or 24 Hours of Le Mans in English. Is anyone here going or going to follow it on TV? This year will be my 8th consecutive trip to the world’s greatest race and it should be a good one. The long range forecast is for dry and not too hot which is a nice change from the monsoons and heat waves of the past few years. Here’s who I’m supporting this year:
LMP1 It’s going to be either Audi or Peugeot with their big budgets and strong diesels. I’m going with the number 2 Audi Sport North America with Capello, McNish and Kristensen.
LMP2 This is a hard class to pick since they suffer lots of attrition. The Porsche RS Spyders have done very well in ALMS so I’ll go with number 31 Team Essex.
LMGT1 My heart says Corvette but my head says Aston Martin. I think I’ll go with the 009 Aston Martin.
LMGT2 The Ferrari F430s are taking over from the Porsches as the dominant cars in this class but I’m going to go with the number 80 Prosche 911 GT3 from Flying Lizard Motorsports.
If there’s no TV coverage in your area check out http://www.radiolemans.com/ you can listen to the commentary (in English) live. I have radio Le Mans plugged into my head pretty much the whole time I’m there.
I sure will, and hopefully in the next few years I can go over there and watch it live, but current gas prices have put a kibosh on those plans.
Salo and Melo have driven like crap so far this year (an incredible bonehead move by one of them at Sebring took them out), but GT2 often is the most competitive of the classes. I hope the Spyders finally decide to run there (Porsche apparently didn’t want to drive at Le Mans unless they had a good chance at overall victory, but since a number of them have won races in ALMS over the past two years perhaps they have a better chance than they think).
[Checking entry list] Apparently a couple of privateer Spyders are entered, so jolly good. In the States the Speed Channel typically has ~20 hour coverage.
I did pretty good with my predictions this year and managed to get photos of all the class winners. The LMP1 and overall winner was the number 2 Audi driven over the finish by Tom Kristensen making it 8 wins for Audi and 8 for Kristensen.
The weather was a bit mixed. It was dry for qualifying and all of Saturday. The rain started just as I got back to the track at 4:30 Sunday morning, there’s a video clip here
It then rained off and on until the finish with most cars finishing on intermediate tyres.
This was my 8th year in a row and was probably one of the better ones. The weather was not too hot and not too rainy so I watched more racing than in other years. The Legends event on Saturday was the Group C cars from the late 80’s - early 90’s. The Silk Cut Jaguar won but the Mazda with the wailing rotary engine stole the show for me.
The main race was quite close at the end with the top 2 in both LMP1 and LMGT1 finishing on the same lap. Early on it looked like Peugeot was going to walk away with it with their dominate speed. After only about 2 hours one of the Peugeots had lapped the entire field. But the Audis were able to do one more lap per fuel stop and their pit teams are the best in the business so were able to claw back the time.
We had a bit of hassle with the new camping allocation system but got settled in OK. There seemed to be more problems with theives in the campsite this year so we’ll be letting the ACO know that they’ve messed up. The week ended on a high note as the 1973 Winnebago Brave we travel in made the trip with no mechanical problems. Not bad for a 35 year old vehicle.
