Our eventual spectating decision was to make our way down to the Ford Chicane to see if there were any decent seats to spectate from the Raccordement (formerly Maison Blanche) grandstand (as this was our eventual choice for the session), and found some decent seats fairly high up. My first photo from Raccordement was taken only 40 minutes or so after the finish of the free practice session, so we clearly didn't hang about in our journey down there. I'm also fairly sure that our arrival at the Ford Chicane was celebrated with some of the longest and best churros we've ever had!
First out at 5.30 pm were the cars from the Ligier European Series which I'd not seen before which had a 45 minute practice session. The 'prototypes' looked similar to LMP3s while the GTs were quite attractive cars. I took a few photos because, well, I was sitting there with a camera.....
We were of course looking forward to the qualifying session for the Le Mans cars. Discounting the ridiculous 'Hyperpole' session (which no-one that I know seems to like), this was effectively the only qualifying session - certainly the only one for the majority of the cars entered. It was disappointing as well that this session is limited to just an hour. Having enjoyed for a number of years four hours of free practice and then six hours of qualifying over the two days, we're now left with just an hour and a half of qualifying, half an hour of which is only contested by the fastest cars in each class from the first hour, and then bizarrely we have another seven hours of free practice on Wednesday and Thursday which counts for nothing other than preparation for the teams. For the spectator, the magic of the 10 pm to midnight qualifying sessions on both days has now been lost. Someone obviously thought that the 'show' needed to be changed.... but if it ain't broke..... (and it wasn't....).
Once again, we watched the whole of the qualifying session from the grandstand. This session finished at 8 pm and we knew that the second RTLM session started at 8.30 with the next Le Mans free practice session from 10 until midnight. So at this point we headed for the car as we decided to watch the remainder of the evening's events from Arnage/Indianapolis.
