Aysedasi's Le Mans

Le Mans 2011 - Ayse's Story - Page 13 - Saturday Evening

Tertre Rouge and Another Shocker

The photography urge inevitably remained strong within me, despite the problems with my camera and despite having taken vast numbers of photographs from here on Wednesday evening, the lure of the cars on the circuit was too great and I snapped away with as much abandon as I my annoyingly inconsistent camera would permit.

The Audi v. Peugeot battle was still fully joined, with no quarter being asked or given between the five leading cars however the battles in the three other classes were also being very keenly fought.  Audi #2 led overall, the #48 Oreca held sway in LMP2, while in the two GT classes Corvette led the way in their #74 works car in GTEPro, while in the GTEAm class, another Corvette, the ex-works #50 Larbre car was running very strongly. 

Almost surreptitiously the evening began to merge into night and the task of capturing shots in low light became all the more difficult!  But then again, this was what I'd been waiting a year for......

We stood watching from the inside of Tertre Rouge until about 10.30 when the need for sustenance simply became too great to resist any longer!  We headed down from the banking to the familiar eatery at the bottom near the spectator area on the inside of the Esses, where I had failed to have my first merguez of the week during Wednesday qualifying last year.  I intended to make up for that..... 

So it was a sandwich Americaine on the menu for me yet again, so more frites and merguez to play havoc with our constitutions.  Jayne had phoned me around this time, but any conversation while the race is on is nigh-on impossible.  In fact, I didn't even hear my phone ringing.  We had been eating for a little while, all of us having removed our earphones for the moment for a brief rest from the commentary, when I suddenly realised it was quiet - as Hugh Chamberlain would say - too quiet.  The cars were clearly not running at pace.  A number then came past, and from the sound it was obvious that they were running behind the safety car.  So it was quickly back on with the headphones to find out what was going on.

It was of course Mike Rockenfeller's huge accident in the #1 Audi that had caused the caution.  We obviously saw no footage of this one, unlike the McNish accident, so we were all extremely concerned for Rocky until it was eventually mentioned on RLM that he had been able to walk from his wrecked car.  In the same way as we had felt after the McNish crash, there was a palpable sense of relief.