THE FIRST TIME LE MANS WAS IN SEPTEMBER

The tear gas hanging over the streets of Paris at the back end of May 1968 was a foretaste of what was to come at the Le Mans 24 Hours that year. Rain, mist and fog swirled around the Circuit de la Sarthe for much of a race that was pushed back to September as a result of civil unrest in France at the beginning of the summer.

An autumn date for the French enduro, the first and only until this year, resulted in one of the wettest editions of the race on record. It began raining shortly before the 3pm start – an hour earlier the traditional 4pm kick-off – and didn’t stop until some time after dawn. And sunrise on the last Sunday of September was only shortly before 8am.

So bad were the conditions over the weekend of 28-29 September that some drivers really didn’t want to go out on track, and at least one got out of his car and walked away. The rain was hard at times and just plain persistent at others, before it finally started to