New slot for the 24 Heures Camions in Le Mans

12. June 2020The ACO (L’Automobile Club de l’Ouest) announced this morning that the 24 Heures Camions would be pushed back once more, this time to 7 and 8 November 2020. Originally scheduled for the last week of September as the penultimate of the FIA European Truck Racing Championship, it had been postponed to 3 and 4 October because the classic 24 Heurs du Mans had slid from its traditional mid-June slot to September. At the time, the organisers of the ETRC simply switched the order of the rounds at Le Mans and Jarama. Now the motorcycle Grand Prix de France too has been slotted for October.
It was expected that there’d be collisions between dates at the more prominent racing circuits as the major series sought to squeeze as many events, prohibited by the COVID-19 regulations in the first half of the year, into the few weekends in the late summer and autumn.
FIA truck races at Le Mans have never been held so late in the year. Many old-timers will immediately hark back to 2003, when they raced at Circuit Bugatti on 25 and 26 October. On that Saturday, a dense fog descended on the circuit during practice and the races. When it lifted, the track was found covered in a layer of ice in many places, and only at 13:00 was it finally cleared for racing.
This year everyone’s hoping for better weather, and Le Mans is known to have had golden autumns at the beginning of November.