Le Mans is one of my favourite times of the year, last year was the first I’d stayed up to watch the entire race, this year I will do the same.
On top of that I will be tweeting a Le Mans stat every hour of the race, and in a sleep deprived state I may even attempt to work some more out on the spot, which could end badly for me. So here are the 24 stats I will be tweeting during the race.
- This is the 84th time the 24 Hours of Le Mans has been run, with 60 cars entered and 180 drivers.
- 21 drivers competing in the race this year have raced in Formula One, but only two of them have won a race.
- A single lap at Le Mans is 13.629km long, the same length as 20,970 baguettes.
- There are two familiar sporting names in Le Mans this year, Fabien Barthez and Sir Chris Hoy are both racing in LMP2.
- The entire track at Le Mans is over 200,000m squared, so you could cover the circuit with 49,910,888 Jaffa Cakes.
- Ten LMP1 drivers have raced in F1 and five of the six Toyota drivers have, but Mike Conway was a Honda F1 test driver.
- If the entire track is about 1cm deep in rainwater there is almost enough water to fill an Olympic sized swimming pool.
- A snail would take 282 hours, 17 minutes and 20.157 seconds to do a single lap of the Circuit de la Sarthe.
- All cars combined will complete around 15,000 laps at Le Mans and travel almost 200,000km, five times around the Earth.
- At 13.629km long the Circuit de la Sarthe is four times the length of the Circuit de Monaco
- Tom Kristensen has an impressive 9 Le Mans wins, including 6 consecutive wins, the same number as Jacky Ickx (non-consecutively).
- A Tour de France cyclist could cycle a lap of Le Mans in 18:10.320.
- The winning drivers at Le Mans since 1923 have completed a total of 26,243 laps and raced over 350,000km.
- The combined race distance of all Le Mans winners is almost far enough to reach the Moon at its closest point.
- Combined distance of every car that has ever raced Le Mans is 9,696,320.071km, which is 242 times around the Earth.
- 27 different countries are being represented by drivers at the Le Mans, at least one driver for every continent bar Africa.
- An F1 car on 2016 Pirelli tyres would need to pit roughly every seven laps and would be able to lap around 3:10 to 3:15.
- The record race distance in Le Mans is 397 laps, 5410.71km by Audi in 2010, this is a greater distance than Raikkonen in 2015.
- The 200,000km all cars combined will complete in the race is 43 million LMP1 car lengths long.
- The Circuit de la Sarthe is a long track, how long? The same length as 8260 Alain Prosts.
- Alex Wurz holds 2 records at #LM24, youngest Le Mans winner at 22 years 91 days old & the biggest gap between 2 wins (13 years).
- Porsche have won the most races at Le Mans, winning 17 times in total from 1970 to 2015, Audi have the second most with 13.
- The first Le Mans 24 took place in 1923, won by two Frenchmen in their Chenard-Walcker.
- If you had 42 Eiffel Towers lying around you could lie them down base to tip and lap once around the Circuit de la Sarthe.