So this weekend I had 8 hours of traveling to go to Le Mans for the 24 Heures Du Mans race. Basically this race is a 'fun' race something like round Taupo so a big range of levels with 1754 riders. The race itself was raced on the same race track as they use in the 24 Heures Du Mans for cars and you have a team of 2,4,6 or 8 riders and you change riders at different intervals for example we had a team of 4 and changed every 2 hours. The team with the most laps in 24 hours wins. The main reason we did this race was for our sponsors, Vulco (Vulco is a auto repair shop) , which were sponsors for the event and so was very important for us to win.
The race started on Saturday and was a scorcher of a day, around 35 degrees. I was scheduled to race 2nd, which meant I started at 5pm for my 2hour block. When I started the front group was all still together so about 30 minutes into my ride I attacked on the small climb on the lap which was about 500m long at 4percent. I managed to get away with 4 other guys and I rode with them for about 45 minutes but were a bit to slow for me so I ended up going alone for the last 45 minutes. By the end of my shift I was 3 minutes ahead of the bunch. Luckily our team had someone to take us to our hotel, which was 10 minutes away, to sleep for a couple hours before our next shift.
By the time I was back at the track for my next shift at 1am the team had finished what I had started and were 1 lap up on the field. This made my next ride a little easier as I could just sit in the bunch and follow any moves, which was lucky for me as I wasn't to keen on making a big effort in the middle of the night. It also had started raining during the night and the track was really slippery, I think I pretty much drifted around most of the corners.
My last shift was at 9am, so by this time the sun was out again, the track was dry and it wasn't too hot yet. At this point we were 1 lap up on 7 teams and 2 laps up on a dozen other teams. I was getting pretty bored sitting in the group so I attacked again and got away with one other guy who I knew as we have raced each other before and got about half way to lapping the field before I had to change again. So I had finished my part and the rest of the team easily got another lap and at the end we won by 2 laps to 2nd place. Also my Latvian team mate got the fastest lap time in 5minutes 14seconds, an average of 48km/h which also beat the previous record by 15 seconds. In the end I think we averaged around 41km/h for the whole race.
Super stoked to get 2nd win of the year although its not the biggest race a win is a win.
The start
Our director
Pit zone
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