THINGS are getting busy at Le Mans as we count down to the commencement of track activities, officially, on Wednesday local time. The vibe is building and after what must have been 70,000 people attending the test day on Sunday even more people are rolling into the circuit now. Tuesday is packed – there’s no circuit activity however the official pit stop competition in pit lane keeps fans engaged. In the enormous ‘Village’ activation area adjacent to pit lane, every retailer is open and doing a brisk trade. The official stores are busy and relaxed and the gear is really

IF THERE is one thing I'm stealing from this event to bring back home, it's Le Pesage - the two day extravaganza in the middle of Le Mans city where every single car, driver and team go through their mandatory checks prior to hitting the circuit. We have a simplified version back home - the Bathurst 12 Hour's Track to Town is as close as we come - but Pesage is much more involved, much more interactive and utterly fantastic. Loosely translated, Pesage means 'weighing' which essentially is the basis of all things scrutineering. DAY 1 DIARY - Road to

THE FERRARI 499P, the Scuderia’s return to top-flight Sports Car racing and outright competition at La Sarthe, has an underfloor that looks like it’s lifted directly from their Formula One car. The Porsche’s are stunningly detailed: the multi-coloured livery with nods to their most famous schemes of old adding a brightness to the already perfectly presented trio of 963s as is suitable for an outfit run by both Le Captain, Roger Penske, and Stuttgart itself. DAY 1 DIARY - Road to Le Mans The madhouse Peugeot 9X8, with it’s rear wing MIA and enormously sculpted and tuned underbody looks like

BEFORE WE TALK about the road there, let's talk about the road in the image above. What you see there is the old section of the Circuit de la Sarthe, used for decades before safety became more of a concern than the manly men and remarkable women who tackled the world's most famous around-the-clock enduro each year. In particular, the section above is the old, fearsome Maison Blanche. The narrow, single-lane carriageway was the link between the back of the old Le Mans circuit and the pit straight, long before the current Porsche Curves, the Ford Chicane and the Virage

Growing up, I never really understood why you would bother driving a Datsun, but wherever you looked across the club motorsport scene, against a sea of choice, the discontinued Japanese marque was, and continues to be, every-bloody-where. This story dates back 20-something years to the turn of the century when I was asked along for my first ride in a racecar. Fortuitously, my younger self was a competent note-taker, although the details of that day were well and truly etched in the memory bank… The invitation came from David Paterson, a long-time campaigner and commentator in the state racing scene