Aysedasi's Le Mans

There seemed to be huge crowds waiting for the coach, however we soon realised that several of the tour operators were doing the same thing and there were coaches hired by Just Tickets and Page & Moy as well as M.R.I.  We were onto the coach at 8.50 pm, very happy in the knowledge that we could not be thrown off this one as we had bona fide tickets for it!

We finally arrived at the Mulsanne car park 20 minutes later and began that familiar long walk to the corner which is situated about half a mile from the car park.  It was very good to get to Mulsanne corner at this time of the race as although I've been to the corner many times before, it has tended to be on Sunday rather than Saturday.  As a result, I was able to see far more of the cars circulating (and photograph them!), than would normally be the case at Mulsanne later in the race.  The lighting was a bit hit and miss for photos and they are rather grainy because of the film speed I was using.  

We were still there at 10.00 p.m. as the light finally began to fade on what had been a glorious afternoon.  A can of jus d’orange to slake the thirst was followed by the long walk back to the coach park.  Our coach was due to pick us up again for the journey back to the garage bleu at 10.20 p.m.  We met up with another chap from our M.R.I. coach and waited.  And waited.  And waited…..

The crowd of people waiting for coaches from all of the tour operators grew all the time, until there must have been several hundred people waiting.  Still, we were okay as we had tickets for this coach.  It finally arrived at 10.35 p.m. by which time the light had all but gone.  It was a very crowded coach ride back to the circuit, with all of the seats taken and we finally reached the garage bleu at 11.00 p.m.  Both Peter and I were quite amused to pass Le Belinois restaurant on our journey back - this time last year (most years, in fact), we would still have been eating in there at this time.  If I was honest, I  wasn’t sorry at not partaking of a very expensive (and slow) meal there, but I could have done with using their facilities!