Many thanks for the feedback 🙂

I still have so many memories of that first visit. I am shore I could write a book. Happy days.

I looked on streetview and by selecting different dates there are some views showing very high armco and catch fencing in front of the buildings. That would spoil the view somewhat. There is also the chicane not much further along the track so they have to start slowing down for that as well. Google says that the bar is now permanently closed but the hotel a little further up is still in business. It would be difficult getting a booking there during the race I am sure!

Many Thanks for the feedback/encouragement

The buildings still do for sure. I added some pictures and location details in the community page

According to the official Le Mans site, the Hyper cars reach 345KH/214MPH just before the position that this video was taken in as now they have to slow for the chicane. The WM did 407KPH/252MPH on the 11th June 1988 so actually they were faster than current cars. Of course the top speed could have been a little further down the straight than at this position.

They're upshifting just before this point, so they're not at top speed just yet.

They were busy enough around the circuit. Especially on the Friday afternoon/evening.

Having realised that I watched most of the race through a 1" black and white screen, I decided not to take a video camera again. I have been there a further 17 times and only have a few seconds taken on a smartphone since then.

Helps with water leaks.

Mostly people just sat on them anyway. In the late 80s the drivers already knew that those bales aren’t helping them at all. They just make it worse when they catch fire. Anyway I truly miss those days of racing. The glorious racing era ended with GT1 in my opinion. Everything after that became pretty boring and too standardized. The new Hypercar/LMP regulations bring back a bit of brand recognition and interesting engine concepts (the NA V8 in the Cadillac and the soon to be driven V12 of the Aston Martin Valkyrie) but unfortunately they are a lot slower than the LMP1 prototypes. I wish there would be another class that is very open to every technology available, without too much BOP that destroys good ideas.

Definitely a camcorder, I think it was made by Panasonic. It took full size VHS cassettes. I dont remember the model but it was in a case and I seem to remember the zoom button and view screen being like the one that comes up when you search for "Panasonic OmniMovie VHS HQ Video Camera Camcorder Model PV320D" It could easily have been another model. At the time, I worked for an AV company and it was one the the cameras we used to hire out. No post work other than putting it in a box in the loft! This year I dug the tape out, put it in an old Toshiba D-VR17-K-TB VHS to DVD player and burnt it onto a DVD. Copied the DVD to my computer and then played around with various converters to get the videos into Davinci Resolve. Once in DR, I just cut out the bits where it was wobbling too much, pointing at the floor... etc. 🙂 I used ffmpeg to convert from vob to mov as follows: ffmpeg -i original.vob -vcodec mjpeg -q:v 2 -acodec pcm_s16be -q:a 0 -f mov final.mov (which I found online)

@@jagzntech I have some Panasonic MS4's, still in their cases, VHS and SVHS decks, edit controller, and a broadcast quality last-of-type SVHS deck too. All back from when editing was done tape-to-tape. I have some capture cards from the 90's, and a couple of USB based ones. Kinda never threw stuff away when updating, just back in to the cases and safely stored in a cool dry place. It's so much easier to use the USB capture dongles rather then the steps involving DVD discs, and a lot of the included capture software is built on top of FFMpeg - gotta love the folks that created that application! I have 8 or 9 tapes of a seminar on chassis dynamics to go through and capture and preserve digitally.

@@PiDsPagePrototypes I guess I should transfer my wedding video too 🙂 Definitely a thumbs up to FFMpeg creators.

Except for the 200+mph

The birds sing less because we killed all the insects with insecticides you fool.

The passenger side was definitely worse, it normally is here in the UK. They do seem to be very vulnerable to rust around the arches and rear quarter panel. Virtually every one I see these days has some rust in those areas. The arch and quarters are reasonably repairable but it gets much harder to fix around the rear subframe mountings. Just remember, if there is a small hole or a big hole, they both need to be repaired but one will look worse than the other 🙂

@@jagzntech I believe the floor pan dates back to the XJS and maybe even before that,..Lots of water traps !

The passenger side was way worse where I too had load of issues when trying to weld in smaller repair panels. There were a couple that I gave up on, cut out the attempted repair and put in a much larger piece of fresh metal. This side was pretty good in comparison ;-)

You can sit on them

😂

It's to protect the cars from it. If a car broke through the barrier at 300 km/hr, that hay bale has a high likelihood of preventing serious injury to the driver and spectators..

@@2bfrank657 You really had to be "That Guy", you have nothing better to do? you think at 300 km/h that haybale is going to prevent injury?

@@Timinator62 no, I absolutely do not.

Did anyone else notice the chunky of wood wedged in behind the upright stanchion for the Armco barrier? That's safety 1988 style!

🤣🤣🤣🤣so funny love it