Le Mans Classic 2006 7-8-9 July - Jox Jottings

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Le Mans Classic 2006 7-8-9 July

This was without doubt the most amazing event. Possibly more so if you are of a ‘certain age’ and can actually remember some of the cars  racing at Le Mans and races like the BOAC 500!

It is very difficult to get your head around exactly what we have here. The statistics are mind boggling. As far as we can establish there are around 400 cars here. They are divided into six ‘plateaux’ or grids. Each grid contains around 65 (with the possibility of 13 reserves). The grids are divided up by date 1923-1939: 1949-1956:1957-1961: 1966-1971 and finally 1972-1979. The actual car entered need not have competed at Le Mans, just the model of that car of the correct date. However around 70 of the cars did in fact compete at The Le Mans 24 Hours. Mostly there were two drivers in each car but sometimes as many as four! Our best guess is that were around 650 drivers here. Amongst these are several Le Mans winners such as Jean Guichet, Stéphane Ortelli and Henri Pescarolo. There are also 44 drivers who have competed in The Le Mans 24 hrs in the past.

The next challenge was that each grid was numbered from 1-93, so you now have (for example) six cars numbered ‘1’. No problem really since they will never be on the track at the same time. Then the organisers popped in a few little challenges like the late arrival of various 30 second (even the occasional 5 minute penalties!) penalty applied for reasons we did not know. Equally baffling was the removal of most of these penalties after we had produced ‘our stuff. Driver and car information was at best sporadic! So there just might be some serious errors… we really don’t know at this point.

The Paddock set up was very ingenious. Each plateau/grid had its own covered paddock with power and light. These were spread all the way along the back of the main pits and in the support paddocks that contained the tyre trucks and support races for the 24 hrs event.

If this lot wasn’t enough ‘Les Clubs’ were out in force on the Bugatti Circuit. There were representatives from no less than 39 manufacturers, ranging from AC to Venturi. There are also one or two slightly more obscure marques like Donkervoort, Marcadier, Sovam, DB and Martin. Between them ‘Les Clubs’ have brought along almost 5,000 cars. The Club Porsche France Classic alone was there with 887 cars.

Christies had a major auction on Saturday with some mouth-watering exotica up for sale. The star of their show was 1972 The Ferrari 365 GTB/A Michelotti Nart Spyder (often known as the ‘Daytona’) that was seen at Le Mans in 1975. The estimated sale price for this car alone is €1,800,000

On a slightly more mundane note enthusiasts who collect Military vehicles were helping to chauffeur people, fuel and tyres around. Finally the Classic Bus, Coach and lorry enthusiasts were also here with some stunningly restored vintage vehicles.
It really was very hard to know where to look!

This was the way it all worked …. There were two qualifying sessions on Friday/Saturday, one in daylight and one in the dark. Each daylight session lasted 45 minutes; each night-time session lasted 35 minutes. These times set the grid positions for the races on Saturday and Sunday. There were three races, basically two in daylight and one in the dark. All the races were eventually lasted 45 minutes.
The results of each race accumulated to produce a ‘class/grid/plateau winner’. There was also a mysterious Performance Index Classification but we never discovered quite how this worked. One can only assume it was like the original system that relied on an impenetrably complex formula.

The weather was pretty good, some rain did fall during Sunday morning. All in all it was a simply brilliant if confusing event. We cannot recommend it highly enough.