For those of you who like your race reports brief - this should be ideal.
We formed up on the green flag lap and ran pretty slowly, congregated into a side-by-side formation for the rolling start and then attempted to squeeze through the last chicane onto the start-finish straight. All was good into the Dunlop chicane, save a couple of spinners - not a bad effort from 61 lunatics all quietly thinking how they might win the race in the first corner.
Kerbed wheel the least of the problems, sadly
I think we all suspected it would kick off into the first chicane though, and sure enough the run out of Tertre Rouge was the cork in the bottle. The two cars in front of me were slow, I got a good run, but fellow Brit Rob Smith was inside me, so I had to back off. It was three abreast into the chicane, I let Rob through and cars kind of scattered everywhere. All I wanted to do was stay out of trouble, not ruin anyone's championship (the GB boys were playing for points) and enjoy some Le Mans racing.
I had a decent tow down the next straight, but I had a car right up my chuff into the braking zone for the second chicane. He just wasn't close enough to have position for the left entry - and besides, no-one just fires it down the inside there because the other car literally has nowhere to go. I remember thinking that just before the large banging noise.
He clattered me hard left-rear, then went down the side of the car. It spun me around and the car stalled, triggering a low-oil pressure warning which wouldn't allow the thing to restart. By the time it did fire the whole field had swarmed through and any hope of any racing was over. I limped back to the pits with the steering wheel not straight and the left rear feeling odd. We bunged on new rubber, I went back out, but it still didn't feel right and I just didn't see the point in risking it to drive around on my own.
The driver who hit me is called Eric Trouillet. It appears he makes trailers for a living. Ordinarily, out of pure spite and anger, I would campaign for people to boycott his product, but this time I implore everyone to buy one of his trailers forthwith. He can use the extra profits to buy some new specs and a few driving lessons.
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