Chunder, I hear what you say about Le Mans. Before I went I would have said very much the same. I never used to like endurance racing. It was cold and usually wet, and I didn't get why it was so interesting. If you gave me 20-some-odd open wheelers fighting it out for an hour and a half or so, I was thrilled.
I found as I got older I had more patience. I started going to more endurance races almost by default when CART, and then Champ Car, imploded. But the nuances captured me. Keeping a lap chart in my head for 26 cars is one thing. For 50, in multiple classes, with different pit stop windows? Whoa.
I went to Le Mans for the first time in 2004, auditioning for a spot on the commissaire crew at poste 61. Sure, I'd seen "that movie." I'd grown up on stories of my dad going to Sebring in the '50s as a mechanic for a works team. I'd been a marshal for more than 20 years. I thought I knew what it would be like.
I was incredibly wrong.
The first time I stood at the braking point for the second chicane with a flag in my hand, watching the prototypes come over the humps on Le Hunaudières in the early-evening sunshine, it all changed. Now my year goes "from June to June," and I don't even mind the outrageous amount of money it costs me to get myself from the west coast of Canada to France, just to stand in the rain and shiver in the cold in the middle of the night with a flag in my hand. Well, I don't mind much.
The one thing I've noticed about Le Mans, though, is that people either LOVE it or HATE it if they go. No in-betweens. But please don't deny the people who love it the opportunity to do just that. Some people don't enjoy Christmas all that much, either!
keke