Le Mans 2012 - Ayse's Story
Page 8 - Wednesday
Free Practice Continued
And so it went on. The cars continued to circulate (some more than others - it was pretty obvious already that this was unlikely to be a good year for Henri Pescarolo....) and I continued to take pictures of them. It was great to see the Toyotas and Audis, which I thought looked absolutely fantastic, but it was also good to see the much-vaunted DeltaWing out running for the first time - weird, but striking....
I notice now, after the event, that the curse of the hair in the camera had in fact come back to haunt me - I can see it in some of these shots. I confess I wasn't aware of it at the time, nor at any time for the rest of the event.... Perhaps it's time to have the camera properly cleaned!
Many, many photographs later the session ended at 8pm and it was incredible to think that we'd actually been watching the cars already for longer than two full Grand Prix and yet it had seemed to fly by. And in those four hours I'd taken 650 photographs. I think it was this year that I finally shook off the old 'film' mentality and I was completely comfortable with the practice of just leaving my finger on the shutter button as I panned the cars around Tertre Rouge.
We now had two hours to kill before the first qualifying session started at 10 pm and the first thing all of our minds turned to was - food! We were starving and made our usual bee-line for the eaterie down below the hillock at the bottom of the Esses where we all indulged in that most quintessential of Le Mans circuit meals, the sandwich Americaine merguez - a magnificent creation, a large baguette containing two super-spicy merguez sausages and then stuff full on top with delicious frites! You can't get to the bread or the sausage for at least 10 minutes as it takes all that time to dig through the chips to find them! OK, possibly not the healthiest of meals, but boy does it go down well when you're absolutely ravenous!
Our meal whiled away a good half hour or more but we were in no rush. We were due to rendezvous with Teresa from Audi at 9.45, so we eventually meandered back up the inside of the circuit and set off through the Village in search of Audi's 'Fan' area.
Index
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
