[LM24 Race] 2021 24 Hours of Le Mans - Race week thread

[eps]

Originally Posted by bella

i think a lot of you are missing the human element to 24 hour races. the car bit is nothing without the human stories behind them, and if you know some of them you'll understand that you'll never know all of them. that some people focus solely on the cars and performance just seems to miss out a huge, vast, enormous part of the event.

obviously lots of people will never be able to get to the race and that's cool but honestly... look further.

i can tell you about my le mans. i'm knackered. 100% purely existing on momentum and inertia at this point. got scratches and bruises i don't entirely understand and have somehow picked up a cold. the start was this huge burst of life from the other side - you live a week inside the garages and the pit box, you've built this tight knit little le mans experience and then boom, all of a sudden you realise that there's more to build it out of.

the wee small hours feel like you're just surviving, all you're doing is keeping the car going because that's all you can do yourself. you spend this entire week flogging yourself to give the boys and the car the best opportunity to get the circuit figured out and the right bits of the car glued together so nothing falls off, and then on race day someone's like, "sure, it's just like testing except you're all going to get at least one randomly selected drama". it's not about who recovers the best from that drama, it's like musical chairs when you all know when the music will stop but if you linger round a chair you'll fall over your shoelaces.

sometimes it just isn't your race, i'm still not completely sure where our car finished, but she finished. the entire paddock will be kicking pigeons for weeks over That One Thing that changed the course of their race, where it started to wobble. the first thing that comes to mind if you try and start a sentence with "if... hadn't happened, we'd have...". and there's usually one person in the team turning over and examining that thing, and rationalising that whilst it happened in their hands, it was le mans that caused it. you can't start picking apart every little thing that goes wrong and apportioning blame because it doesn't work like that.

Excellent post, thanks for sharing. Having been involved in a 25hrs race - I can only concur. Halfway through the week you start to think you've already done half the things you need to in the race as you've practiced and practiced already during the practice sessions. For the team a 24 race is probably closer to a 32 or 36 hour stretch, with all the build up and prep that happens beforehand and getting everything ready and then tidying up and packing away (if they reach the end of the race that is!). If not more. Lack of sleep is a problem as you're on a high whilst engaged in the race and not really wanting to take a rest mid-race, even if you've got 2 'teams' of mechanics.

I think Audi 'sort of' ruined Endurance racing with a lot of clever thinking and making their cars durable and easy to mend or even making tactical component changes mid-race in the matter of minutes, when previously it would have taken hours. The expectation is that all top-flight teams can achieve this, but it's just not the case and the spending caps and new regulations mean that the cars are a little more fragile.