Jox Jottings - Le Mans 2007

Well those of you that felt miserable being stuck in UK need not have worried, it was perfectly easy (and more expensive) to be wet, cold and miserable here at Le Mans. I know us Brits tend to rabbit on about the weather but this time it was a bit special. Rumour has it that there were around 250,000 spectators here, whether that is the total number over the weekend is unclear but it was busy. The ‘Peugeot factor’ must have kicked in big time. They have not been here since 1993 this made up for it. They made up for their absence by building a medium sized town accompanied by a modest trading estate.

We have to assume that we fell for the propaganda because a lot of people assumed that the Peugeots would be blindingly quick, but fragile. Testing and qualifying seemed to suggest that they were in fact pretty damn quick. As it turned out it was all bollocks!

Audi, bless them, had been cunningly sandbagging the whole time and in race specification they could comfortably take 3-4 secs a lap off the Peugeots. This even surprised our French chums!

The new-fangled diesels arrived with smaller fuel tanks (9 litres less fuel) and smaller restrictors. It was important not to scare the petrol teams off. Especially Pescarolo … they are French, they race petrol cars and Henri badly wants to win Le Mans as a Team Boss. So the regulations were written to calm the diesels down a bit! But …Surprise!! The oil burners were quicker than last year and seemed at least as ‘economic’ (Not an expression you immediately associate with a modest V12 5.0 litre lump with 650 bhp and ‘sufficient’ torquies).. but they were!

This was the ‘slowest’ Le Mans since 2001 despite this the LM P1 lap record fell, as did LM P2, LM GT1 did, so did LM GT2. The weather slowed things up a bit overall! It was utterly disgusting… the rain was often torrential with no warning at all. Over and over again teams got caught short. The leading car made 35 visits to the pits for service, tyres etc. It would be raining at Mulsanne and dry in the pits and then the next time … all change … torrential rain in the pits and so o n.

We had the usual bru-ha-ha at the start but no drivers parade. Maybe because the start was at 15:00hrs and there were French dignitaries around. About the only constructive observation we could come up with was that the Hawaiian Tropic girls still drawn an enormous amount of attention. They have been coming here since 1983 apparently and maybe it is time to move some of the original girls onto other duties and bring in some new ones!

At the start Bourdais got mightly over excited and blew his pole position by going ‘all agricultural’ at the Dunlop Curve and he was not a happy bunny. Nobody else to blame, he simply over cooked it, pilot error! This saved Audi from cruising round for a lap or two behind him and thus losing some good TV coverage. (Didn’t matter much because looking at some of the French TV coverage you could have made the mistake of thinking the only cars running were Peugeots!) The leading Audi simply yawned, stretched and ambled off into the distance. We are not anti Peugeot but suddenly all the bullshit stopped and even their drivers admitted they had been shocked by the casual pace of the Audis.

But Audi decided to keep the commentators busy and make life easier for the Peugeots (and maybe even the distant petrol powered Pescarolos) when Rockenfeller seemed to lose the will to race and threw his car into the scenery! The team management were highly unimpressed and seemed to have bought up the TV footage since we never saw the incident again played in glorious Technicolor. However there were some rather touching shots of him trying to re-arrange the meccano kit of bits of rear suspension that were all jumbled up in a heap. Eventually it must have dawned on him that a trackside miracle was not on the horizon .. so he gave up.

The No.8 Team Peugeot Total Peugeot 908 began to cause lots of speculation. It seemed that at every pit stop the team extricated dead rubber (marbles) from the side pod louvers, they also kept big hair dryers blasting cold air at the radiators.
It looked like a cunning Baldric plan to make a huge collection of second hand, useless rubber in the pit. The two cars looked identical but nothing like this happened with the No.7 Team Peugeot Total Peugeot 908 . So we worried (?) about the No.8 car.

Ironically it was the No.7 Peugeot that took a mysterious ‘early bath’ when, much later in the race, it made a very low key exit with unspecified engine problems and a total lack of emotion from the team. It was almost as if it was pre-planned… no .. silly idea!

Then Audi decided to level the playing field all once more and keep French spirits up by reducing their challenge by another one car yet, this time it was the No.2 Audi Sport North America Audi R10 TDI that lost a wheel and attacked some rather solid scenery. Nope.. It wasn’t a wheel nut that wasn’t done up properly and fell off, closely followed by the wheel.. Instead we were told by Audi PR it was all highly complex and that a scientific explanation was sought, but not before the scientists back at the ranch had studied all the evidence. To be fair if it was a cock up by the pit crew it didn’t show up for 54 mins! Audi management shifted about restlessly… they had never visualized their three car challenge would become a loner!

In LM P2 it was a bit like a tag wrestling match .. eleven cars entered the ring and just two made it to the podium .. and that was a damn close run thing, it was very nearly only one … the two survivors were separated by a nerve jangling 17 laps! When the No 31 Binnie car arrived for a long ‘rest’ in its pit garage with unspecified engine trouble it looked like maybe one car might survive.

Your drunken pundits were wondering a) why the ACO remains obsessed with Prototypes and b) even more confusing why LM P2? They may be cheaper but they are fragile… fragility is not a major bonus at Le Mans.

So the No.31 Binnie Motorsports Lola Zytek B05-40 romped home a ‘convincing’ victor … OK .. put it another way … it fell apart rather less often and rather less comprehensively than the others! Sadly our favourite LM P2, car the No.25 RML GBR LM P2 Lola AER B05-40 broke leaving us very little to cheer for.

LM GT1 was looking good Aston .v. Corvette.. the bad old, laid back Yanks versus the good old spunky Brits. Then Corvette did a sort of Audi. Ollie Gavin excused himself from the meeting very early on with a broken carbon fibre drive shaft. Not a regular problem with ‘Vettes. Apparently this simply shook itself to bits and delaminated. It happened because when the safety car came out they ‘turned off’ a handful of cylinders as an economy measure and this caused a healthy, if eye watering, vibration. This in turn damaged the prop shaft … Ummm … Seems a tad far fetched but who are we to argue?