,
Meanwhile, a few minutes later, we hooked back up with Bill Riley, jumped in our street cars and went for a lap of the track. Sortof…
All but a few turns of the Le Mans circuit is on public roads (there is a permanent track there, but it shares only a few turns with the big 8.5-mile track) and those roads are actually open on the Friday between the final practice day and the race start on Saturday.
So here we are, on the surprisingly narrow Mulsanne straight.
And here we are passing the shitty Chinese restaurant we failed to find the night before.
And here we are sneaking past the barricades onto the Porsche Corners, which were not part of the open road, but not actually hot track either. The gravel in these traps is unusually sharp, as Bill pointed out, and cause a lot of punctures.
Finally, Bill took us through Burnout Alley, a section of the main road to the track that happens to squeeze through two campground full of drunk English race fans. The loopy limeys will block your path, mob your car, hurl insults at you and attack you with squirt guns unless you placate them with a burnout. We were driving a Citroen C4 with 3 hp and a Mazda CX-7 turbodiesel with a bajillion lb-ft of torque, but all-wheel drive, so we were screwed. We were also too dumb to put up our windows before we got there, so in through the window came a hand holding cup filled with about half a liter of water, all of wich went straight in Bitter Dan’s ear.
Then, as you can see from this photo, he wet his pants…
Check back in a few days for more Le Mans stories as soon as we get the pictures sorted out.
