Hi all,
Just got back home to Finland from our first Le Mans trip with the wife. The experience was superb for both of us even though my wife is not particularly interested in motorsports. We decided to book a hotel and drive to track. On Saturday night we wanted to drive to the hotel and back to the track on Sunday morning. I wanted to share how it worked out, just to help other Le Mans virgins who also might want to plan a nice "non-camping" trip to Le Mans
- We drove to Le Mans on Saturday morning, traffic went standstill around 9:30 in a way I've never seen before, be sure to arrive before 9:00 as already has been written on this thread! We barely escaped the jam and had to sit on the traffic only around 30 minutes.
- Traffic is worst when arriving from northeast on Voie de la Liberté, if possible planning your route to arrive from the opposite direction may save you possibly hours of time on traffic
- We booked a numbered parking spot from Park Blanc, a very good choice for us. Park Blanc is close to the start-finish line where we had Tribune seats, the car acted as a headquarters with plenty of cold water, snack, warm clothes, umbrellas etc.
- Finding your parking spot on the parking field can be difficult because most of the officials don't speak english and there is too few of them around the field, finally we bumped into an official riding a bicycle and she showed us the spot
- Tribune seats were a good choice, we had a good view to the track and pits, we took snacks and a bottle of wine there and enjoyed watching the race
- Race commentary is almost only in French and the radio is very hard to listen to with normal earbuds due to the drive-by noise, best option seems to be earmuffs over earbuds or earmuffs with built-in FM radio
- Cell phone network data transfer was jammed from time to time, couldn't follow the live timing or news articles on the official website as much as we'd liked to
- Food on the village can be expensive but not very good in quality, we found the best price to quality ratio from the sandwich/kebab tents outside the track area
- after sunset we wanted to go to Arnage and Mulsanne corner, there were a long queue to the shuttle buses so we decided to walk to Arnage which is around 4km from the Porsche curves
- Road from the main entrance all the way to Arnage was in standstill after midnight, because the shuttle buses were sitting on traffic we walked back to the Tribunes (here you need the warm clothes and after that, the cold water...)
- Visit to Arnage is a must. Don't miss it at any cost
There's lot of passing, some wheelspin when accelerating out, brake discs glowing red, the Christmas lights and glowing number plates on the cars, lots of people stuffed together, smell of the grill selling sausages and beer, the atmosphere is there!
- getting out the track after 1:00 AM was not a problem, we had to sit in traffic for about 20minutes to get to the highway, the traffic was jammed from main entrance to Arnage direction but not as bad to the opposite direction
- at this point the comfortable hotel bed in the quiet countryside was so good...and the warm shower in the morning was even better
- back to the track on Sunday morning between 9 and 10AM and almost all the traffic was gone by then
- after the race was finished we left right after the LMP1 podium ceremony was over, took us around 30 minutes to get to the highway
- highway near the entrance to A28 was badly jammed, we took a countryside route to north where the roads were clear, just a few cars with GB plates on the route
Hope this helps and at least serves as a reminder for us when we hopefully return to the race someday
edit: corrected some typos
