Woo hoo, Le Mans! Le Mans! Le Mans! Le Mans! It has been several years since I've been able to sit down & watching the 24 Heures du Mans on television. (Curse ye, Fox Sports!) Velocity, a part of the Discovery, Inc. family of channels, is carrying Eurosport's (another part of Discovery, Inc.) coverage the whole race, including an hour-long pre-race show & a scheduled half-hour-long post-race show (podiums & whatnot). This is a joy, especially after having to cobble together online coverage.
That said, I have a First World Problem. (Actually, everything to do with Le Mans is a First World Problem, since it is a motor race run in France which I am able to watch here in America.) The pictures of the race are glorious, but the Eurosport commentators are, while better than Fox Sports' goonish crew, not as superb as the commentators on Radio Le Mans. I've watched Radio Le Man's "Studio Vision" on the YouTube the last couple years, which is a less-than-ideal way to experience the race, since the video feed is just that, just their crew commentating from studio—no video coverage of the race. But the Radio Le Mans boys & girls are second to none in covering "the Grand Prix of Endurance & Efficiency." Ideally, I could watch Europsort's pictures on Velocity while listening to Radio Le Mans, but this is not feasible in that I do not have a television in my bedroom, where my Macintosh is located, nor do I have a laptop to use down in the living room where the television & the comfy green armchair await my return. Like I said, a First World Problem.
L.M. P.1
The Toyota hybrids, the only factory hybrids in the field after the withdrawal of Audi (2016) & Porsche (2017), are far outpacing the non-hybrid privateer P.1s, but this is a surprise to no one. The petrol-only privateers are counting on the unreliability that knocked out four of the six hybrid P.1s in 2017, unreliability that could well rear its head with just under sixteen & a half hours of racing left to go. For their part, Toyota aren't just cruising around, they are setting faster lap times than they did in last year's duel against Porsche.
L.M. G.T.E. Pro.
There were "balance of performance" (B.O.P. or "bop") changes made the day before the race, between qualifying & the start, which may explain why the B.M.W. M8s are so much faster in the race than they were in practice & qualifying, but there are also dark suspicions of "sandbagging," B.M.W. having deliberating concealed the true pace of their car, in order to earn B.O.P. help from the organizers, the A.C.O. Of course, most of those dark suspicions come from Porsche & Ford, both of which have been known to play B.O.P. games themselves.
Corvette, Ferrari, & Aston Martin don't seem to have the pace to keep up with B.M.W., Porsche, & Ford, but Le Mans is a long race & there's much more to it than pure speed. Fortitudine vincimas ("By endurance we conquer").
Bonus! Song o' Le Mans
"Weird Al" Yankovic, "First World Problems" from Mandatory Fun (The Last Angry Homme)
No comments:
Post a Comment