Le Mans 2016 - Ayse's Story
Page 17 - Sunday 19th June
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.
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