IF THERE is one thing I’m stealing from this event to bring back home, it’s Le Pesage – the two day extravaganza in the middle of Le Mans city where every single car, driver and team go through their mandatory checks prior to hitting the circuit.

We have a simplified version back home – the Bathurst 12 Hour’s Track to Town is as close as we come – but Pesage is much more involved, much more interactive and utterly fantastic.

Loosely translated, Pesage means ‘weighing’ which essentially is the basis of all things scrutineering.

DAY 1 DIARY – Road to Le Mans
DAY 2 DIARY – Right Car, Right Time

Each car has a 30 minute window to proceed through the line.

It’s arranged in a horseshoe layout in the middle of town, surrounded by buildings that were probably built long before the First Fleet lobbed into Sydney Harbour.

The cars go through to separate bays of inspection to tick off everything required to race, from weights to aero, from mandatory stickers and everything else.

The drivers, meanwhile, assemble with all their gear to have it approved by scrutineers, before donning it all in advance of the team photo. The bigger names then join the local Emcee on the stage to be interviewed – a process here that takes twice as long because it happens in English and then in French.

The stage is set in front of a large grandstand, fans able to watch the checking process and the interviews as they roll through.

They then gather for the famous team photo, fans and the city buildings in the background, before being pushed around and out towards a waiting flatbed truck which takes them the 15-minutes or so back to the circuit.

In the middle is the media pen, where different zones for journo’s and TV are set up with the drivers doing the rounds among them all. There I bump into Queensland’s favourite son, Matt Campbell, who is not driving and therefore has time to chat with plebs like me.

Through it all the fans have superb access to the drivers, who all appear to reciprocate with autographs and selfies.

It’s all slightly chaotic, very French but today, in the beaming sunshine, it’s spectacular.

While the 12-Hour’s Track to Town is great and it is brilliant for fan engagement, it’s a much simplified version of this. Pesage is just so engaging, so much of an event. It takes a lot more time and honestly, replicating it back home would be a massive challenge given the logistics and, more to the point, timeframe involved. But imagine that in the centre of Bathurst, a motorsport-themed festival around it.

Pesage is just one part of what feels like a total-motorsport vibe that has taken over the city of Le Mans.

It’s a familiar sensation, the warm embrace of an entire city as a collective to a sporting event that has defined it to the entire world.

It’s Bathurst for the 1000 and more recently the 12-hour. It’s Indianapolis with the 500. It’s Sebring with the 12. Places that just wouldn’t be on the map without their major race and, as such, embrace it so.

I also don’t think I’m drawing a long bow when I notice similarities between Le Mans and Bathurst, their obvious commonality of being famous endurance racing hubs across the globe.

Both are university towns, so the percentage of youth in the area is higher than others.

Both are historic: Le Mans can trace its history back to Roman times while Bathurst’s history with the native Wirrajuri people – both good and bad – goes back even further. And even after colonial settlement it’s one of the oldest cities in the nation.

And both are attractive places with much more to see and do than just the car race – though it does dominate the landscape in both cases.

There’s little doubt it’s a motorsport town.

**

IN the media area I have the great pleasure of chatting to James ‘Jim’ Roller, a native of New York and a staple of sports car and road racing media for years.

Jim, who is this weekend working on the WEC App ‘World Feed’ commentary with Martin Haven and Graham Goodwin – among others – is a legend of the scene and appears on the Radio Show Ltd network – home this week of Hagerty Radio Le Mans – with his Historic Racing programme that airs regularly.

For both of us it’s a case of ‘long time listener, first time caller’ as we both know each others’ work well. His stories are legendary and his insight into the sport is remarkable, and he has me smiling immediately by noting that one of his favourite racing trips was his visit Down Under to the Race of 1000 years in Adelaide 23 years ago.

We would already be mates anyway, but telling me how much you love Adelaide is the short-cut to instant mate ship!

What Jim represents is the remarkable globality of the race this year, in fact it could be the most international of the Le Mans 24 Hours in the century that has passed before this week.

The media pen is filled with international voices, the field is as diverse as ever (if lacking a glut of Aussies – no pressure, then, on Ryan Briscoe and James Allen) and the brands are the same.

But in the forging of closer relations between the WEC, ACO and IMSA in the United States – and subsequent glut of Americana in this race, more than perhaps the Ford GT40 invasion of the 1960s – there is a feeling that Sports Car racing is more global now than perhaps it has ever been.

**

ON the tram back to La Sarthe, Hindhaugh and I are politely stopped by a French gentleman.

Mid 50s, dressed in a black Porsche t-shirt and clinching a mostly-consumed beer, the man is almost apologetic when he askes if my colleague is, in fact, ‘the voice of the Radio’.

The affirmative answer draws a smile and a profound thank you from him, to John as he tells us that he and his friends, despite being French, they always listen to the Radio Le Mans coverage.

Our new French friend is profoundly thankful to the English fans and even jokes that he feels the French host an English race once a year which, with more than 80,000 Brits expected to make the journey, seems more truth than fantasy.

It’s a nice moment that shows how deep the passion for this race runs.

**

FINALLY, it’s very cool that Rodney Jane will race in the supporting Carrera Cup race this weekend.

Rod’s first international race will come 39 years after his old man bankrolled the famous Bob Jane T-Marts Aussie attack featuring Touring Car heroes, Peter Brock and Larry Perkins. It’s a nice piece of personal and more broad motor racing history and seeing the iconic – and mostly unchanged – Bob’s logo running around Le Mans once again will be a very cool thing indeed.