The hard truth about the mad world of endurance racing
Too much partying, too much noise and too much racing. Here’s why the Le Mans 24 hours is an overdose of biking brilliance
‘The 40 machines that finished this year’s Le Mans completed a staggering 82,818 racing miles’
Aheavy pall of smoke hung over the Le Mans circuit as the final act of this year’s 24-hour race began. It was 5am on Sunday morning and I’d climbed to the top of the main grandstand to take some pictures. The only occupants were a pair of shivering Frenchmen, inexplicably huddled under a huge Union Jack. After two nights of mayhem the campsites were mercifully silent, hundreds of campfires the only evidence of life. The hedonists had retired but the racers continued to tear along the startfinish straight as they had for the past 14 hours. The same amount of time it takes to run seven Senior TTs had elapsed since the Tricolour dropped and the riders sprinted to their machines at 3pm on Saturday. Another five could be completed in the almost unimaginable ten hours that remained to be run. It’s impossible to rationalise what is happening in a 24-hour race at 5am but even now, at this distance, it feels as though Le Mans was all about excess. Too much time, too much alcohol, too much noise, too much racing. Too much everything.
One statistic proves the point. The 40 machines and 120 riders who finished this year’s Le Mans completed 31,848 laps of the 2.6-mile Bugatti circuit. That’s a staggering 82,818 racing miles. In the path of this relentless racing juggernaut it was time to adopt the endurance racer’s motto as given to me by former winner, Steve Mercer. “Never give up and always keep pushing,” he said. “You can’t give up, otherwise what is the point in being here?” Although a smattering of British bike fans could be found amongst the 85,000-strong crowd at this year’s Le Mans, most folk on this side of the English Channel seem to view 24-hour racing as a continental curiosity that bears little if any relevance to the MotoGP, BSB or roads events we flock to. No UK meeting even remotely resembles Le Mans. The premier endurance event on the international calendar remains resolutely French with 41 of this year’s 60 teams and 115 of the 180 racers who started the race being homegrown.
Each of those teams fields three ‘pilotes’ but reserve riders swell the numbers, hoping to get a last minute outing if someone is injured or can’t get on the pace. Steve Mercer had been the stand-in for the British-based Honda Endurance Racing team before being snapped up by the Mototech Yamaha squad, swelling the number of Brits competing to six. Michael Laverty, Christian Iddon and Danny Webb rode for Rico Penskofer’s Wepol BMW team. Peter Hickman raced another BMW S1000RR for the German NRT48 squad and Paul Carew was entered on the Team Racing 85 superstock Kawasaki. Racing in the dark is 24 hour racing’s unique trademark. BSB star Michael Laverty explained: “You know where you need to be on the track because you have already done so many laps in daylight.”
With trackside floodlighting being poor to non-existent at Le Mans, Laverty says you have to have a good feel for the track and what the bike is doing beneath you.
“Turn One can be a problem though because you are doing 190mph along the straight and it is hard to see the white markers going in,” he added. “It can be a little bit arse-clenching!”
For the quickest riders, speeds drop just a tiny fraction during the hours of darkness. This year the cooler night provided welcome relief from Saturday’s 32-degree heat.
Laverty, who finished on the podium at Le Mans in 2014 on a Yart Yamaha, says being able to maintain a high and consistent pace is the key to endurance racing success. “You have to knock it back a couple of per cent to be steady and safe.
“You can’t push the front in every corner the way you do in BSB but the more laps you do, the faster rhythm you can set.”
With 23 superbikes and 37 superstock machines (plus a couple of what the French call ‘experimental’ prototype bikes) in the starting line-up, there was a huge disparity between the teams at either end of pit lane. Endurance racing provides the opportunity to display the performance and reliability of R1s, ZX-10RRs, GSX-Rs and Fireblades. Factory-backed squads like the British and French Honda teams, the YART and GMT Yamaha outfits and the SERT Suzuki squad are supported by huge budgets. Riders like David Checa, Broc Parkes and Max Neukirchner, with WSB experience, are the hired guns. Honda had dieticians and expert physiotherapists on hand at Le Mans to look after their three French riders between riding stints while the smallest privateer teams are often just a collection of friends who go racing. Usually they find themselves 20 or 30 laps down on the leaders after just a few hours but a smaller team that works well together can still have success in 24-hour racing. “The team is a massive thing at Le Mans,” Danny Webb explained. “If one person makes a mistake then the whole job is messed up.”
Pit stops are rehearsed over and over again, honing the wheel change and refuelling process down to just 12-14 seconds. Even in 24 hours, every second still counts: just 55 seconds separated the three teams who finished in fifth, sixth and seventh positions this year. “There are two men on each wheel plus the catchers. We can change both wheels in six seconds,” Dave Moore, Wepol BMW’s refuelling man, said. The tank is topped up with fuel from the quickfiller system in a similar amount of time. A huge fire at Le Mans a few years ago means everyone has to maintain a safe distance and no-one is allowed to touch the bike during the
process but there are still plenty of spillages when the heat is on . Fuel consumption is a very precise science in 24-hour racing with some of the teams using test tubes to measure the exact amount needed to squeeze in another lap without running out.
“We want the guys to stay out as long as possible so we aim to have just an egg cupful left at the end of each stint. It is all mathematics and it can be tricky enough to sort all the sums when you are knackered at 4am,” Moore explained.
“There are about 50 minutes between pit stops but it takes about 15 minutes to measure everything out and get ready for the next one so there is never much rest time.
“You just drink tea or coffee and try to fight off the sleep,” Moore added. “If you do nod off in the garage the rest of the boys spray you with water anyway!”
The riders also struggle to get any shuteye. Danny Webb said: “The adrenaline keeps your head busy and I find myself doing gear-changes in my sleep if I do drop off.” Another huge impediment to sleep comes from the racket the French fans make through the night. It seems to be some kind of Gallic obsession to acquire a motorcycle or static engine and rev the s**t out of it for hours on end. The racket is deafening. Petrol and lighter fuel poured into the exhausts enhance the pyrotechnic effects.
“It is like Mad Max out there,” was how Australian racer Josh Hook described the spectacle. “I’ve never seen anything like it.” Christian Iddon was racing at Le Mans for the first time. He said: “You think there is a lot of track time but when it is divided amongst three or four riders per team it isn’t so much. That makes it difficult to get into any kind of rhythm. Seeing my own shadow on the track from the following bike’s lights also freaked me out a few times.”
Iddon said the biggest difference between an endurance race and a 12-lap BSB sprint is the unpredictable nature of a race held over 24 hours. “You are always coming across things you have to deal with in the heat of the moment because there is so much going on. There are tyre and fuel strategies to sort out and you are riding round with people who are all going at a different pace. Every time you go out there is always something different to get used to. At one point I was bedding in new front discs, calipers and pads while I was racing, which was very sketchy,”
A huge variation in machinery and ability means disasters are inevitable and frustration is a common emotion at Le Mans.
The Wepol BMW team had two crashes in the first few hours at Le Mans, robbing Laverty, Iddon and Webb of any chance of victory. They fought back to claim the final podium place but Peter Hickman’s NRT48 squad suffered an even crueller fate. The team lost 45 minutes early on when the wiring loom had to be replaced after the BMW picked up track debris. An engine failure at 10.30pm on Saturday night finally brought proceedings to a halt. Even with just two-and-a-half hours to go, Christian Iddon refused to contemplate getting on to the rostrum. “That is long enough to run four BSB races. Anything can happen.”
A couple of minutes later one of the SERT Suzukis rolled into the garage with a broken gear linkage. Iddon’s caution seemed well-placed. The British riders came away from this year’s event with huge respect for the endurance racing specialists. “I think the fast guys who do endurance races are underrated,” Webb said. As a former Grand Prix, British championship and TT rider, Webb is well placed to make comparisons between different bike racing disciplines.
“We have some of the quickest riders in BSB here this weekend and they aren’t getting away from anyone. This is the hardest type of racing I have ever done and you still need to be bloody quick to do well at Le Mans,” he added.
“It doesn’t always get the respect it deserves. It’s a bit like the TT: you have to have a bit of a screw loose to do it, don’t you?”
‘If you nod off the lads spray you with water’