Tales of La Sarthe
Lara made a new friend en-route to France
At the ferry port in Newhaven we were in the queue with a Commer caravanette (old H reg!) belonging to some acquaintances from the Club Arnage website and as they were packed to the gunnels and I was travelling single crewed this year I offered a lift to one of them who was painfully perched atop a pile of camping kit in the back of the van.
They had a mini convoy, the Commer and a Porsche so after a calm crossing to Le Havre we set out over the Pont De Normandie with Bob, my new navigator getting comfortable at last.
For a while all was well but the venerable Commer began to show signs that all was not well within her engine room and between Lisieux and Vermontiers she just packed up. After looking around we found the remains of a plastic bag inside the glass dome of the petrol pump, presumably used in the past to act as a stopper after a lost filler cap. If this is so it must have been a long time ago as the present owner knew nothing of it. We cleared the residue out of the way but the pump soon packed up again. Andy the owner had a new pump aboard so we fitted that and after blowing the pipe clear we set off again for Le Mans.
The Porsche driver soon became fed up with travelling at 60mph and shot off, but with the Commer having had a bad start I decided to stick around just in case. After about a hundred miles and with the signs for the 24 Hrs circuit and camping sites in view, it became a good thing that I had. The old bird packed it all in again. Andy managed to get off the highway onto a slip road but as this was in use by juggernauts heading for an industrial zone we decided to get the van off the slip road up the hill. As it was too steep to push the van up (shades of Ice Cold In Alex!!!) I decided to tow it uphill with Lara to a roundabout and a small dead-end road where we could park her safely.
After squashing cries of "You'll never get her up there with that little thing!" I showed the sceptics just what a well turned out Midget was capable of, tow strap fixed around the flats of the rear spring and the front suspension arm of the Commer we made light work of the job and were all able to settle down whilst we made a few phone calls and rounded up a tow from a mate on the campsite in his Discovery.
I had been en-route to set up base camp for our team of Spridgeteers, Gary Lazarus, Toby Anscombe and Bob Tooke, with Bob's son Anthony and friend Dan. They were due on site on Thursday afternoon. Toby was due to be joined on Saturday (at race start time!!) by Rachel and her friend.
All the above had happened on Wednesday evening and come Thursday morning Andy and I set about fitting a new (second) in line filter between tank and pump so any repetition would not stop the van permanently.
After all this the racing was almost unimportant, but Lara hadn't finished showing the happy campers what she could do. On Fridays on the Le Mans 24 hours weekend there is "The Great British Welcome" at the local town of St Saturnin where many of the hundreds of Classic car owners that attend every year go to enjoy looking and chatting about other people's cars and have a congenial meeting with Jazz bands and commentaries, plus a celebrated Car Of the Year. This year's special, oddly for a "British Welcome" was Ferrari.
After the meeting several of us including our own Gary and Toby, (Toby was my passenger for today) went for a trip around the local countryside, guided by a pair of ex-pat Brits to a small bar about twenty miles away. In our small convoy was Gary's Frogeye, a couple of Cobra replicas and the Ferrari (some sort of Fezzer, I dunno!) of another local ex-pat.
I was stuck behind the Ferrari and spent the entire drive wishing I'd set off in front of him. He braked hours before the proper time, steered wide around every curve and Lara spent the whole trip far too close to him.
I wish she had let him go but she didn't have an ounce of pity for him or me! 
Lara had taught me how much she could do on the track days we'd done together, so the drive on those French roads let me have great fun using the car's legendary agility.
The racing was very good this year even if the diesels won again, Aston Martin winning their class very nicely. On Sunday morning there was much confusion about which tyres to fit and just about every team got it wrong-ish at one time or another. Due to poor pit work, during the early afternoon Peugeot lost their very strong act in a flurry of bad decisions and so Audi won againÂ…
After the race we took ourselves off to our customary watering hole at Bagnolles sur L'Orme for a great meal and the next day we split up to make our way home to our different destinations. Gary and I decided to travel along the main coast highway to Le Havre and his ferry at Boulogne after travelling many miles along dead straight French roads. They were like roads you see in "The Movies", marvellous.
After docking at Newhaven I had a three and a half hour run home with the roof off, reaching home at quarter past three.
And I was very, very glad to be home.
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