Le Mans 2008
The Tourists' Story
The Night (and a Surprise Meeting!)
It was while I was at Tertre Rouge that I sent a text to Paul Truswell as he had posed a question on Radio Le Mans about not knowing what the weather was like at various points around the circuit. Being the anorak that I am, I kept a record of that text and I know that I sent it at 4.39 am. At this time, it wasn’t raining very hard at Tertre Rouge, so I sent him a text to tell him. As it happened, within a few minutes the rain worsened but despite that, although the rain remained consistent, to me, the track never seemed to get really wet at Tertre Rouge.
It was as I was about to send this message to Paul that I noticed I’d received a test from Allon. |I just assumed he’d woken up back at the hotel and was texting me to see what was happening in the race. It was only when I read his text that I realised he hadn’t gone back to the hotel at all!He’d stayed at the circuit after all. He’d changed his mind very quickly and dashed back to the grandstand while I was buying my water. Thinking that I hadn’t gone back there at all, he had gone off elsewhere, so we missed each other when I did go back to the grandstand. All in all, we’d missed each other by about 2 minutes! And now he was sitting in the grandstand, having been down at Tertre Rouge while I was in my seat there!
Although I really enjoyed watching from Tertre Rouge, I decided to leave there at 5.10 to make my way back to meet Allon at the grandstand. But I managed to miss him again at Dunlop! Astonishingly, it was well after 6 am that we finally met up again in the grandstand, having wandered the circuit independently for the previous four and a half hours!
It had been raining consistently now for over two hours, not hard rain at all, but that fine rain that eventually gets you a lot wetter than you realise. It was disappointingly obvious now that the rain was set in for quite a while, so this pretty well put paid to any more thoughts of extensive circuit wandering. Inevitably, we were both feeling pretty tired by now and were a couple of nodding dogs up at the back of Lagache!
We were due to meet with the returning Ian at 7.30 down on the inside of Dunlop, so I took my last shots in the stand just before 7 am and then we left to head off for the rendezvous point. Ian soon appeared, bang on time as usual, and after a cup of coffee (strangely difficult to source for 7.30 on a Le Mans Sunday), we were soon heading back to the car and breakfast at Le Grand Lucé. There was plenty of time for a wash, change and to pack our bags before eating.
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