The Friday afternoon of race week in Le Mans, the municipal car park in the town centre fills with vehicles that don’t show up every day. Pre-war Citroëns, post-war American land yachts, one-off concept cars, chrome-covered motorcycles, supercars, and movie tribute cars mix together. A lot of pick-up trucks are also present, and their purpose becomes clear soon enough.
Something is about to happen that fuels the enthusiasm of race fans for this century-old endurance event: La Grande Parade des Pilotes des 24 Heures du Mans. This year, I am taking part.
I’m among a group of British motoring journalists who drove to La Sarthe in a cavalcade of Ferrari supercars.
We were invited to join the parade to add color and excitement to the occasion. Nobody will know who the drivers are, but as long as we look like we’re enjoying ourselves, that probably won’t matter. So here we are, waiting as the start-line car park slowly fills.
When they asked if we’d drive in the Le Mans parade, I assumed it would be on the race circuit. Instead, they bring the race to the town. The motorsport celebrities and grandees are arriving, and the race drivers are filtering in after their briefings and meetings 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. 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 various cars and live streaming their enthusiasm to their followers.
Some local classic car and sports car owners have clearly been invited by their dealers to run their machinery and drink champagne in the VIP area as they wait. This will be a procession — done so fans can get up close with the drivers — rather than any kind of demo run.
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A parade route through narrow city streets
The parade route is no more than a mile long and lined with barriers. It runs out of the car park, emerges in front of the town’s imposing Saint Julien cathedral, and winds through tight left and right turns along narrow, sprawling city streets.
It runs directly past several popular bars, restaurants, and cafes, which seem to be the prime viewing areas. Pretty much every foot of barrier is occupied by a spectator hunting 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.
One race fan is getting a massive cow bell autographed, for reasons best known to himself. A kid has made a basketball hoop out of cardboard and is collecting quite a haul. This is where Le Mans worshipped meets its worshipful, and there’s a toll to be paid.
As we wait to run, the occasion builds. A DJ blasts dance music from the back of a Maxus flatbed for the fans. He’s competing with a roving free-form jazz saxophonist connected to his own PA system, doing his best to entertain the moneyed VIP car club set.
There are dance troupes and mascots in bear suits. Spider-Man, The Predator, and the cast of Transformers are all here too.
The cars you might expect to be in attendance — 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 freebies, firing T-shirt cannons, and whipping up the mood to a frenzy.
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A 1959 Ford Galaxie convertible about the size of a French local-area département looks made for the task as well. There’s the Genesis Box Buggy concept, a little like a golf cart with superpowers, featuring castor-style wheels with in-wheel electric motors and four-wheel steering.
The pick-up trucks have flatbeds 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.
When the Ferrari 296 Speciale met the crowd
We wait for all of the race teams to get called, and then they crawl through the course. Then come the motorbikes, 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 out of a hearse rather than the correct Miller-Meteor ambulance conversion.
By the time it’s our turn, it’s gone 7pm. We fully expect the masses to have dispersed. 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?!” “Rev the nuts off it!”
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 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.
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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. “Gas, gas! Noise, noise!” they shout.
So that’s what they get.
The high fives are flowing, the marshals are smiling, and everybody’s waving and cheering. The course is too narrow for any other showboating, 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.
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. The first 296 Speciale that many will see in the raw becomes the first they see being pushed. A few minutes to cool down and a booster pack on the 12V electrics 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, 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.