Director's Statement

As a small boy, I received a toy racetrack. It was a gift that made more of an impression on me than all of my previous gifts. After a while, I realized that what attracted me the most was the phenomenon of the race, competition, meeting face-to-face with my childhood rivals. My imagination was quite vivid at this age. One could say the races I was experiencing were absolutely real. Because I was very productive as a child, I thought, “How could I bring a real contest into my room?” And so, I organized a race the entire street wound up talking about. It was called The 24 Hours of Le Mans. We met in my friend‘s spacious apartment and built four complete racetracks. We began at three o’clock in the afternoon, our mothers cooked, brought us drinks and cheered us on. Our young eyes glowed like a flame in a hearth until ten at night, when we all fell asleep on the plastic track with the remote controls in our hands, and perhaps dreamt about how we would one day ride the track as adult racers.

That was the beginning of my dream about the most famous race in the world, The 24 Hours of Le Mans.