Jenson Button Really Enjoyed Out-Dragging Prototypes at Le Mans in the Garage 56 NASCAR

Jenson Button is prepping for next weekend’s NASCAR Cup Series race in Chicago, but he’s still buzzing from Le Mans. As you well know, he ran there with NASCAR’s Garage 56 effort in a Camaro stock-car modified for La Sarthe. The hulking Camaro may have looked out of place in France, but it was fast. Faster over a lap than any of the GTE cars entered and nipping at the heels of the slower LMP2 prototypes. To Button, this was endlessly amusing.

“You know, there were certain place son the course, Tetre Rouge, which is on to the first part of the Mulsanne, where the LMP2 cars would try and overtake us,” Button recalled in a media roundtable. “If they got it wrong and they pulled out too early, they'd pull alongside us and then we would drag past them again down the straight.”

Button says he couldn’t have imagined the sight beforehand. “I loved it. It made me smile a lot out on track. I 'm sure it annoyed a lot of drivers out there, but that's what made me smile even more.”

All in all, he says it was one of the best race weekends of his career. “I think one because it was so relaxed, but two because it was just utterly nuts for us to be able to race a stock car at Le Mans against the GTs and the prototypes.”

He also got to see the fan response firsthand. Throughout the weekend, fans cheered every time the Camaro thundered past, its V-8 an order of magnitude louder than anything else on the track. The Garage 56 team wanted to be fast, but as they were a non-classified “innovative car” entry, the bigger goal was to create a spectacle, and to bring new fans to NASCAR. Button thinks NASCAR should capitalize on the momentum with something in Europe next year, either a race or some sort of exhibition during the race weekend of another series.