In the end the winner of the pre-war class covered 21 racing laps, while the fastest cars from grid 5 and 6 managed 30 laps. (Photo: Sander van Dijk and Pieter Melissen) » More Photos

Victory in class went to the Jaguar C-Type of Garry Pearson and owner Nigel Webb. This is the oldest existing C-Type, yet it is given as many outings as possible.

Plateau 3 (1957-1961)
The outstanding car of this grid was the Aston Martin DBR1, winner overall in 1959. Its owner Harry Leventis does never hesitate to race this most valuable of all Astons on a very regular basis, helped by Peter Hardman and son Nick. This time their combined effort in the always immaculately prepared car resulted in 4th overall, behind the Gary Pearson/Nigel Webb driven D type, the incredibly fast and furiously driven Ferrari 250 SWB of Vincent Gaye and the Lotus 15 of the McIntyre family team.

The Aston’s sister car, 2nd overall in 1959, was an early victim and managed only 7 laps in total.

Plateau 4 (1962-1965)
1965 marked the last year of a Ferrari win at Le Mans and one example of the winning 250 LM was present, although not the actual winner. A very interesting entry was the ex Scuderia Filipinetti Porsche 904/6 that 11th overall in 1964. The car has recently been restored to racing conditions after a 30 year’s break. Another 904/6, entered by Klaus Frers came 4th overall in 1965 and again in 2008. The 9th finisher of that year, the Bizarrini Grifo was entered by Alberto Francioni.

The race itself was dominated by the Ford GT40s, unsuccessful in 1965 but now easily running away with the Christian Glasel driven car coming first and Richard Meins’ car finishing second. Third was for the Tour Auto 2008 wining Cobra of Ludovic Caron.

Plateau 5 (1966-1971)
During the event the question was raised what can be seen as the most iconic Le Mans car. The answer was predictable. A Gulf Porsche 917, as driven by Steve McQueen in the famous movie. There were of two of those, plus two others in other liveries. Against all history, it was however Olivier Cazalieres who drove his Ferrari 512S to a win, but with only 5 seconds advance on John Sheldon’s incredibly fast Chevron B16. Although Ayari in the 917 won the last race convincingly, his excursions in the field during an earlier race, saw him finish only 16th on aggregate.

The most famous car no doubt was Claude Nahum’s gold coloured Ford GT40 MKII, which came third in the staged 1966 finish with the two other Fords. This time the car finished a lowly 46th place, but it was certainly one of the outstanding cars of the weekend. Catching the eyes of many was also the 1966 Ferrari P3, owned and driven by the Leventis family.

Plateau 6 (1972-1979)
The car to beat here was Jean-Marc Luco’s Porsche 936, the same car that came 2nd in 1980 driven by Ickx and Joest. Needless to say, nobody was able to keep up with Luco who drove together with former Le Mans winner Jurgen Barth to three straight wins. Although much faster in practice, the Hadfield/Laidlaw/Schryver Lola T282 suffered a puncture in race one and a clutch problem in race 3 leaving it without any chance. However, Simon Hadfield proudly mentioned that very few people can claim to have reached pole in Monaco and LeMans during the same year.

Results are less important than participating but for those who really want to see everything, the classifications for all classes can be found here.

Although in the 24 Hour race on its own is very much worth a visit, it is only part of the story. Many other aspects ensure that nobody gets bored during the weekend. Fifty children aged between 6 and 13 years participated on Saturday in the Little Big Mans race, using scaled down electric replicas of original cars, to cover one lap on the Bugatti circuit. And if you were tired of the races, the various parking areas were filled up with all sorts of exotic cars, brought from all over Europe. According to the organizers about 6000 cars were entered by the clubs, and looking at the oceans of Porsches, Alpines and Loti, they were probably right. The Le Mans village had the traditional small exhibition of famous Le Mans cars that were not on track, while Porsche, BMW and Mercedes also presented some racing history.

All in all this is a must visit event, as we already mentioned and fortunately we were not let down by the weather. We have captured the highlights, (admittedly not all of them) in a 140-shot slideshow.