Jox Jottings #1 Le Mans 2007

Jox Jottings Le Mans 2007 Test day

It is now the Saturday before Sunday ‘Testing’.. and the sun is out and the sky is blue and God is in his heaven! Or putting it another way we have been in France for a week and it has poured with rain everyday, so today is a bonus!

Any of you regular pilgrims to Le Mans will have a big surprise when you get here. The whole place has been flattened (nuked?) and rebuilt and nothing is quite where you might have expected it to be. Currently there is a “ It will be nice when it is finished” feel about the place. The inner paddock is largely unmolested except for the nine new, solid, genuine pits garages that have been built where the old temporary Bedouin tent encampment was before. A vast amount of earth has been moved during this €6.3 million stage one development. We can well believe it… it is remarkably hard to try and remember where everything was before.

The only sensible outer paddock access is at the far end (the control tower end) and it will take very little policing to keep the public out. The ‘outer’ hospitality paddock is now about twice the size, flat and has an all asphalt surface. One of the bonuses seems to be lots of power sockets and shrubbery (that may one day become trees!).

In one fell swoop a lot of the old slightly eccentric atmosphere has been lost. But maybe like the new Twickenham Rugby ‘Stadium’ it will settle down and mellow a bit. I suppose it is bit hard to tell this weekend, let’s see how it shapes up for the main event.

Naturally the talk is all about the oil burning Audi tractors versus the oil burning Peugeot tractors. Let us hope that Peugeot have a good weekend because they have shipped in a colossal amount of real estate to eat, sleep and party in. As usual Audi are not skimping so this is a genuine head to head conflict. But where would you put your money? Peugeot should have done around 5,000kms testing but instead they went to Monza and Valencia, and won both races. Audi however were not there to play with!

Audi on the other hand are heading for their second ‘diesel’ year at Le Mans plus they have a fellow called Reinhold Joest running the show and he is not entirely unfamiliar with the business of winning Le Mans. Don’t know where your money is but we think maybe not with Peugeot.

Previous readers of Jox Jottings will know that we have a spot of bother getting excited about LM P2. However Mike Newton, Thomas Erdos and Andy Wallace are all nice guys and bloody quick so if the car holds together it could be three in a row for them. Not sure about the rest except car No 40 Lola AER V05-40 entered by Quifel-ASM Team which won at Valancia.

LM GT1 is all about Corvettes , Aston Martins and perhaps the Team Oreca Saleens. They came 1st and 2nd at Monza.… It is hard to really tell since Corvettes seem to go well here and in America and the Astons don’t always travel well.

LM GT2 caught us out badly last year when they went and confounded the pundits by beating the Porsches. So far this year it is honours even between Porsche and Ferrari but there are five 430 GTs up against four 911 GT3 RSR Porsches and a pair of Panoz. This year the Porsches are the new 997 models but the Ferraris have plenty of speed and are now thoroughly reliable. We will let you know if anybody shows their form during testing. Keep reading!