NASCAR TO LE MANS!

Le Mans always reserves Garage 56 for a wild-card entry that pushes the boundaries of technology and design. Well, this year it's been given to a NASCAR team with a Camaro ZL1 - and Jenson Button amongst its driver line-up. We get the inside line

- JETHRO BOVINGDON

EVERYONE HAS THEIR OWN VERSION OF Le Mans. For some it's the romance of massive, oil-spitting Bentleys with skinny tyres thundering around the clock in the 1920s, whilst others are stuck in 1971. Steve McQueen's slate-grey 911S, those 917s and Ferrari 512s... the noise and the crashes. Or maybe you're a Group C diehard, or remember standing in awe near the Porsche Curves as the Peugeot 908 HDi FAP flew through almost silently but with such aggressive agility it literally took your breath away. Perhaps you just love the GT cars, which may lack the spaceship wonder of a prototype but are much more distinctive in look and sound.

It's not just the cars, either. It's where you camp or stay, the corners you like to visit, how you plan your race day (and night) as a spectator. Even the route and the group of people you choose to travel down through France alongside. Le Mans isn't one event. It's hundreds of thousands of lived experiences, each one different and each as valid as the next. The very essence of Le Mans is variety. And for this summer's 100th running of the 24-hour sportscar race, the Garage 56 entry - a special single-class invite for cars demonstrating innovative technology-has truly embraced that spirit.

It's big, you might argue it's not clever, but my goodness it's exciting to have a Chevrolet Camaro ZL1 stock car from the NASCAR Cup series taking up that Garage 56 entry. Yes, it's true. Alongside the hybrid hypercars, the incredibly nimble and closely contested LMP2 field and the sophisticated GTE cars from Ferrari, Porsche, Corvette and Aston Martin there will be a big, bawdy, badass stock car on the grid.