RACE REPORT: SUPER SOCOPA – VICTORY AT LE MANS!

Well, it’s taken me four days, but I think I’ve just about recovered from the weekend – and what a weekend it was! Having battled through searing heat on the Saturday afternoon, endured thunderstorms and monsoon rain during the night and then encountered gale-force winds on the Sunday, at the end of a testing 24 hours Team Socopa-Corbeil emerged victorious, taking a comfortable win in the 8-man team competition with an impressive 6 lap gap back to our nearest challengers.

Having always enjoyed the Action Medical Ride 24 back in the UK, I was very much looking forward to Le Mans as it’s widely regarded as the pinnacle of 24-hour racing and, as such, attracted a staggering 435 teams this year from countries all across the world, including Japan, Venezuela and Ukraine. In the build up to the Grand Depart on Saturday afternoon, a procession of flag bearers paraded the standard of each nation represented along the finishing straight where all the riders were gathered in position and ready to commence racing. The national anthem of each nation was then played, one by one, in front of the main grandstand which was surprisingly busy. Unfortunately, the novelty of the anthems had somewhat worn-off by the time it came to the likes of the Japanese chorus, however a rousing rendition of La Marseillaisefollowing the Venezualan anthem soon recaptured and rejuvenated the carnival atmosphere both in the grandstand and down at track-side. With the musical interlude then complete, the flag bearers made a hasty exit from the circuit and the moment that I’d most been waiting for arrived, the famous Le Mans style start.

Now, for those of you that don’t know, in a Le Mans style start riders begin the race on foot and have to run across the track to their bikes which await them on the opposite side. I’d been told prior to the event that witnessing 450 cyclists dashing, en mass, across the open tarmac is a sight to behold, and I wasn’t disappointed. With teams being organised into their respective categories for the start of the race, we found ourselves starting right at the back of the field and way down at the very bottom of the finishing straight, so whilst this gave me a fantastic view of the start, right up the entire length of the straight, I didn’t envy Vince, our starting rider, who had at least 500 meters to make up on the leaders from the get-go. The honour of starting this year’s race fell to former alpine skier-turned-racing car dirver Luc Alphand and, with an enthusiastic wave of the tricolour, he unleashed a stampede of cyclists who made the awkwardly hurried waddle that is the result of trying to run in cycling shoes across the track, mounted their bikes and set off with haste. Honestly, it really was quite something!

With the race underway and my 3-hour shift scheduled for the rather amicable time of 8 am on the Sunday morning, I sat back, relaxed and enjoyed the atmosphere of the event. However, with the guys riding on Saturday afternoon having to shorten their stints due to the heat, which really was borderline unbareable even sat in the shade of our pit garage, my projected start time began to creep ever further back into the early hours of Sunday morning. Eventually though, temperatures dropped enough so that the lads who rode during the Saturday evening and night could get back on track with the 3 hour shifts as planned, and after a little re-jigging I was now facing a start time of around 6 am. Whilst this doesn’t sound too bad, it meant that I had to be up and ready to race at 3 am in case there was a problem to Dario, who was doing the stint before me, so after just 3 hours sleep – it was impossible to get any more because the heat during the day had turned the tent into a sauna – I was lethargically grazing on pasta in the pits at 1 am.

Thankfully, Dario completed his ride problem-free despite having endured a huge thunderstorm that dumped an abolsute shed-load of rain onto him and the circuit about an hour before I was due out on track. By the time I was relayed into the race at just before 6.30 am, there must have been an inch of standing water in places and the rain was still falling. Rather unfortunately for me, the combination of the rain and the oil residues left behind by the motor cars had turned the fast corners of the first half of the circuit into an ice rink, not ideal considering that the team had dropped off the pace a little over night and thus we now had some ground to make up on the other teams in the top 10 of the general classification (GC).

Still, despite the tricky conditions, I decided that I at least had to attempt to regain some of the ground we’d lost so the moment I entered the fray, I set off in pursuit of the teams ahead of us in the classification. During my first hour, I managed to catch and pass a number of groups solely on my own and I felt really strong – despite the dangers I really enjoy racing in grizzly conditions and this seemed to be playing to my advantage. After an hour and a half, I’d caught the group that contained most of the other teams in the top 10, but instead of sitting in the wheels, I went straight on the offensive and looked to take back some more time from them. After putting in a big turn on the drag up the finishing straight and into the climb, I managed to split the group in half before then going on to ride everyone off my wheel in exactly the same manner one lap later. Although I was feeling strong, I still had an hour and a half of my stint remaining and I knew it would be a tough ask to outlast the group by myself for this duration, so when I saw that four riders had got together and were in pursuit of me, I back off the gas slightly and waited for them to come across the gap. Luckily, a couple of these riders were also in the position of trying to make up time on those teams above them so we worked well as a quintet and were soon well clear of the group we’d left behind.

With half an hour remaining of my shift, the other riders began to flag a little and I found myself doing more and more of the work. Eventually, they all decided that they were going to change at the same time, but instead of following them into the pits, I saw the opportunity to put some distance into their teams by capitalising on the time it would take them to change over. So, for the next half and hour, I rode as hard and as fast as I physically could until I had absolutely nothing left in me. By the time I pulled off the track to pass the baton over to the next rider at around 9.40 am, I was a spent force. However, thankfully my efforts had not been in vain and between myself and Dario, we had managed to pull the team back up to 8th place on GC, but more importantly, back to just 1 lap off the podium and onto the same number of laps as the rest of the top 10, as well as extending our advantage in the 8-man competition which we now had a convincing lead in.

Utterly exhausted and soaked from over 3 hours of hard riding in the continuous rain, I was dying for a long, hot shower, so it’s fair to say I was less than amused when I was greeted by the feeble dribble of cold water that fell sluggishly out of the shower head in fits and spurts. Still, some exceptional riding from a couple of the other lads who went out after me made up for the disappointment of the washing facilities and by the time we’d reached the final hour of racing, we’d managed to claw our way up to 6th place on GC but, crucially, back onto the same lap as the team in 3rd place. With the 8-man team competition now pretty much in the bag, we had the best part of 3 minutes to make up in this final hour of racing if we were to make the GC podium. After giving it a mighty good go, Antoine managed to get within 1’05 of the third placed team when, sadly for us, time ran out, the claxon sounded and the race was bought to an end.

So, after 24 hours of gruelling racing, we had fallen just over a single minute short of a place on the GC podium, however we’d still finished in a very credible 6th place out of 435 teams, completing an eye-watering 966.5 kilometres. Most importantly however, we’d romped to victory in the 8-man team classficaiton having lead from the start and, as such, our weekend at Le Mans finished with a trip to the famous podium for the presentation of our trophies and race winners jerseys.