In the summer of 1988 my father was invited by Jaguar to be their guest at the 24 hour race at Le Mans in France. The package included all-access passes, including the Jaguar hospitality tent in the inner paddock. Lucky for me, there were passes for two. Even luckier, I was invited to go. I packed a bag, camera, film, and hopped on a train down to Southampton to meet him at the ferry.
Several hours later we checked into our hotel, and the next day we were threading our way through the crowds to get to the hospitality tent for the start of what proved to be a most memorable weekend.
The last Jaguar victory at Le Mans was in 1957. The newly developed Jaguar XJR-9 had debuted earlier in 1988 at the 24 hour race in Daytona, and its sister model, the XJR-9LM was specifically designed to take advantage of the very long Mulsanne straight at Le Mans.
As the weekend unfolded, it started to become clear that we were not only privileged to be witnessing such a spectacular race, but as guests of the winning team in what turned out be an epic race, we were lucky to be caught right in the middle of the excitement.
I rattled through about 3 or 4 rolls of film with my old Minolta X-300 and a cheap telephoto zoom lens. These images are scans of the prints I had made at the time, which probably explains some of the image degradation, but I find that they go a long way to capturing some of the excitement of the day. Especially the sequence at the end, where the crowd poured onto the grid with such speed, that I was unable to keep up winding the film and shooting as quickly as possible.
