Welcome to the "Your First Time at Le Mans" story series.
I decided to break this huge week+ long experience into smaller sized and self-contained stories you can read either in a sequence or in the order you prefer.
I hope you enjoy the stories as much as I did writing them!
Feel free to reply if you have any feedback, or if you had similar experiences and want to share. I read and get back to all replies.
If you really liked the article, it would be amazing for you to share with others who might also enjoy it!
Without further ado, today's story is:
Chapter 4: Your First Time Camping?
As I mentioned before, I had never camped in my life before going to Le Mans.
Not even as a kid.
Never got the opportunity and also was never really interested in it.
As I jokingly but kind of seriously said to several people before: I consider myself "an apartment prince".
An apartment prince?
I'm a very organised, clean person who enjoys order, calmness and predictability.
You can already imagine where this is going.
When my friends told me "we're camping the whole week" a bit of me got worried.
I would be "losing control" of things that I usually have very well defined. Sleeping place, sleeping times (and showering times, any kind of pre-defined times), "noise control", comfort, temperature, etc.
Everything would be now on a "best effort" basis, and surprisingly, I was pretty ok with it.
The only thing you can do is to make the best out of the situation.
I prepared as much as I could for it, and let it happen. Whatever I didn't like from the experience, there was always the idea of "I did the best I could" in the front of my mind, that really eased any kind of annoyance in my head. I believe it was the right approach.
How it really turned out?
I already mentioned the purchases and how that went (pretty good!), so after spending a ton of time "preparing" for this in terms of reviews and purchases, I just rolled with it.
And it was not even half bad!
My mother in law has outdoors experience, so she was of great help. She warned about some specific things/issues you can encounter while doing this, and I'm glad I listened because she was right!
Things about the setup, how to be prepared for changing temperatures, where to put my stuff when sleeping and many more.
All on point, clearly noticed by the times I forgot to follow her advice.
I once again want to thank the guys who opened their camp to me. Without them, I wouldn't have had such a great first camping experience.
The main reason this worked out in the end, was because I prepared for "my own things" (tent and everything inside of it), and they were more than ready for everything else. Especially to spend the rest of the day properly when we were not on the track.
This would've been such a different (and worse) experience if I arranged it on my own.
And speaking of the camp and the trackβ¦
Campsites and distances
When I heard we were "camping at Le Mans" I thought "Oh nice! We're gonna be right in the action, wake up, be next to the track and go!".
Well, yes and no.
Turns out, it used to be more like that many years ago.
But as time went on, the campsites in or close to the track started to get more private and for wealthier people.
This means that us, normal folks for whom going to Le Mans is a commitment that needs time, effort and financial alignments, have been pushed outwards for years.
Luckily even if the campsite we were in, the Hippodrome, was not the closest one for regular people, it was also not the farthest, at 1.38 km from the closest ticket checkpoint.
You could expect it to be a healthy 30 minute walk from our tents to the side of the track itself.
It does not sound like a huge problem, and honestly, it's not. But it adds up and has some minor inconveniences.
For example:
- You're staying outside of the track itself, which means you need to have your ticket on you the whole time to enter and go out of it. The ticket itself (at least mine) was a paper one the size of a flight boarding pass, so not the most comfortable to have on you (especially if you don't want to bend it).
- You have to plan"your day"before going to the track. You don't want to take extra weight you don't need, and you don't want to forget anything. You are definitely not going back to camp just for one thing you forgot.
- To the point that you have to pick if you'd rather lose an hour+ of your day or some euros, if you forget a jacket, umbrella or similar at camp and have to choose between going back to fetch it, pulling through or buying something on site.
This is also a key topic while thinking when, where and if you are going to recharge your own batteries on race day.
At home is really easy to take a nap or a short rest and continue. But here you have to plan not only the sleeping time, but also the walking time.
I strived to sleep for 3 hours. So I had to calculate around 4:30 hours between the walk to camp, time to get to actually sleep and the walk back to the circuit.
Almost no free water?
The "free drinking water" situation at Le Mans is, in my experience, terrible.
I know it's quite a different event, but I can't help but compare.
The other 2 car events I held my experience at the 24 Hours of Le Mans against were my two visits to the Goodwood Festival of Speed (2023, 2024), as well as my visit to Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps for ELMS in 2023.
It's a bit more fair to compare it to Spa than to Goodwood, since they are both race tracks so the expectation on facilities are similar.
The main difference is that I was not too much time in each day in Spa, as I was in Goodwood, or Le Mans. This made this a bit less noticeable.
I don't quite remember the "free drinking water" situation at Spa, but even if I was for a couple of hours there, I don't recall having this issue (not that it was not there. I just can't remember so I will not report on it).
The Festival of Speed, on the other hand, had what I think is the perfect situation and what was really lacking at Le Mans.
You had to walk a bit, but every once in a while you could find toilet stalls and next to almost all of them, a tap with clean water you could fill your bottle with.
This is important. More so at Le Mans, since the 24 hour race takes place almost in summer and it's key to stay hydrated.
It's on their best interests to keep people from fainting or worse, and it really depends on where you come from and how your personal finance is.
I come from Argentina and I am currently lucky enough to live in the Netherlands, so I traveled there with an European salary. This means that I can just buy water.
But if I had to travel with an Argentinian (or similar) salary, every penny counts. A lot of people would not hesitate to skip drinking water since it might be so expensive for something that could be free and people usually think they can get away without.
This might be just a random complaint, but I think having a bit more readily available water to fill your bottle would make the experience in the summer heat so much better.
I have not camped in Goodwood, but the other thing I thought was terrible, was that the campsites do not have drinking water as well. There are some that have, but for example, in our case, we had to walk all the way to our campsite entrance, go around to the connection of the next campsite, and into it. To then be able to get some water from there, and get back however you can.
I say this because since it was far away, you did not want to do 20 min round trips for a 700 cc bottle of water, but at the same time, you really couldn't bring in gallons, since you had to walk all that way back.
The toilet stalls in the campsites should have drinking water faucets next to them for people to be able to go back and forth to restock. I think there's no way around it.
This is the end of "Chapter 4: Your First Time Camping?". Stay tuned for "Chapter 5: Not to miss. Practices, qualifying and other races." in the upcoming days where we'll go over things like:
- Expectations vs. reality from your first time camping
- How campsites work at Le Mans
- What kind of distances you'll need to cover
- The status and availability of facilities while there
See you there?
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