On parade
Posted by Jamie Hibbard at 8:00PM on Friday 13 June, 2008 2 Comments
I did one of those things a few weeks back where I leapt before I looked.
The press guy at Aston Martin asked me if I wanted to drive a DBS in the supercar parade at Le Mans.
Who wouldn't say yes to that?
So I said yes.
All I knew about it at the time was that a few supercars ran through the centre of Le Mans town in a parade ahead of the racing drivers - who would all sit on the back of classic open topped cars - and beyond that I didn't know.
Until we got down there earlier this afternoon, and I was confronted with tens of thousands of spectators ready to watch all the beautiful cars drive by.
And there were plenty of those, but what really blew my socks off was a Ferrari FXX, sitting in the paddock area - a carpark - being run through it's warm-up settings by two or Maranello's many motor technicians.
These cars were never meant to run outside of 20 or so yearly official Ferrari events, so to see one in that sort of environment, was jaw-dropping.
To me it was like seeing a unicorn.
So there I was in the DBS, waiting to go up the start ramp - an actual start ramp, like they have at rallies! - behind a pit girl on the back of a scooter holding up a plaque to announce the car - my own brolly dolly! - and all I could think to myself was, 'please don't stall. Please don't stall.'
The crowd loved seeing us all drive by, and even though I knew they were only cheering for the car, it was probably the closest I'll ever get to being a cheered driver.
So thank you to all of you, and sorry I didn't do any burnouts like you wanted.
But if you were driving a hundred and sixty grand's worth of someone else's motor, would you have risked it?
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2 Comments for "On parade"
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You schould have installed a video camera in the car to film it all and now we would all be able to see it!
Thanks for the blog anyway.
Have no fear, we did film it and shall chuck it up next week sometime. We're hopefully going to do it like those speeded up London-to-Brighton train films they used to do.