Circuit des Remparts – Angouleme 2008

This year marked the 30th Anniversary of the staging of Circuit des Remparts in Angouleme, a classic/vintage/historic car rally and race our the city walls of Angouleme on a street circuit. I knew it was on around this time every year and last year being our first year here in the Charente we did not realise the significance of the event. This year unless Franca had not read another blog we would have totally missed the event, as it was we missed the Saturday, because we only found out on Saturday afternoon. So Sunday morning we got up early and took the 30 minute drive to Angouleme where we were lucky to find a parking place in the centre of Angouleme not far from the action. Luckily the French do not do early mornings, later in the day Angouleme was basically grid locked, if you pardon the pun...

Being a car nut I was like a little kid in a free sweetshop, I did not know which way to turn, luckily I had a disinterested wife (and I don’t mean that in a bad way, but cars are not her thing), and a 6 year old daughter to keep me under control. There were literally hundreds of historic, classic and vintage cars to look at on static display at various points around the city, Angouleme it appears has several car clubs, we came across the Mini club and the Alfa Romeo club but there are several others.

Then there were the races and demonstrations themselves. I have never been to a motor race before, my reasoning is you pay £100.00 for a ticket to blink and miss cars rushing by, then end up spending loads more money and you still have not seen much of the race and your wallet is a lot poorer for the experience, so I prefer to watch on TV. However for the princely sum of €10.00 you can get up close to the action and because the circuit is so small you can get around most it pretty quickly and most vantage points have more than one view of the track so you can see what is going on. The noise of some the engines is glorious especially the GT1 and GT Plus cars, my daughter loved it too, but sadly this put the wife off even more. The highlight of the event for most people is the vintage Bugatti only race, it is not only unique, but fun as well, the later models being really powerful machines and the early models with less powerful engines that glide around the course with a certain elegance being lapped again and again by their later bigger engined family members. We were also able to get up close (almost too close) to a Jackie Stewart Matra-Tyrell F1 car with a lovely sounding Ford Cosworth engine.

I could go on for ages, hopefully my lovely wife will post a couple of pictures here for me, it was a great break from building work for me, thanks to my wife and daughter for letting this big kid into the sweetshop for a few hours. I'll back next year for lots more...

so I will leave it there for now, next year we hope to have some of the people taking part in the circuit des remparts staying with us, Au Bellefleur would make a great base for this special weekend in Angloueme's calendar.