24 Stats for the 24 Hours of Le Mans

The 24 Hours of Le Mans is possibly my favourite race of the year and this year is (hopefully) the first where I will stay awake and watch the full race, tweeting at least one stat every hour.

Here are my 24 stats for the 24 Hours of Le Mans, all of which will all be tweeted on the hour, every hour during the race.

1. This is the 83^rd running of the 24 Hours of Le Mans race, 56 cars are entered into the race with 168 drivers.
2. The record race distance in Le Mans is 397 laps, 5410.71km by Audi in 2010, this is a greater distance than Lewis Hamilton managed in races in the entire 2014 season (5308.593km).
3. The Circuit de la Sarthe is a long track, how long? The same length as 8260 Alain Prosts.
4. There are fifteen ex F1 and one current F1 driver racing in Le Mans this year, with 12 wins between them.
5. There is an incredible 14 car LMP1 grid this year, with six different teams. Last year had just nine LMP1 cars.
6. A Tour de France cyclist could cycle a lap of Le Mans in 18:10.320.
7. 11 F1 drivers are racing in LMP1, five of those are racing for Toyota, meaning Mike Conway is the only Toyota driver that hasn’t raced in F1, though he was a Honda test driver.
8. The LMP2 grid has also increased, from 17 cars in 2014 to 19 in 2015 with Karun Chandhok being the only ex F1 driver racing in LMP2 this year.
9. A snail would take 282 hours, 17 minutes and 20.157 seconds to do a single lap of the Circuit de la Sarthe.
10. The entire track at Le Mans is over 200,000m squared, so you could cover the circuit with 49,910,888 Jaffa Cakes (which are cakes and not biscuits!).
11. Porsche have the most wins at Le Mans with 16, Audi aren’t far behind with 13 wins, but their first was only in 2000!
12. Tom Kristensen has an impressive nine Le Mans wins, including six consecutive wins, the same number as Jacky Ickx (non-consecutively), who has the second most Le Mans wins.
13. Alex Wurz holds two records at Le Mans, he is the youngest ever Le Mans winner at 22 years and 91 days old and also the biggest gap between two wins (13 years).
14. At 13.629km long the Circuit de la Sarthe is four times the length of the Circuit de Monaco
15. All cars combined will complete around 15,000 laps at Le Mans and travel almost 200,000km, five times around the Earth.
16. A modern F1 car would take around 3:10 to do a lap of Le Mans, ten seconds quicker than the lap record at the current layout of the circuit.
17. An F1 car on 2015 Pirelli tyres would need to pit roughly every seven laps at Le Mans.
18. British and French drivers are most successful at Le Mans, with 29 winning drivers from each nation and 42 total French wins and 41 British wins.
19. The winning drivers at Le Mans since 1923 have completed a total of 25,848 laps and raced over 350,000km.
20. The drivers at Le Mans this year are from 30 different nations, representing all continents bar Africa.
21. The first Le Mans 24 took place in 1923, won by two Frenchmen in their Chenard-Walcker.
22. The combined race distance of all Le Mans winners is almost far enough to reach the Moon at its closest point.
23. A Peregrine Falcon bird, lets name him Sam, could fly above the Circuit de la Sarthe in 4:28.308, not much slower than a GT car.
24. 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.

Don’t forget, you have until the 13^th of June to enter my competition to win a pair of tickets to Race Week London on the 30^th of June