The Gendarmerie line the motorways on the route down from Calais, with number plates from the other side of the channel their target. Those who managed the journey unpunished found a festive mood in the fields around the circuit.
Ted Marshall, originally from Shrewsbury, runs a holiday business in the Dordogne and has been taken on a surprise trip by his son to celebrate his 60th birthday. “It’s hard to describe how mad it is,” he told Telegraph Sport from one of the campsites.
“I thought it would be a crazy but it is way beyond what I expected. Everywhere you turn, there’s a party going on, people having barbecues, or setting off fireworks. There seems to be very little sleeping going on. It’s an amazing experience, something that you have to do to fully understand what it is like.”
Then there is the ambience both in the paddock and in the town itself. Unlike Formula One, it is not an exclusive event. Fans wander the team areas freely – tickets can also be bought for the grid – and the drivers are constantly signing autographs. They packed onto the grid like sardines.
Nico Hulkenberg, on loan from Force India to Porsche here, was surprised by the level of attention compared to his day job, where the paddock can be surprisingly sparse. Even in Monaco last month, it felt like a collection of depressed executives sharing stories about the worrying state of the sport.
F1 can also visit a city and it would be hard to notice one of the biggest sports in the world was in town. Not so in here. The city embraces the event with phenomenal gusto.
On Friday evening, the night before the race, there is the traditional drivers’ parade through the old town. They line the streets four or five deep as the stars of the event throw t-shirts, flags and other paraphernalia into the crowd.
Within five minutes on the Rue de la Galère, just by the river Sarthe, there was a Mickey Mouse float, some Harley Davidsons, the trophy parade in its own open-top car, a live band, not to mention the drivers themselves. Carnival does not quite do justice to it.
Throughout the field of more than 150 drivers, there are also unlikely tales aplenty. One of Mark Webber’s Porsche team-mates, Englishman Nick Tandy, only became a professional racing driver after years spent working first in a tyre recycling plant and then for Autoglass. Unlike most of his competitors, to this day the 30-year-old from Bedford has not been in a kart race and spent most of his youth racing Minis around oval circuits.
“There’ll be one team and three guys that end up winning the biggest race in the world, and I’ve got probably a one in eight chance of doing it,” Tandy told me before the start. “It’s a huge honour.”
Once the race began at 15:00 on the dot local time, there is the sheer sight of these futuristic machines belting down the Mulsanne straight. Watching a car doing 220mph at night, with the glare of the headlights and the roar of the engines is something to behold.
The Aston Martin Racing Vantage “Art Car” of Darren Turner, Stefan Mucke and Rob Bell (GETTY).
In Webber’s words: “You have a massive sensation of speed. Your senses are alive. Your smell is alive, because all your other cuing is going down.”
As the Australian’s team-mate in the number 17 Porsche, Timo Bernhard, led after the first lap, the teams and drivers bedded themselves in for the long haul. There is nothing quite like it.