Aysedasi's Le Mans

By 10:30 we were back into our seats and the burger and chips from the cafe turned out to be more than decent as well as cheaper than elsewhere. 

The threat of rain still hung over the circuit so we stayed in the grandstand watching the race and the activity in the pits until shortly before 3:00 am. We were of course still in T-shirts and shorts and we were actually beginning to feel a little chilly so James, Alan and I nipped back to the car in Expo to pick up some ‘night gear’. I put on some trousers, a warmer top and my trusty bodywarmer in the Expo car park and we returned to rejoin Lauren in the grandstand. 

It was by now around 3:30 and we were all starting to feel quite sleepy. Allon had wandered off from the stand for another trip around the shops and stalls just to keep himself awake.   In order to try and ward off sleep for the time being James, Lauren and I left the stand and proceeded to walk up the outside of the circuit past Dunlop where we stopped briefly and then up and over the Dunlop bridge. 

We thought it would be nice to spend a little time sitting in the relative comfort of the ACO area at La Chapelle before moving on but when we got there we were very surprised to find it closed and empty. We had been there during the evening of the race in previous years but I realised that at this time of the morning we would have normally been out at Indianapolis and wouldn't have known that the ACO shut up shop in the members area in the early hours. We had just assumed that the members area stayed open all night and I was surprised that it closed at all during the race. It was disappointing as all four of us were feeling pretty weary by now and in need of another sit down, in fact, having been thoroughly drained by the heat all day I was absolutely shattered, despite the fact that I hadn't walked anywhere near as far around the circuit as I normally would have done by this time. We therefore had to decide what we were going to do next...