Aysedasi's Le Mans

Le Mans 2009 - The Tourists' Story - Page 4

The Longest Driver Parade....

As readers of my previous few stories will know, having chanced upon the drivers parade in 2005, we had made the trip into Le Mans town on Friday evening for the last two years to see the parade. In 2009 we followed the same game plan, but little did we know that 2009 would turn out to be a lesson to us all!

We made a fairly quick exit from the circuit and we were soon driving into the centre of Le Mans, looking for somewhere to park. It was packed of course, but Ian and Martyn managed to get parked in the square by the Hotel de Ville, near to the restaurants in which we had eaten on Friday evening for the past three years. Jeremy parked his DB9 nearby and we took a drink in one of the bars before heading off to the parade at about 4.30. Of course this was long before any drivers would be sighted as the parade wasn't actually due to start until 6 p.m., but Ian and I quickly separated from the others and walked down to the area in front of the cathedral, before going our separate ways. We had all agreed to meet back in the square at 6:45, as we needed to leave for our evening meal at Le Belinois at 8 pm-ish, our first return to our old Friday evening haunt since 2004.

I made a beeline to what I've termed the ‘collection area’ where the drivers first arrive to meet up and find the old car they'll be travelling in on the parade and I started snapping at whatever took my fancy. I suppose it was getting on for 5.30 before the first drivers started walking across the road from the car park to the collection area. The Flying Lizards crew were among the first to arrive, with the Corvette drivers following soon after.

 I lay in wait for the Audi drivers as I saw them make this journey last year and I was able to get some reasonable shots when they arrived.

But it was around this time that I started to have a really frustrating problem with my camera. All of a sudden I started getting "Error 99" codes when using my longer zoom lens. It didn't happen with the smaller lenses. I changed CF cards several times and each time when I thought I'd sorted it, it came back a few shots later. It was seriously annoying and was really costing me some great shots as I had to keep stopping to remove the card and try again. I even cleaned the contacts on both camera and lens and although this seemed to help in that the frequency of the problem reduced, every time it just came back again. I was now beginning to worry about whether I was going to be able to use my long lens for the rest of the weekend, particularly at the start of the race tomorrow.

I kept plugging away though, still very frustrated at not being able to get into the collection area with the drivers. I had hoped that the Creation team through Andy Woolgar was going to be able to help in this regard but unfortunately Andy and Creation failed me totally come race weekend, despite my carrying the team’s logos on my website for several weeks! 

Time was moving on and I thought I'd better get back to the square. I had to go around the parade and then over it to get back to the cars. Even though I was there on time (I hate being late for any deadline!), I was surprised to find no one else was there so I walked back to watch for a few minutes more.

When I walked back again a few minutes later, Nick, Jeff, Terry and Jim were there. The others soon followed and before long the Tourists convoy was ready to move out for the journey to Moncé-en-Belin.

So, have you worked out what happened next? You should have! We left the square at almost exactly 7 p.m. and over the next two hours we tried every possible way to get out of the centre of Le Mans, some legal, some less so. In the end, by about 9 p.m., we had exhausted every possibility and gave up all further attempt to move out of the town, and found ourselves sitting waiting for the parade to end (so much for the parade lasting just between 6 and 7 p.m.!) and for the utility men collecting the barriers to let us through. It was a laughably simple yet incredibly stupid mistake to make and I kicked myself for not realising that we had parked right in the very centre of the parade route and once it was under way we were locked in tighter than the proverbial duck's rear end...   We'd been here in roughly the same place before of course, but we'd never had to leave the town during the parade before. It was astonishing that the mistake we'd made didn't dawn on any of us! We had been due at Le Belinois at about 8 p.m. so on two occasions Martyn phoned Madame to apologise for being so late, but she took it entirely in her stride and when we finally arrived at 9:50 p.m. she greeted us like long lost friends – which of course we were!

And lucky for us, we had a really lovely meal there - for me, foie gras followed by sandre, some kind of pike or perch-like fish, which was very pleasant. This was followed by the house special chocolate desert, which was way too filling! We eventually left Le Belinois are at about 1 a.m., vowing not to leave it so long to go back there again and we made our way to Le Grand Lucé and the Hotel Restaurant Le Cheval Blanc for our usual Friday/Saturday overnight stop.

We wondered what we would be greeted with when we got there as we were fairly sure that the hotel had changed hands since last year and that Madame, a fixture since the first visit in 1993, had finally sold up and moved on – after all, she had talked of doing so for several years. When we arrived, bearing in mind it was getting on for 2 a.m., nothing much seemed to have changed, although we were all rather surprised to find ourselves not only sharing double rooms, but double beds as well, but we were all so dog tired it wasn't much for most of us to get worked up about!