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And so it went on. The cars continued to circulate
(some more than others - it was pretty obvious already that this was unlikely to
be a good year for Henri Pescarolo....) and I continued to take pictures of
them. It was great to see the Toyotas and Audis, which I thought looked
absolutely fantastic, but it was also good to see the much-vaunted DeltaWing out
running for the first time - weird, but striking....
I notice now, after the event, that the curse of
the hair in the camera had in fact come back to haunt me - I can see it in some
of these shots. I confess I wasn't aware of it at the time, nor at any
time for the rest of the event.... Perhaps it's time to have the camera
properly cleaned!
Many, many photographs later the session ended at
8pm and it was incredible to think that we'd actually been watching the cars
already for longer than two full Grand Prix and yet it had seemed to fly by.
And in those four hours I'd taken 650 photographs. I think it was this
year that I finally shook off the old 'film' mentality and I was completely
comfortable with the practice of just leaving my finger on the shutter button as
I panned the cars around Tertre Rouge.
We now had two hours to kill before the first
qualifying session started at 10 pm and the first thing all of our minds turned
to was - food! We were starving and made our usual bee-line for the
eaterie down below the hillock at the bottom of the Esses where we all indulged
in that most quintessential of Le Mans circuit meals, the sandwich Americaine
merguez - a magnificent creation, a large baguette containing two super-spicy
merguez sausages and then stuff full on top with delicious frites! You
can't get to the bread or the sausage for at least 10 minutes as it takes all
that time to dig through the chips to find them! OK, possibly not the
healthiest of meals, but boy does it go down well when you're absolutely
ravenous!
Our meal whiled away a good half hour or more but
we were in no rush. We were due to rendezvous with Teresa from Audi at
9.45, so we eventually meandered back up the inside of the circuit and set off
through the Village in search of Audi's 'Fan' area.
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