Two days into the Le Mans Classic trip and so far the Daytona has run extremely well.
We set out for the Channel tunnel on Thursday morning me in the Daytona and Dad in his LHD 365GTC4. The car park at the tunnel terminal was full of sporting and classic cars ranging from a 1920's Bentley through to modern Lamborghinis. Originally our party was to include a 365GTC which has been converted into a Spider, but at the last minute the owner elected to bring his Porsche 993. Also one of our party was unable to bring his 430 Spider due to a recent speeding indiscretion in France and was reduced to travelling passenger.
For some reason the air conditioning in the tunnel train carriage tripped out forcing us to move to the next carriage, although the kind attendant was nice enough to give us complimentary bottles of water by way of an apology.
Once on the other side it was only a short run down the autoroute to our overnight stop in Le Touquet. At his point I discovered annoyingly the automated buzzer for the French tolls was not working meaning at each stop I had to get out of the right hand drive Daytona and run round the car to get a ticket. Fortunately I was able to obtain a new buzzer yesterday.
After a night in Le Touquet and a slightly disappointing meal in one of the fish restaurants in town. we headed out yesterday morning around 10:00. The Daytona is absolutely in it's element on French autoroutes happily cruising at around the speed limit of 130kph pulling just over 3000 rpm. However at the heat of the day rose the ammeter was indicating that having the AC on was ever so slightly discharing the battery (even more so when the engine fans come in when we encountered traffic ) so as it't not particularly effective anyway I switched it off and elected for the slightly blowy windows down route to driving cooling.
We're staying at a hotel about 50km north west of Le Mans, as a result we eschewed the traditional route to Le Mans through Rouen and headed down the autoroute over the Pont de Normandie (the French certainly know how to do spectacular bridges) around Caen and then onto the back roads down to the hotel.
Driving the sparsely trafficked back roads is hugely enjoyable compared to the over populated roads of the south east of England, at some points on the trip we could go for 5 - 10 minutes to without seeing any other cars. Some of the cars we did see were British registered classics including a group of vintage Bentley's outside a garage in one of the small towns in a scene straight out photos of the pre war Le Mans.
After nearly six hours in the car the heat soak into the cockpit is immense and I was sweating buckets and actually quite glad to get out of the car when we arrived at the hotel. While the engine fans had done an admirable job of keeping the engine within operating temperatures, by the end the water and oil temperatures were creeping up so the arrival came at about the right time.
The hotel (which is out little secret and shall remain nameless) provided its usual excellent standard of food last night (particularly the warm Fois Gras washed down with a sautern), and the cars joined by some other classics including an E Type and Aston DB6 along with a modern Ferrari 599 and Aston Vanquish provided an lovely backdrop as we enjoyed a couple of beers to celebrate a good days driving.
We're heading into the circuit later but as the air temprature is even higher I think I will squeeze myself into the back of my freinds 993 rather than subject the Daytona to the potential heavy traffic an parking nightmares that can be Le Mans.
