Le mans unravelled - leg 7

About ten minutes after we'd left the circuit, the call came over the radio from the pro drivers in the nine Porsches behind: "Tower, this is Ghostrider requesting a flyby." To which, as anyone who's even the slightest fan of Top Gun will know, there's only one reply. "Negative, Ghostrider, the pattern is full." And in turn only one reply to that ...

Led by the lead Macan GTS, all nine Porsches howled past the slow-moving coaches, the banshee wail of the 918 Spyder distinctive even above the others. It is a source of lasting regret to the rest of us that tribe scribe Ben didn't have a cup of coffee to throw over himself.

Onwards, ever onwards, the convoy rolled on relentlessly through the night. But the 24 Hours of Le Mans always has a trick up its sleeve, and Le Mans Unravelled was about to prove that it was going to be no different.

Just before dawn, as the Porsches got ahead for some dawn photography on a spaghetti western set along the route, a rear tyre on the crew coach blew out. Even as the coach limped to a safe place, (dare we say into the pits?), we were working on changing our strategy.

All crew onto the lead coach, pro drivers re-routed to a new rendezvous, taxis ordered to carry luggage, fuelling stops changed. We didn't have a Toyota TS050 bearing down on us, but we did have a convoy to get to the southernmost point in mainland Europe in time for the media driving it to catch their flights home all over the world.

It might not be quite as dramatic as the decisions required by the bigwigs on the pit wall, but in our own way, we were reacting to the situation - and learning a little more about the greatest race in the world.

Fuel consumption* 911 Turbo S: Combined in l/100 km (mpg) 9.1 (31.0); CO2 emissions in g/km 212.

Fuel consumption* Macan GTS: Combined in l/100 km (mpg) 9.2 (30.7) - 8.8 (32.1); CO2 emissions in g/km 215 - 207.