! He’d stayed at the circuit after all.  He’d changed his mind very quickly and dashed back to the grandstand while I was buying my water.  Thinking that I hadn’t gone back there at all, he had gone off elsewhere, so we missed each other when I did go back to the grandstand.  All in all, we’d missed each other by about 2 minutes!  And now he was sitting in the grandstand, having been down at Tertre Rouge while I was in my seat there!

As I've said before, the addition of the debris fencing doesn't exactly enhance this shot of the #8 Peugeot.....     And here is the #14 Creation Aim with it's forward firing laser beam headlights......

The #63 Corvette was trading places routinely with the #009 Aston Martin     The Virgo Motorsport team, running the #96 Ferrari suffered really bad luck when the car driven by Rob Bell, Tim Sugden and Tim Mullen went out with a broken engine with little more than 2 hours to go when it was in a solid second place in GT2     Is it just me, or is the Oreca-Courage colour-scheme somehow reminiscent of the early 90's Williams F1 car - even down to the red '5'?!?

Although I really enjoyed watching from Tertre Rouge, I decided to leave there at 5.10 to make my way back to meet Allon at the grandstand.  But I managed to miss him again at Dunlop!  Astonishingly, it was well after 6 am that we finally met up again in the grandstand, having wandered the circuit independently for the previous four and a half hours! 

By the time we got ourselves back into the relative 'comfort' of the grandstand, it was pretty wet out there - not that the Corvettes seemed to notice that much...     But Henri's #16 Pecarolo wasn't destined to see that elusive chequered flag - it went out with a broken Judd after 238 laps (or, as Jim Roller would have no doubt said, 'It done blowed up.....'     The #007 Aston Martin was destined tobring up the rear of the GT1 'gang of four'...

And we're back in the pits with the #73 Alphand Corvette     I'm guessing this is Franck Montagny getting into the #9 Peugeot     And it's another one of those popular Lola Aston pitstops!     And off she goes again!

Another stop for the #8 Peugeot     I don't know if it was because the Epsilon Euskadi's spent so much time in the pits, but I got very few decent shots of these lovely cars. So a bonus here, both in the pits together - and hopefully not being wheeled back into the garage!     The pit board shows that Andrea Piccini was driving the #007 Aston Martin and he was due for a pit stop....     Here's Joey Foster in the #45 Embassy Racing Zytek. Sadly, their good effort came to an end after 213 laps when Joey dropped the car at one of the chicanes when apparently he was surprised by another car which straight-lined it....     And here's that Piccini pit stop....or is it? That looks like Karl Wendlinger's helmet in the car - is that Piccini walking away?

A stop for the #72 Corvette this time. You can see just how wet it was by looking at the pit apron!     The Dome boys soldiered on, despite being well down on the LMP1-bis leaders.Yuji Tachikawa is ready with his seat in hand...     And a long shot, showing both of those stops. Five consecutive garages and no garage doors down. We'd had about 12 retirements by this time

It had been raining consistently now for over two hours, not hard rain at all, but that fine rain that eventually gets you a lot wetter than you realise.  It was disappointingly obvious now that the rain was set in for quite a while, so this pretty well put paid to any more thoughts of extensive circuit wandering.  Inevitably, we were both feeling pretty tired by now and were a couple of nodding dogs up at the back of Lagache! 

Not great shots of the two Epsilon Euskadis here....     ....but I have so few of them I decided to keep them in!     After the nasty accident to the #6 Oreca Courage, the sister #5 car kept chasing the lead Pescarolo for the LMP1 sub-class lead. Loic Duval here making his Le Mans debut

The #26 Radical kept on going despite a variety of problems - Ben Devlin was also taking part in his first Le Mans      Allan McNish in the #2 'yellow' (and suppedly unlucky) Audi. If he could have seen it, I'm sure he would have been delighted with that single red light on the side of his car....     Joao Barbosa was making his 5th start at Le Mans, every one of them in one of Martin Short's Rollcentre team cars     Is there a little of the TS010 look to the Dome? No, it can't be THAT pretty.....!

The #63 Corvette, gradually slipping further behind the #009 Corvette, making it all the more unlikely that one of those two yellow lights would get turned off     It was great to see the #55 Lamborghini still running, with (I believe) Mike Hezemans at the wheel here) - but such a shame that it's race had been so blighted by mechanical problems     Another stop for the second-placed #7 Peugeot (with a rear body panel sitting mysteriously in the garage...)

We were due to meet with the returning Ian at 7.30 down on the inside of Dunlop, so I took my last shots in the stand just before 7 am and then we left to head off for the rendezvous point.  Ian soon appeared, bang on time as usual, and after a cup of coffee (strangely difficult to source for 7.30 on a Le Mans Sunday), we were soon heading back to the car and breakfast at Le Grand Lucé.  There was plenty of time for a wash, change and to pack our bags before eating.