From handing out high-fives to revving an 870bhp Ferrari: part motoring spectacle, part sensory overload
It’s the Friday afternoon of race week in Le Mans. The town centre municipal car park is filling up with vehicles you won’t see here every day.
Pre-war Citroëns, post-war American land yachts, one-off concept cars, chrome-covered road-hog motorcycles, supercars, movie tribute cars and more. It’s a joyously assorted mix.
Then there are the pick-up trucks – lots of pick-up trucks, actually – necessary for reasons that will soon become apparent. Something is about to happen that, every year, fuels the fevered race fan’s enthusiasm for this famous, century-old endurance epic: La Grande Parade des Pilotes des 24 Heures du Mans.
And this year, I will be taking part. I’m among a bunch of British motoring journalists who’ve driven to La Sarthe in a cavalcade of Ferrari supercars. We’ve been invited to join the parade to add the colour and excitement of these cars to the sum total of the occasion’s drama.
How could we say no? Nobody will have a clue who the drivers are, of course, but as long as we look like we’re enjoying ourselves, perhaps that won’t matter too much. So here we are, waiting as the start-line car park slowly fills. I must admit that when they asked if we’d drive in the Le Mans parade, I assumed it would be on the race circuit. But here, they bring the race to the town.
The motorsport celebrities and grandees are arriving and the race drivers are filtering in after their various briefings and meetings have been completed at the circuit a few miles away. Jacky Ickx’s sunglasses are proving about as effective a disguise as they normally are and he can’t move for the queue of selfie hunters mobbing him at every turn. He might be the only person in the world who is less recognisable when he’s not wearing his aviators.
The influencers are out in force, posing in front of this and that, and live streaming their feigned enthusiasm for just about everything to their digital faithful. Some local classic car and sports car owners have clearly been invited by their dealers to run their machinery, and quaff champagne in the VIP area as they wait for the procession to start.
But that’s very much what this will be: a procession – done so the fans can get up close with the drivers as they pass – rather than any kind of demo run. The parade route is no more than a mile long and is lined with barriers, running out of the car park, emerging in front of the town’s imposing Saint Julien cathedral, and then winding its way through some tight left and right turns along the narrow, sprawling city streets.
It runs directly past several popular bars, restaurants and cafes, which seem to be the prime viewing areas, but pretty much every foot of barrier is occupied by a spectator who’s on the hunt for a souvenir or memento.
Imagine the Goodwood Festival of Speed done without the speed – but with more music and free stuff – using your local town’s shopping centre, bus station and pedestrianised areas as its backdrop.
There is one race fan who’s getting a massive cow bell autographed, for reasons best known to himself. Then I notice a kid who’s made a basketball hoop out of cardboard and is collecting quite the haul. This is where Le Mans worshipped meets its worshipful – and, clearly, there’s a toll to be paid.
As we wait to run, the occasion builds. A DJ is blasting out dance music from the back of a Maxus flatbed for the benefit of the fans. But he’s competing with a roving free-form jazz saxophonist, who’s connected to his own PA system and doing his best to entertain the moneyed VIP car club set. Then there are dance troupes and mascots in bear suits. Spider-Man, The Predator and the cast of Transformers are all here too.
The cars that you might expect to be in attendance, however – the track racers – are not. But those that have come are as special as they are unexpected. This is France, so the Citroën Méharis are mandatory inclusions. Some are original but there’s a bright pink electromod as well.
They’re ideal because race drivers can hang out of them, waving, throwing out freebies, firing off their T-shirt cannons and whipping up the mood to a frenzy. But there’s a 1959 Ford Galaxie convertible about the size of a French local-area département that looks made for the task as well.
There’s the Genesis Box Buggy concept, which is a little like a golf cart with superpowers (castor-style wheels, each with an in-wheel electric motor, and four-wheel steering). And then there are the pick-up trucks, whose flatbeds are ideal for loading with a crew of three endurance racing drivers, and enough bouncy balls, flags, caps and cuddly toys to keep any baying mob happy.
We wait for all of the race teams to get called and then they crawl through the course. And then come the motorbikes, and the vintage cars, and the movie cars. (One of them is a Cadillac Sentinel made to look like the Ectomobile from Ghostbusters, except it’s been made, perhaps ironically, out of a hearse rather than the correct Miller-Meteor ambulance conversion.)
By the time it’s our turn, it’s gone 7pm – and we fully expect the masses to have dispersed for the most part. Hell, no. The barriers are still packed as I approach the start line in a Ferrari 296 Speciale Aperta. Even though they’ve already seen so much, the crowd’s reception is enthusiastic, demanding – and well mannered.
“Monsieur, monsieur! Bruit, bruit, bruit, s’il vous plaît!” “Please, my English friend – make some music for us!” “Come on! Where’s the V8?!” (Everyone’s a critic.)
“Rev the nuts off it!” (That one in a decidedly Estuary English accent.) The last of those requests seems very much to be what we’re here to do.
So, proceeding quite a lot more slowly than walking pace, I let the Speciale’s hybrid powertrain run in Performance mode, creeping forwards mostly, but double-paddling into neutral every 20 metres or so in order to rev it up and satisfy the crowd’s appetite for exhaust theatrics.
The car’s V6 is a bit meek-sounding compared with the V12 motors of the 12Cilindris ahead and behind, but it seems to be doing the trick anyway.
The instinct for mechanical sympathy leads me to try to content a few groups of onlookers with a cycle of the car’s folding roof. They’re not having it – not for a minute. “Gas, gas! Noise, noise!” they shout. So that’s what they get.
It’s all going very well. The high fives are flowing, the marshals are smiling and everybody’s waving and cheering. The course is too narrow for any other showboating, I’m relieved to find, and the rate of progress prohibitive. It would be like trying a burnout upstairs on a Channel Tunnel train – only with far more witnesses to see it all go wrong.
So we carry on smiling, waving, honking, revving and generally getting carried away with all the entirely unwarranted adulation, until about 200 metres from the end of the course – when the car decides it’s had enough.
The combination of lots of revs at near-stationary speeds, with no cooling, has overheated something, and it unceremoniously shuts down. And so the first 296 Speciale that many will see in the raw becomes the first they see being pushed (although, very shortly, it won’t require more than a few minutes to cool down, and a booster pack on the 12V electrics, to restore it to health).
It was almost certainly my fault. A few metres earlier, a lad who couldn’t have been older than seven or eight had asked for my ‘casquette’ (my baseball cap) – itself a souvenir of a trip to Le Mans I made more than a decade ago – and I’d refused to throw it over. The parade gods clearly saw fit to punish me for being ungenerous. Next time, I’ll know to bring spares.
