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Failsport. Le Mans 2012.



Sir_Dave

ClioSport Trader
The write up that im sure you’ve all been waiting for!! Well some of you, mostly those who actually went on the trip that have been looking forwards to a giggle at our own stupidity!! Or, for those that were simply pissed from the moment we left England, to when we dumped you back at your house, you might want to know what we/you actually got up to all weekend. Yes, I mean you Burgess :rasp:

July 2011
So, last year FailSport had an epic trip to Le Mans in June, so shortly afterwards, in July 2011 in fact, we booked the spaces for 2012, without even knowing the dates. I know, Hero’s aren’t we? Like a boss, etc.

Unfortunately when the dates were released, they happened to coincide with quite possibly one of the most important days of the century, yup, my 30[SUP]th[/SUP] birthday. For me, this meant the opportunity to spend a really great weekend with my mates, watch an awesome race, & generally have a great time :clown:

For Sarah, my girlfriend of 7 years, it meant I was a c*nt :mad: One specifically that didn’t love her, didn’t want to spend said important day with her and was essentially the most hated man in the world, ever. Queue much discussion, much rowing, & me committing to another rather expensive holiday to Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam & Cambodia for 3 weeks in August 2012. For most people Le Mans costs £250. It was going to cost me 10 times that. IR Committed/Stupid (delete as applicable).

Plans were set in place, I had just bought my dream car, an e46 M3, Nick had got an e36 M3 and well, Ollie had plans on taking an Exige. It was going to be the Le Mans trip to be on, naturally, & we would all have awesome cars. Because well, we’re all awesome, clearly :eek:

Roll onto April 2012
I had sold the M3 after spending £750 in fuel in one month, which had got a little tiresome, the bloke at Shell knew me by my 1[SUP]st[/SUP] name FFS. Nick’s M3 had been polished to within one inch of its life and now simply sat on the drive as some kind of orange garden ornament - whilst he pondered whether to buy/build/race/track/strip another clio or not. Ollie, well he now wanted to take the cup, but was concerned about losing his hearing on the way down.

So a plan was set in place. We needed cars to transport fridges, go-peds, beer, food and 10 idiots to France. I found a mint 330i Touring whilst scouring PH on a Friday afternoon, then went and bought it on the Saturday. Mike got drunk, typed ‘Volvo’ into eBay, bought a car completely unsighted, crossed his fingers, then passed out, probably whilst holding a kebab. Ollie was considering buying some ear defenders, but adamant that the cup wasn’t carrying the fridge – it’s supposed to be lightweight iirc :slap:

A few days before, we had got the vehicles sorted, I was taking the BMW, Mike was taking the ‘Lolvo’ and Ollie had blagged his step-dads Hyundai Santa-FE CRDI GSI7 Auto along with creating the most epic BBQ ever known to man. We were ready. Probably.

And so to the actual Trip
All due to meet at Clackett Lane services at 7am.
Ollie (Ollie82.) picks up his brother Ross, Nick (Nick172cup) & Ryan (Couzens) – gets there on time.
Mike (Budgie) is late picking up Jon (Saner) and Dom (Tom@whatwasJMS’ brother)
I am very late picking up Vish (Vish) and Tom (Tom@whatwasJMS)
We got to Clackett Lane at about 7.45iirc, cue a rather ‘swift’ hoon down to Dover to get on the ferry
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At which point. The Trip well and truly started. Further to Naith’s comments in the Le Mans thread, we had obviously all invested in some fancy dress…

Ryan:
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Tom:
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Dom:
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The rest of us had all just gone as Nick, i.e. a bearded c*nt. Simples. Laziness FTW. For example, me:
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So the journey started, Dom and Mike got on the beers, at 9am, so Saner took over custody of the Lolvo, whilst the other two muppets started on the whisky. It was going to one of those trips. The journey down was fairly uneventful, bar us losing the Mike/Lolvo at exactly the same point that we lost Tom/Mike/Volvo last year – must be a think about drunk gingers/Volvo’s/France I think.

Anyways, we found them eventually, and got to Le Mans at about 4.30 ish, after approx. 15 pi55 stops. Unfortunately, I turned off one junction too early so we did a few laps of Le Mans town centre prior to going to the campsite, which may/may not have resulted in drunk abuse of me from certain individuals, but hey ho, I was in a BMW, I don’t care what other people think. Especially other road users when I cut them up by going from the outside lane, to the inside lane, to off at the junction. Although admittedly, sometimes I did forget that not only were other people following me, perhaps a loaded up diesel Santa-Fe CRDI GSI7 Auto doesn’t have quite the same turn of speed as me …

So we got to the campsite, & we were in exactly the same spot as the previous year – awesome!! 30 minutes later and ‘Palace De FailSporte’ was up & running
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Obviously we were hungry pretty much instantly, so the BBQ of quite epic proportions was unveiled to the world for the 1[SUP]st[/SUP] time. Who needs a coffee table when you can have a FailSport BBQ!!
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No Messing, we did afterall bring 90 Burgers, 100 Sausages, 3 chickens and 180 bread baps lol … Having so much food, & quite a bit of beer, we obviously need two fridges, I mean, doesn’t everybody when they go camping?
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So, full of food, we then decided that whilst we waited for practice to start we would have a few beers. After much discussion, that A. the Lolvo would look epic with lowz (but we were far too tight to fit coilovers), & B. whilst many people had no doubt tried to see how many people they could fit in and a Lolvo, we were unsure as to how many people had been fitted on a Lolvo … bonus was that it also made for quite a nice group photo as well ;)

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It then doubled up as a wood carrying device for our oil drum based heating solution:
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After which, we decided to go and watch qualifying, where on the way, Mike found a giant inflatable to jump off:
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And a man with a most appropriate t-shirt:
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We watched qualifying, got drunk and went to bed, some far more worse for wear than others:
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And some, just well, a little odd …
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The next day was the Pistonheads meet, where we saw some lovely cars, an Allegro with a Caravan (thought this was Foxy et all, but they had a BMW towing there’s apparently) and the blokes from Oop Nurth. This was lovely as I got to meet some familiar faces, Brett, Sam, Naith etc, along with some new ones, specifically a really short chap, who rather disappointingly looked more like a 13 year old boy than Carl Pilkington and didn’t sound at all Northern (lol). He seemed to be having a great time, but was most unimpressed with the level of dust in France –
I imagined that whilst talking to me about ‘tut race’ he was dreaming about
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his car in the campsite with the sperm of a young unicorn to make sure the red shined as beautifully as normal.
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not driven irrc :nono: xx

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Mad Friday then ensued, in the rain. So we just got drunk from memory, with Mike being brought back to the tent by some random French after he had essentially offended half of France, some blokes in an ambulance (quite possibly on PH) and generally made a ballbag of himself. He wouldn’t get in the tent, so I kinda chucked him in, he landed on Nick (fast asleep), who then got a bottle of beer split over him/his sleeping bag and possibly got a little grumpy. I obviously blamed it all on Mike, who then passed out on the floor, & Nick went to sleep in the SantaSleigh :quiet:

The next morning there was the Group C race on, so we thought we had better go & watch some of it. In the Rain. Vish looked dashing, as im sure can tell
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There was also a 24Hr race on that Audi had sponsored.
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I won’t put that many pictures up as im not soo great with a camera, but im sure other will add some in later on. Suffice to say, as Audi seem to organise it all, they were obviously going to win from the start, this year with their new electric car. Great stroke of marketing genius, so expect to see 5 billion LED running light wearing A3 1.3 Tdi Sline Sport E-Tron special editions being driven up & down the motorway by your local badge loving bellend shortly …
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It was also my
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and I felt old :dapprove:

As such, in the evening we decided that we should probably do something exciting, like get dressed up in dark outfits, climb through the woods, crawl through some fields and sneak around various security people/other darkly dresses ninjas in order to get to the Mulsanne Straight. After about 30 minutes of bumbling around in the dark, & thinking we were about to be r4ped by some dirty Frenchmen in the woods, we got there. It was epic. Truly epic :star:

Despite the fact that we weren’t really that much closer than normal (ok im lying, we were about 2 foot from the track lol), it was just incredible, probably made more exciting by the chance of huge, painful death caused by an Audi either flying through the trees or smashing through the barriers, but cars doing 200mpg metres from your eyes is brilliant. I thoroughly recommend it to anyone :race:

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After about 20 minutes of standing there, we saw a few torches coming our way from out of the bushes, & as most ‘Black Ops’ like us would more than likely be slightly more stealth-like we assumed it was either the riding boot wearing Gendarmes, or probably some bit burly security guards. So we legged it.

After that, it was down to Arnage for some late night flame spitting, disc glowing goodness. This time we chose to drive instead of walking the miles and miles of non-lit backroads, which meant that A. our feet didn’t get covered in blisters and B. we could stay a lot later without having to think about that damn awful walk back!!


We got back to the tent at about 5am, & had a good snooze in preparation for the final day. Rather surprisingly Audi won again, & took the chance to parade all 4 of their cars around in winning formation. C8nts. We did however get to walk on the track and have a nice picture taken, as per last year:
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It would however apart that ‘FailSport’ is a lot harder to write in pi55 than ‘Mike’ …
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And so as the weekend drew to a close, one we now called ‘Mad Sunday’ began
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Words can really describe the stupidity/carnage/lolz that occurred, so I shall simply add a few photos, with captions :coffee:

Firstly we needed fire, so we sent off the 3 intrepid explorers, Ryan, Panda & Burgess, who on the way back decided to play chicken with a
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van. Most people would join the back of the mile long queue down the side of Houx, but Mike, no he just gunned it down the wrong side of the road, saw the van, squeezed a bit more throttle on and hooned into the campsite at the last minute. Dangerous? Sort of. Time-saving? Most definitely. In trouble? Nah, be reet.
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In addition, the lolvo yet again proved its worth as a load lugger in fantastic fashion:
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Which allowed us to create lots of fire (green flames were a bit odd!):
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And food, nom nom nom:
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After the food, we consumed some beer:
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Which led to some music being chucked on the radio and rather strangely, considering we were a group of entirely blokes, some dancing. Bit gay perhaps?
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Nah, not when you’re up on a stage ..
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Or perhaps on a moving stage, with all of your mates with you as well? As you drive around the campsite, with drum & bass blaring out? F*cking numpties, I stayed at the campsite and drank some beer lol.
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Once they had driven around for about half an hour, been chased out of various different campsites by security and generally made utter tits of themselves, they returned and discussed the next plan of attack:
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Unfortunately I have no further pictures, but essentially the go-peds came out. As im sure you can imagine, lots of beer + go-peds plus a hero who could only go at ‘as fast as possible’ speeds (Ollie) resulted in a big crash, lots of blood, approx 50 plasters and quite a lot of pain
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After that, we went to bed, woke up and made the journey home. Le Mans 2012 was over, but the memories will stay ingrained in my mind forever. Yes the race was a bit of a foregone conclusion, but the fun I had, with a load of my best mates, made my 30[SUP]th[/SUP] birthday the one to beat.
Cheers guys, roll on next year :drunk:
 
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  Saab 93 Aero Wagon
Well that was worth the wait. Well written Davidoff. I almost wish I had had a Go Pro attached to my forehead for my Go Ped wipeout. I swear, even though Im a bag of bones, that I bounced...and all I have are the nearly healed wounds as a momento.

I don't think we managed to convey how drunk Burgess actually was Friday night either. I think we need a film crew next year....
 

Nickson

ClioSport Club Member
Awesome, awesome write up Dave, worth the wait! :rasp:

Bit annoyed that I missed you lot there this year. I did see the back of Mikes head during the pit walk though, but that was about the only glimpse of the FailSport brigade!

Would have loved to have got onto the Mulsanne!

Looking forward to next year already!
 

Gally

Formerly Mashed up egg in a cup
ClioSport Club Member
Epic mate! <3 The failsport crew.

Did Ollie assess his own injuries? Write off?
 

Hixle

Hi Kiss Luke E****
ClioSport Club Member
  E90 M3
Awesome, enjoyed that mate. Room for a little one next year? :eek:
 

Heez

ClioSport Club Member
  Superleggera'd Bean
Flol at the stage! Definitely want to do this next year!
 

Christopher

ClioSport Club Member
  Z4M
Mint. Good to meet all you guys finally.

...and I look at least 16. Come onnnnnnnnnnn.

I'm staying on Houx next year and buying a Mk1 MX-5 snotter for the trip. Excited already!
 
  330Ci (Fail)Sport
LOL epic write up Dave!

It really was as good as the write up suggests. Audis were a snore-fest for me, 458s, Astons, Vettes and LMP2 were much more interesting. But the race was only a small bit of the epicness of the weekend.

Did I send you some of those photos. I'll see if I have anymore worth adding.
 
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Good write up/pics, must have passed on numerous occasions. Indeed it was a BMW, which now has a f*cked turbo thanks to said caravan.
 
  Petrol Blue 182.
"Oi, Boyz, WTF!?"
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KAt Mobile?
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Camo?
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The Ale Team
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French DTM?
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This left the field at a 90 degree angle
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Few race shots (bare in mind this was the first time I've shot motorsport!

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Porsche Flying Lizard 80 by couzens1989, on Flickr

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Porsche 67 by couzens1989, on Flickr

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Lotus 31 2 by couzens1989, on Flickr

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Ferrari 66 by couzens1989, on Flickr

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Ferrari 66 2 by couzens1989, on Flickr

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GT P2 P1 by couzens1989, on Flickr

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Arnage by Night by couzens1989, on Flickr

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69 CF Ferrari 2 by couzens1989, on Flickr

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Jaguar 140 by couzens1989, on Flickr

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Jagermeister 17 by couzens1989, on Flickr

More here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/couzens1989/


More interested in the P2 and GT class's this year. Toyota were really using the race to make sure their cars could last (they didn't)
so it was Audis race to loose (they didn't).

still this years trip was better then last IMO, epic drive around Houx and Houx Annexe haning out the window dressed as Albert Einstein was a highlight. plenty of banter and plenty of booze consumed.

Heres to next year!
 
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Jamie86

ClioSport Club Member
  RS175,595,205gti,172
Wow i'm impressed how small the rrof in the dent actually is now!

Looks like a cracking weekend!



P.S Dave your OLD
 

JamesBryan

ClioSport Club Member
  Titanium 182
Nice writeup Dave!

Was good to meet you all :D

Thanks to Mike for the pint at the PH meet :drunk:
 


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