Morning Has Broken - Mulsanne Corner
and the Ford Chicane
The journey to Mulsanne Corner
is always a tough one for me as having missed a night's sleep and having been
awake for the best part of a day, much of which has been spent concentrating on
the race, even 20 minutes sitting in the car induces a powerful desire to sleep
and there's nothing worse than a 20-minute car journey with constantly dropping
eyelids! At this point I thank James again for his driving duties, bearing
in mind that he must have been just as tired as I was!
We arrived at Mulsanne at 6.30
am, parked up and made what always seems to be a very long walk from the car
park down to the corner, pausing as always by the fencing on route to watch the
cars as they accelerate out of the corner and on to Indianapolis. One of
the primary motives for heading to Mulsanne at this time is breakfast, having
not eaten since about 9.30 the night before, so we paused for coffee and
croissants before heading up onto the rather muddy bank to watch more of the
race. As is often the case on Sunday morning, we were joined at Mulsanne
by Pascal, for whom the breakfast there is also something of a tradition.
It happened to be quite an
exciting point of the race with LMP2 cars falling off all over the place
(possibly on oil dropped by the ByKolles car which had finally had the good
grace to expire). This included the Thiriet car which flew off into the
gravel just in front of us. I managed to get a couple of quick (if rather
poor) grab shots of it on my phone. And there was still a tooth and nail
battle going on at the front of the field between Porsche and Toyota.
Again, true to form, I was
pretty camera-weary by now, and just couldn't raise the energy to get my SLR out
of the bag, so our visit to Mulsanne is evidenced by just a few pictures from my
phone and some videos.
By this time thoughts were
turning to our now standard quick pitstop and we left Mulsanne Corner at 8 am
arriving back at the hotel for a revitalising shower and a change of clothes
before returning to the circuit at 9.20 for the last quarter of the race.
On our return to the circuit,
for a change we decided to watch for a while at the Ford Chicane where its just
possible to shoot through the single layer fencing where the marshals post is
sited just as the cars turn onto the start/finish straight. We only stayed
here for about half an hour as the sun had graced us with its presence and it
was really getting pretty warm. Sun added to lack of sleep is always a
dodgy combination at this time at Le Mans, and as none of us were up to walking
any distance we headed back to T17 where I knew we would remain until the end of
the race.
