Hyperleggera

24 heures du Mans 2007

Dawn in Le Mans

Why the 24 Hours of Le Mans is the great­est motor race on Earth and why you will never learn this from Wikipedia alone.

Words and pic­tures: Peter Orosz

Shad­ows fall. Shad­ows fall so blue.

No unfil­tered per­cep­tion other than the lights and sounds of racing cars. Occa­sion­ally, we glance at dis­plays for the standings.

We are cruis­ing through deep space.

Eight hours into the race and I will remem­ber every sound for­ever. The greasy, furi­ous rumble of Corvettes. The mad, vespid scream of Fer­raris and the unnerv­ing, vibrat­ing hum of Audis. The Peu­geots: jet engines at takeoff.

The darker it gets, the more you can see the flames erupt­ing out of the open exhaust pipes.

The cherry glow of brake discs.

The flu­o­res­cent racing num­bers on Aston Mar­tins, double-​oh seven.

By the Ferris wheel that keeps spin­ning, people are launched into the atmos­phere. Of the past sixty hours, we have been awake for fifty-​six, catch­ing four hours of con­torted sleep in a car.

And yet still. I cannot remem­ber the last time I felt so alive. The last time there was so little petro­leum jelly between the world and my senses.

Head­lights. Brake disks. Flames.

Set to a mul­ti­lay­ered, glo­ri­ous noise: repeat.

It is now three forty-​five and the race is halfway over.

The hyper-​capricious, cloudy day has turned into a bril­liant, star­lit night. Ninety min­utes from the tran­si­tion between vel­ve­tine black and elec­tric rose, to be fol­lowed by sun­rise at 5:58 a.m.

I type this in the middle of an aban­doned park­ing lot. To my left: an unin­hab­ited arena. I sit cross­legged on ten thou­sand square feet of asphalt, behind me a thin forest of black pines and in front of me, the Hunaudières straight.

I have no mem­o­ries of the world before the noise. Of what it felt like when the single most rel­e­vant dimen­sion of the world was not made of racing engines revved to a single rpm before crys­talline explosions.

Alfred Neubauer once said, before he invented pit sig­nal­ing, that the racing driver is the loneli­est crea­ture in the uni­verse. He could as well be in space, orbit­ing at unfath­omable speeds, know­ing noth­ing of the rest of the world slowed to a crawl.

Can you hear me, Major Tom?

The racing driver is not the only soli­tary crea­ture in the world: so is every­one watch­ing the 24 Hours of Le Mans. Dis­con­nected from the results table, the race coa­lesces into a whole. Classes cease to exist. There are no cars in the lead. None falling behind. What remains is a vast, inter­con­nected, rum­bling, pul­sat­ing organism.

Time spreads out like ice cream on asphalt.

Le Mans is a war. Harsh search­light every­where, guards give random com­mands in an alien lan­guage, like when an hour ago they stepped in front of me on a wide access road and indi­cated “no tres­pass­ing” with­out fur­ther expla­na­tion. Before that, I was stand­ing above the black poplars that mark the begin­ning of the Hunaudières, the hill­side mud­died into a swamp of trash during the day.

Sur­round­ing this are con­crete walls, razor wire, ditches of filthy water, litter, a hastily con­structed indus­trial land­scape. But the brain is over­whelmed, it is trying to cope with the fact that hear­ing has all of a sudden replaced vision as the pri­mary sen­sory input. The repul­sive, rigid sur­round­ings elicit no reaction.

Every­where and all the time: the noise. Scream­ing, roar­ing, whin­ing, howl­ing, machine­gun­ning as the dri­vers lift off the accel­er­a­tor. It res­onates in my chest. In my knees. In my larynx, too.

They say Le Mans is a pil­grim­age. You don’t come and check off the tourist sights on a post­card of some random city. Le Mans demands the whole of you. To take you and devour you, to grind you up and beat you down. This would undoubt­edly hor­rify a sane mind. The grime, the fatigue, the inces­sant pandemonium.

You have to let go.

Of the desire to be rested, to be cleansed. You have to jump head­first into this tem­pest of light and sound, you have to let it rip you up into atoms—quarks, even—so that come Sunday after­noon at three, you can be reborn as some­thing new. In the sudden, mad­den­ing silence. It may very well be that Lam­borgh­i­nis will no longer cap­ti­vate me. That bald men will grow full heads of hair.

All the while, it is humans who con­trol the racing cars. The Hunaudières used to be a single, three mile long straight. These days, two chi­canes slow the pace but speeds still approach two hun­dred miles an hour. Main­tained for hours at a time. Then, after a short rest, the racing dri­vers go at it again. And again. A win­ning dis­tance of 3,200 miles—quite usual at the present time—assumes an aver­age speed of over 130 mph. One hun­dred and ninety feet cov­ered every second.

Repeat 86,400 times.

Le Mans is the center of the uni­verse tonight. The aluminum-​titanium heart of Vor­sprung, a two hun­dred deci­bel melt­ing pot. With a quar­ter mil­lion car nerds for com­pany, I circle like Mus­lims circle the Kaaba at the Hajj.

Ours, car nerds of the world.

This was orig­i­nally writ­ten in Hun­gar­ian during live cov­er­age of the 2007 24 Hours of Le Mans for Belsőség.

∞ Published on Sunday, June 15th, 2008

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