When life gives you Le Mans

Wednesday contains a hoop to jump through that will dominate the qualifying driver’s mindset from the second they open their eyes in the morning.

Quali for Le Mans is a brutal psychological escalator. You must end in the top 12 in a ‘qualifying’ session directly after the first practice to progress to the Hyperpole sessions for a shot at the top spot on Thursday. Inside the mind of each qualifying driver is what happens should they not progress; they will have to watch the others do Hyperpole, having publicly missed the cut. A psychological dent to avoid taking into the 24 hours if possible. Should you make it, you just step up and anything but pole feels like failure.

The non-qualifying drivers will be focused on their race pace, and for them, there is another mind game to play. Only one of your drivers can be in the car at any one time. In practice, conditions swing violently and heavily affect lap time. A rookie driver can step from the car convinced they’ve done a respectable job, only to watch their teammate lap two seconds faster shortly afterwards.

In retrospect, it’s easy to see that conditions became more or less favourable over the 3min 30sec lap, but in the actual moment, sitting in the garage watching timing screens, it can send your head spinning

What am I missing? Why is everyone so fast?

Class pole-sitters have a special position and salutation when the action breaks for the ‘Mad Friday’ driver’s parade, which sees drivers once more into the centre of Le Mans perched on the back of a vintage roadster. If you were C-list on Monday, you’re Brad Pitt now. Fandom has turned to fervour.

Being momentarily famous is tremendous fun. In general, the earlier parade start times for your specific car are better because the crowd is less drunk. However, if you go early, it’s critical to ration the knick-knacks you have been given to hand out. If you have nothing by the end of the parade, they riot.

Fan-led tactics to get the driver’s attention are a must-participate. I have been ‘knighted’ on the parade with a plastic sword by the British fans, drank a shot of tequila in 2021 (at least I think that’s what it was) and turned down a proposal of marriage in 2017. He didn’t take it too badly.

The drive-in on Saturday is the moment you notice the pre-race fatigue. Yes, pre-race. This is thanks to all the briefings, sponsor events, media appearances, autograph sessions, engineering meetings, and interrupted sleep. Le Mans is exhausting even before the green flag.

I have started the race on four of my nine appearances. ‘It’s like a Formula Ford race,’ is the commentators’ trope about drivers being too aggressive too early, but there is something much deeper at work than mere exuberance.

In very few other places do you start a race in a prototype set up for tomorrow. That means brake ducts fully open in case it’s hot at 3pm on Sunday. Ride heights must be high in case it’s cold at night, generating more downforce and wearing the plank to the point of illegality.

You may have driven in practice with a reasonable fuel load, but 45-minute stints at 85 per cent full throttle require a tankful. The overwhelming theme of the first stint is, ‘Why is my car so rubbish?’ and it’s easy to make mistakes at the start.

The first three stints even feel like a mini–Grand Prix, ‘undercutting’ rivals in the pits and jostling for track position. A weird dichotomy with 22 hours to go because it’s all totally pointless, but you are also ‘here to race’, with everybody participating in a shared delusion that positions gained and lost are at all relevant.

After the first flurry of stops, there is actually very little to do; you are driving for hours. There’s significant mental capacity available that could be filled with mind wandering, leading to errors.

The trick is continuous improvement. Braking, line, throttle application. You’ve just finished driver coaching yourself, and then suddenly, two hours have disappeared without a mistake.

I always prefer the stint driving from day into night, allowing a slow adjustment of the eyes; pit lanes are inherently downlit with bright LEDs, and exiting the pits into pitch black is a moment of danger.

An FAQ among endurance racing viewers is ‘How do you go that fast in the dark?’ The honest answer is that the human brain adapts far better than most imagine. Give yourself the muscle memory for the circuit, practice the task, add a survival instinct, and the brain starts filling in the missing visual information surprisingly quickly. First, you drive by numbers, using remembered reference points, and you can build a mental picture of the circuit from there. By lap five at night, it might as well be daylight.

However prepared you are for tiredness to set in, it’s the circadian rhythm that’s the real battle. Even if you rest all day, your body is designed to sleep at a reliable time. This time neatly aligns with your fourth stint at Le Mans, typically, and the brutal reality of racing all night hits home.

Where you are in the race has a heavy bearing on this. A good performance so far will see you evade the actual feeling of tiredness, but you’ll still be worse at things. You’ll be slower to react, and it’ll be easier to lose concentration, but your body holds the actual feeling of tiredness away because it recognises you’ve got a ‘bit on’. If you’re already out of contention and just circulating, you’ll feel broken and dream of daylight.

Daybreak and happy hour, with a crispy-cool circuit and light conditions are your reward and are hotly contested, not only on track but in the pit lane. Sports car drivers are evaluated by their ‘average lap time’ over stints, so at Le Mans, being on circuit at the right time is key to professional advancement. Tell me the driver rotation at the beginning of the race, and I will let you know whether I am doing happy hour or not from the top of my head.

I have had teammates (nameless) who have taken this further, faking cramp, discomfort or tiredness earlier in the race to manipulate the stint rotation to their advantage, so they are ‘back in the car’ at the magic moment nine hours later.

Seldom will race drivers ever take on a circuit so heavily covered in rubber from a full day of solid competition, so it’s a special technique to maximise it.

This evolution of the circuit means a turn requiring fourth-gear with a dab of brakes at the beginning of the race could be flat in fifth by the end. Positions are now also harder fought; in other words, it starts getting rough.

With six hours to go, if the race is going badly, time is running out. If it’s going well, you’re aware that there is still a full WEC endurance race to go while standing in the pit lane, and on track the escalation has begun.

There are 186 drivers at Le Mans each year, some for fun, some on a trajectory to works seats, some coaching amateur drivers. About half of these will be deemed professional, but in these final hours, the real stars find something extra.

I remember being told about the days of 1990s Group C at Le Mans: enjoying the daybreak, positions set by reliability, traffic clear, and a satisfying cruise to the line, at one with the car. No more.

The pace on the track switches from ‘professionally competent’ to lightspeed in the final hours. Tired but steel-eyed professional drivers, the real ‘Pilotes du Mans’, feeding their families by being the best in the world at doing this, here, are moving the game forward. There are no excuses; you have new tyres on the prototype you drove all night and 30 laps of frenzied slug fest to prove you belong in the half-broken speedster you’re driving.

The flag.

You peel into Parc Fermé, and the toll becomes clear. Everywhere you look, the cars are wounded. In the heat-haze 50-odd racing cars sit there having all, in their own way, reached the end of themselves.

Iconic scenes of course ensue, the crowds flood to the podium, elation for victors, disappointment for losers – tears either way. The famous four-pillared trophies, garlands and champagne, and yet, within an hour or two, Le Mans becomes incredibly small again.

For all its scale, by Sunday evening, the crowd has escaped, and the circus has folded back in on itself. The eerie pit building is left once more almost silent, but for the weary conversations of ‘the club’. The same travelling club that arrived the previous Monday, and the only people really involved. Momentarily famous but once more just club racers, done good; leaning on freight cases or the historic pit wall.

‘How was yours?’

‘Good, mostly. Bit of understeer.’

‘Okay mate, see you next round.’