18 Jun 03
Sunday morning dawns slightly overcast, but by the time we get going mid-morning, it's horrendously hot and humid again. I queue for nearly an hour for a shower - there's a somewhat smelly shower and toilet block on Maison Blanche, an improvement on the loos-only other sites - but it's well worth the wait. In the queue, I meet a woman who's been coming to Le Mans for the past 12 years; her husband is on his 25th visit. That's nothing, pipes up a bloke in the (faster-moving) queue for the mens' facilities. He's here with his father, who's been coming for 35 years. Le Mans is a bit like that; for all the older spectators moan about the infrastructure, the increasing prices, the litter, the queues, the over-officiousness of the people checking passes, they just keep coming back, year after year. I have a brief vision of myself, 25 years on, in the same queue for the showers.
The boys head off for Tetre Rouge corner, but I wimp out of a long trek in the heat and hours of sitting in the sun, and go to the air-conditioned Audi press box instead. Given the early exit of the UK car, the atmosphere is subdued, but the view down to the pits is fantastic, and it seems churlish not to cheer on the Champion Racing and Team Goh cars. The Bentleys still hold first and second positions, but things are hotting up further down the rankings - at the end of the morning, the fifth-placed Panoz and the Courage and Dome cars are involved in out-and-out racing, charging round as if they had nothing left to lose, dicing with the slower GT and GTS cars and getting ever closer. The LMP 675 class has been decimated, however, with only the Welter Racing Peugeot, the Danish Den Bla Avis Zytek and the Reynard Lehman surviving the night. The Danish fans - who have come in a huge Den Bla Avis-logoed coach, which has been touring the different viewing points of the circuit all night - are buoyant, waving banners and defying extreme drunkenness to see their team to the finish. Few of the Dutch flag-wavers have made it to the main grandstands, though the two Dome Judds are still running strongly, and the Spyker is bravely, if slowly, struggling on. A small number of Japanese are hanging on in there, too, cheering the Team Goh car, the Dome-Mugen halfway down the field and the number 77 Porsche 911, an all-Oriental team. The British, however, are displaying the most stamina, on the part of the spectators as well as on the track.
By lunchtime, barring catastrophe or an act of God, it's obvious that it's going to be a Bentley 1-2. A British victory, people are saying. No, a German win, say others. Either way, the team has been mightily impressive, and the two cars still look fantastic as they power by, their dark green livery barely dirty. The two remaining Audis look a little more ragged, and most of the cars are bearing a few scars, patched up with duct tape. Someone tells a good joke: why is duct tape like the Force in Star Wars? Because it has a dark side, a light side, and it holds the world together. Well, it seemed funny at the time; nobody has really had enough sleep. At around three o'clock, the cars are more or less ready for a formation finish, bar the Panoz, two Domes and the Courage Judd, still trying their hardest - they keep the momentum up right up until the closing minutes, in the true spirit of the event. The action is led by 21-year-old Gunnar Jeanette in the Panoz, holding out against the Courage driven by Jean-Marc Gounon, until the Courage loses power from a cylinder and falls back to seventh place. We also lose the number 16 Dome, tragically, just after three-fifteen - it spins off at Indianpolis, and Tristan Gommendy crawls back to the pits with bodywork trailing and suspension too damaged to repair. It is pronounced 'dead' at three-forty-five.
