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Having finished our 'dinner' we managed to find
our way to the 'Fan' area - which turned out to be a very large stand at the
back of the Village where World Cup football was being shown on a large screen.
After a short while, members of Ten Tenths began to appear in readiness for the
visit to Audi - Vincegail, Batmobile and his brother Stéphane, lemansfan and his
friend Tom, Simmi and his fellow travellers Ranvir and wewantour darbyback, plus
Truckosaurus all joined James, Tony and I - this is of course the point in the
story where 'normal' readers, i.e. non-Ten Tenths members will think I've gone
completely mad reciting these strange names.....
The full group was collected together with a
minimum of fuss - everyone was keen to get to the hospitality area. Teresa
arrived and quickly spotted us and led us over to the back of the pits and up
into the room overlooking the pitlane. I had of course had a brief taster
of this last year when we were in one of these rooms prior to our Audi pit
visit, but there was obviously nothing happening on track at that time.
Now though we were going to experience that view as the cars went out to qualify
for the first time. Excited? Yes, I think it would be reasonable to
say I was excited!
I made my way very quickly over to the window, as
did all of those with cameras, keen to capture as much of the view as possible.
Unsurprisingly, it was a great view, although it struck me that it wasn't so
very far removed from the view familiar to me from the seats in T34, although
rather easier (and safer) to get pictures of the cars actually on the pit apron.
It was terrific fun and we were looked after with
nibbles and soft drinks - no beer, but then that didn't worry me in the
slightest. We did have one gripe, but for true fans like us, it was quite
a significant gripe - there were no timing screens! None of us
really wanted to put radios and headphones on to listen to RLM, but it was a
shame we couldn't see what times were coming in. Finally I came up with an
answer - if not terribly satisfactory - I could see a timing screen down in one
of the Audi pitwall boxes in front of us so I took a photo of it on full zoom
and then enlarged it on my camera's screen. It worked, I could read the
times, but it was hardly 'live' timing!
But this aside, we were having a tremendous time.
I hadn't appreciated originally that we were going to be staying for the whole
of the two hour session, but if that was good news, the icing on the cake
arrived in the form of Emanuele Pirro, these days an Audi 'ambassador' of
course, who spent over an hour chatting to us. He regaled us with stories
from his early racing days as well as his time at Le Mans and at Audi. He
really was wonderfully entertaining and I think he was able to pick up our
fascination with Le Mans, something which he very obviously shares. The
only shame was that my photos of him turned out to be so poor!
Despite the fact that we didn't have a full
picture of what was going on in qualifying, for me those two hours had
disappeared in the blink of an eye. Soon the clock ticked around to
midnight and it was time to say our farewells to Teresa and each other before
leaving the hospitality area, passing the cars as they collected in parc ferme,
waiting to be checked at the end of the session.
Although we didn't get back to the car in the
garage blanc much before 12.30, we were 'back at the ranch' just after 1 am and
I even managed to post a few photographs on the thread on Ten Tenths before I
climbed into bed. What a great day! From our meeting up with Tony in
the morning, then the visit to the Audi base and hotel in the afternoon, four
hours of free practice followed by the whole new experience of watching the
first two-hour qualifying session as a guest of Audi - absolutely marvelous!
And Florian - yes, we'd love to come back again next year - but we do need a
timing screen!
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