When you experience the 24 Hours of Le Mans, there is a lot to see and do.
Especially on your first time.
But there are certain ones that you should certainly not miss.
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The free practices and qualifying
These happen during the week, and are your best chances at a good look at the cars.
Since there are several free practice and qualifying events, both during day and night time, you don't have the concentration of people you have in the actual race weekend (more on that later).
Both are very much self explanatory. Free practice are for drivers and engineers to test the cars themselves and get familiar with the track and current conditions.
Qualifying on the other hand, is a bit more exciting, because it has two stages. The normal stage is where everyone laps around the track, and positions are determined by the lap times. This is what normal qualifying is.
Mind you that these are divided by category, so there's no mix in qualifying between Hypercars, LMP2/LMGT3 cars.
But then you have Hyperpole.
This is what makes regular qualifying exciting as well, because the Hyperpole is only accessible by the 15 fastest Hypercars, 12 fastest LMP2s and 12 fastest LMGT3s.
In Hyperpole round 1, the 5 slowest Hypercars get knocked out, as do the 4 slowest LMP2 and LMGT3 cars.
Finally, in Hyperpole round 2, the remaining 10 Hypercars, 8 LMP2 and 8 LMGT3 cars fight for the final standings in the starting grid.
It really is exciting, since someone can actually be last doing very badly and just getting into Hyperpole rounds, but then get the top place. Or vice versa!
Support races
The main event is the 24 Hours race during the weekend, but that does not mean there are not other races to have fun with.
In these kind of big events you often have some support races.
In this case, you could also see the Porsche Sprint Challenge, Ford Mustang Challenge and the Road to Le Mans.
The first two are single manufacturer races where the name says everything about what you can expect. Fun fact: Frankie Muniz of “Malcolm in the Middle” fame was racing at one of the Mustangs!
The Road to Le Mans, however, is extra interesting.
It is part of the Michelin Le Mans Cup and includes teams from GT3 and LMP3 categories.
But there’s a catch: The stakes are high.
The teams in Road to Le Mans are competing for a chance to be part of the "grown up Le Mans" in a following year, so they give it everything and more.
The Le Mans Museum
Day 3 of my trip was a very warm Wednesday June 11th.
It kept getting warmer and warmer, as 30ºC was felt early in the morning already.
Since it was so warm, I took the chance to visit the museum. I was planning on doing so anyway, but spending a couple of hours indoors with AC was definitely extra tempting.
The only thing I didn’t love is that they have a weird rule of "backpacks in the front". Not sure why, maybe not to knock stuff down unknowingly with your backpack on the back?
What I do know, is that walking with a heavy, camera gear filled backpack on the front was not very pleasant.
That said, the museum was very nice, albeit a bit small. I expected it to be a bit bigger.
This shall be rectified soon, as they were expanding it during my visit. I’ve seen a lot of construction equipment on the outside and the updated version seems it will be quite bigger, which is very exciting.
I will not spoil “everything” that is inside so that you can awe yourself once there too, but I want to share some highlights and tell you about the general layout of the museum.