Building the show: hospitality at Le Mans
by
IT Development
Organised hospitality for guests at Le Mans first appeared in the early 1960s, back in the days when a motorhome really was a motorhome, rather than the glass and steel palaces that we see these days. The guests would be served tea and sandwiches in tents just outside the paddock, while the drivers grabbed some sleep in rudimentary caravans.
Now, Aston Martin – along with the other manufacturers at Le Mans – has a specially-built structure to accommodate guests, which goes far beyond a mere motorhome.
As well as a space to entertain, the Aston Martin hospitality unit is also a restaurant, grandstand, bar, meeting venue and entertainment facility – even featuring a spa and a live computer link to the pits last year.
Planning for the structure begins not long after the previous year’s race. In September or October there is a meeting to define the basic structure and some of the facilities that it will contain. It’s essential to start the planning early, in order to finalise budgets and have details of the hospitality packages available to send to customers before Christmas.
As Tim Bevan of MDH – the company that builds the hospitality unit – points out: “Ideally we like to have all our ideas in place before Christmas, as lots of people like to buy a trip to Le Mans as a Christmas present. We also like to try to make the unit a little bit different for every race, as there are lots of people who return year after year.”
The unit is designed to accommodate around 500 people over the course of the weekend, made up of guests, Aston Martin dealers and owners – as well as some VIPs and media. Amongst the guests at the hospitality last year was Sir Stirling Moss, who had just taken part in the Legends race at the wheel of the 1959 Le Mans winning Aston Martin DBR1.
The fittings inside the tent all have a link with Aston Martin in some way: for example last year’s spa was courtesy of Elemis and InterContinental Hotels and Resorts – which was the team’s title sponsor – and this year there will be audiovisual equipment provided by Bang & Olufsen, Aston Martin’s newest partner.
Organising the actual structure is reasonably straightforward: it is the fixture and fittings, with the appropriate attention to detail, that takes up the time.
The outer shell of the building is made up of modules built around a frame, which is how some permanent homes are now built. These modules fit together like Lego, and then the interior and central staircase is assembled.
In total, around 20 people are involved in the construction, which takes between three to four weeks. The building is well-advanced by the time the test weekend comes round, two weeks before the race.
The structure is completed on the Thursday night prior to the race, handed over to Aston Martin staff on the Friday and welcomes its first guests on Saturday morning. It then looks after the guests, day and night, until Sunday evening.
Of course, there are still things that can occasionally go wrong. “We’ve got 20 years experience of doing this, so there’s not much that goes wrong with the structure, but the fixtures and fittings can cause a headache,” explains Bevan. “Sometimes the wrong things turn up, and we also have to make sure that we comply with all the French health and safety rules, which are quite stringent.”
Having gone to such painstaking efforts to build, the whole structure takes a lot less time to come down: just three or four days. By the Friday following the race, it would be hard to know it was ever there.
Then, of course, it’s just a few months until the whole cycle starts again for the 2009 race – the 50th anniversary of Aston Martin’s debut win at Le Mans.
Downloads
Languages
This article is available in the following languages: -
English