25 Stats for the 2019 24 Hours of Le Mans

As many of you may know, Le Mans is one of my favourite races of the year, I was there last year, will definitely be there again several more times and usually watch the entire race without sleep, something I will do again today.

So here are my 25 stats for the race, which will be tweeted on the hour, every hour, of the race, with the first being at the race start and the last at the race finish

1. This is the 87th 24 Hours of Le Mans, with 62 cars and 186 drivers entering the great race

2. Each lap of Le Mans is 13.629km long, or the length of 20,970 baguettes or 3,354 Renault Clios

3. All cars combined will complete around 15,000 laps at Le Mans and travel almost 200,000km, five times around the Earth

4. The 200,000km the cars combined will complete in the race is 43 million LMP1 car lengths long

5. A whopping 22 drivers in the race this year have raced in Formula One, though only two have won a race in F1, and they finished 1-2 at the 2012 Spanish GP

6. There are 18 Formula E drivers racing in Le Mans this year, including four race winners, two of which are also champions

7. Tom Kristensen has an impressive 9 Le Mans wins, including 6 consecutive wins, the same number as Jacky Ickx (non-consecutively)

8. 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

9. The entire population of Guernsey lying down head to toe would stretch 111,943m, roughly 8 laps around Le Mans

10. The first Le Mans 24 took place in 1923, won by two Frenchmen in their Chenard-Walcker

11. At 13.629km long the Circuit de la Sarthe is four times the length of the Circuit de Monaco

12. A snail would take 282 hours, 17 minutes and 20.157 seconds to do a single lap of the Circuit de la Sarthe

13. The entire track at Le Mans is over 200,000m squared, so you could cover the circuit with 49,910,888 Jaffa Cakes

14. 7,828 average height French men would lap once around the Circuit de la Sarthe

15. If it were possible to do laps at 3 minutes 15 seconds constantly without pit stops you would complete 444 laps in the race

16. 30 different nationalities are being represented by the 186 drivers, with every continent except Africa being represented (and of course I’m not including the Arctic or the Antarctic)

17. Combined distance of every car that has ever raced Le Mans is 10,436,879.038‬km, which is 260 times around the Earth or 2.4 times around the sun

18. Porsche have won the most races at Le Mans, winning 19 times in total from 1970 to 2017, Audi have the second most with 13

19. The city of Le Mans has a population of 146,804 people, if they all laid down on the circuit they would stretch to 255.586km, or 18.75 laps of the Circuit de la Sarthe

20. Last year at Le Mans the winning car drove for 388 laps, which is 5,288.052km, which is 8km more than Charles Leclerc drove in all F1 races combined in 2018

21. If the entire track is about 1cm deep in rainwater there is almost enough water to fill an Olympic sized swimming pool

22. The winning drivers at Le Mans since 1923 have completed a total of 27,386 laps and raced over 375,000km

23. The combined distance of all race winning cars at Le Mans over the closest distance between the Earth and the Moon and almost that of the average distance

24. A Tour de France cyclist could cycle a lap of Le Mans in about 18:10.320

25. The cathedral in the city of Le Mans is 134m long, so 102 of them would lap once around the circuit