Le Mans Magic

A motor racing addiction is built on memories of special moments. Standing trackside and seeing something truly special is what keeps us coming back.

To my personal pantheon of great motorsport moments I now add the awe, the sheer jaw-dropping awe, of watching the Toyota TS040 LMP1 sports car slicing and dicing the Circuit de la Sarthe's Porsche Curves at the 2014 24 Hours of Le Mans.

It’s dusk, so the race is about seven hours old. In the background, the Ferris wheel is lit up and the grandstands and pit lane beyond look like Disneyland.

But the real wonder is out here. The Porsche Curves are a series of fast right-left-rights and the Toyota is taking them at a seemingly impossible speed. The lightning changes of direction, the combination of mid-corner speed and grip, and the rate of acceleration as it rushes from sight, simply defies my sense of what is rationally possible on four wheels.

To know this is a high-wire act with serious potential consequences only makes the scene more magnetic. A mistake or mechanical here and a wall awaits, as factory Audi Sport driver Loic Duval discovered on Thursday, destroying his R18 e-tron quattro and putting himself on the sidelines for the rest of week.

Wait three-and-a-half minutes and the race-leading #7 Toyota is back again. Doing it again. Maybe getting a clean run; maybe dodging an LMP2 prototype, or a production-based GTE coupe. Or, maybe, passing a whole bunch of slower cars at once...

It’s not only the shrill V8 Toyota that’s putting on a show, of course. The growling V4 Porsche 919s look almost as quick; the Audis are silent assassins, their diesel engines whooshing rather than roaring and their new laser headlights cutting through the corners.

Tech regulations and aerodynamics means these three rivals bear a certain external similarity. They are low outboard with cabins that bulge amidships and trail a mandatory airbrake fin that merges into the single element rear wing.

They aren’t as pretty as Le Mans sports cars once were, more brutally effective like those monster Group B rally of yore. Maybe one day we’ll rate them just as highly. Driving them must be exhilarating.

I watch for two hours. It feels like minutes and when I leave the Curves it’s with regret.

That is my foremost memory of my first Le Mans 24 Hour. But there was a much more; a series of indelibly etched memories loosely connected by the over-arching theme of a race of which I was only vaguely able to keep track. Believe me, if you want to keep up minute-by-minute you can. There’s radio, television, a million web sources, blogs, tweets et al. But step back, let the whole thing wash over you and the fundamental basic, immutable, fact of the 24 Hour becomes apparent – it’s so much more than a motor race.

It is an event of such epic proportions I can’t think of anything in Australia that comes close. The circuit is more than 13km long, the number of spectators is staggering and the atmosphere that of a giant carnival. It’s sort of like Bathurst multiplied in scale by 10 – more people, more cars, more everything -- except the pressing crowd menace you sometimes feel at Mount Panorama is noticeably absent.

I am sure there was ugliness somewhere at Le Mans among the hundreds of thousands of fans and campers, especially once a few beers had been drunk – or more than a few judging by the mountains of discarded tins and bottles!

My race started among the families in the more sober surrounds of the front straight grandstand, watching that Toyota shoot straight to the lead from pole position and streak into the distance, the field gradually stretching out behind.

If the Bathurst 1000 is your reference point for endurance car racing, then you’ll be learning about a new world at Le Mans. Fifty four cars started this year’s race with an incredible 40sec or more disparity in lap time potential between the fastest prototype and the slowest GTE. Put it this way, Alex Wurz set the fastest lap of the race on lap four. On lap five he was into the traffic.

It sounds horrific, looks crazy at times and can come spectacularly unstuck, but the disparity in performance is also a positive. It helps you grasp just how fast those LMP1s are and it also means that there’s action quickly spread right around the circuit.

A V8 Supercars race at Le Mans would be hopeless because the cars are so equal in performance. The gaggle goes by… Wait… Wait… Wait (13km takes a while)… Oh, here they come and go… Wait … Wait... Etcetera.

And while the roadcar-based GTEs are the support act, they turn on brilliant racing. The battle in the opening hours between Giancarlo Fisichella in a factory Ferrari 458 Italia and Jan Magnussen in the Chevrolet Corvette C7.R was simply outstanding.

Italian hot-head versus Danish hard-nut. Shrieking Fazza versus bellowing Chevy, with a couple more Ferraris, the second Corvette, several Aston-Martins and – of course – a flock of Porsche 911 RSRs in hot pursuit. What a show!

The LMP2s prototypes (the undercard to the LMP1s) don’t have quite the same impact. Being a privateer class they possess neither the star quality of the LMP1s or the familiarity of the GTEs. They races fast, close and hard and are driven by a bunch of blokes who all look impossibly young, fit, and hungry – just not enough money to buy a seat in F1 presumably.

Of course, the LMP1s are the superstars. If you read our Le Mans primer then you’ll understand how complex and different the seven factory cars from Audi, Porsche and Toyota are. And yet at Le Mans they were able to turn on a race for the lead that wasn’t truly settled until the chequered fell.

With hindsight it went to the script: the Toyotas were fast but cracked under the pressure; the Porsches were debutantes that over-achieved; and, the Audis motored through to collect win number 13 since 2000.

But that script had enough twists and turns to keep us all guessing. A rainstorm at 90 minutes accounted for one Audi and put the #8 Toyota out of contention for the win; a sticking speed limiter pushed back the #14 Porsche; a broken front roll bar that seemed to cruel the chances of Aussie hero mark Webber’s #20 Porsche; the ‘electrical’ issue that ended the #7’s Toyota's charge after 14 hours with a 90sec lead; the turbocharger changes for both Audis that helped Webber’s Porsches back into the lead at 22 hours; and finally, the engine failure that ended the 919’s heroic charge at the 22 hour mark and ensured Audi’s 1-2.

It was one hell of a show, offering both quantity and quality. And it underlined how much progress sports car racing has made in the last three years since the World Endurance Championship was re-established and Le Mans made the centrepiece of an eight-round title chase.

On track and in the overflowing paddock sports car racing looks vibrantly healthy, technically interesting and diverse. It is an alternate global motor racing power centre to Formula One, and with Nissan joining the LMP1 show in 2015 (and Ferrari rumoured to be considering an entry), it will only get stronger.

So if you haven’t been to Le Mans my recommendation is simple. Go. Have your memorable moments. And there will definitely be plenty...