Cooler temperatures and even a little rain brought welcome relief after the heatwave of the weekend.
It was raining when we left the hotel around 9:30 in the morning. We took a slightly different route back up to the autoroute heading towards Flers and onto Caen. The roads were near empty and the Daytona may be thirty six years old but the 4.4 V12 has more than enough power to easily dispatch the few trucks we encountered heading towards the car ferries. Utterly glorious on these open roads and still enourmous fun even at the legal limit, I'm sure a 599 would be somewhat less fun at these speeds.
After a coffee and petrol stop in Flers (I'm trying not to think how much fuel I used on the trip) we hit the Autoroutes. As on the trip down the I settled on a steady cruise at an indicated legal limit. The Daytona's speedometer is not the most accurate device so I suspect we were actually a couple of kph under this.
As with the back roads the autoroutes had relatively light traffic and a significant number of cars were classics heading back up to the tunnel as we were. Some of the more unusual offerings included a enormous Chevrolet Impala and a scary looking late sixties Pontiac Firebird convertible with large drag racer style rear wheels.
We timed our arrival at the Channel Tunnel almost perfectly to drive straight onto the train rather than have to suffer half an hour in the dreadful terminal, and as we directed to the lower deck of the train, along with a blower Bentley and a beautifully restored Porsche 356C cabriolet. It is said that you are never without a firend with a classic car and the train carriage was soon full of discussion about the different cars. The Blower owner had been on a 3000 mile rally around Europe with the car which had finished up at Le Mans and sounded like an epic adventure.
The train conductor's concerns that any smoke on start up from these old cars would set off the trains fire alarms proved unfounded and the Daytona hit the vile M20 and M25 back home. A brief clean up of the fly splattered front of the Daytona (I'll give it a full clean at the weekend), and after some 800 miles the Daytona was back in it's garage.
All in all despite my reservations about the organisation at the Le Mans Classic itself, a fantastic weekend of driving.
No comments:
Post a Comment