A reproduction of a watercolour by the artist  who is most faithful to the 24 Hours of Le Mans, Ray Toombs( www.raytoombs.com), sold for € 2,650 on the internet. The funds will go to the Allan Simonsen Foundation set up for the Danish driver who was tragically killed in the race on June 22.

Ray Toombs decided to offer the original watercolour painted for the newspaper Le Maine Libre to the Allan Simonsen Foundation (www.youngdriver-amr.com). The work measuring 50 x 70 cm, and which depicts a night scene in the pitlane, has been signed by sixty drivers and personalities. The auction ,  held last night ( Wednesday, Oct. 2 ) at 20.15 , raised the sum of € 2,650 .

Born in 1955 in London, he  also  lived at Silverstone , but  Ray Toombs has lived for several years in France at Malicorne, about 20 minutes from the circuit . At the  annual 24 Hours of Le Mans, he paints all the cars, all parts of the track , and at all times . "I draw my sources from my personal archives, I take every year  my own photos" , he said." I can adapt to the demands of particular drivers or current or past owners of cars ."

Thus he had to produce the precise specification, when an American came to the race and wanted a painting of an original Cunningham Corvette C1 : "I had to paint the car in its original environment , but  the car was in  poor condition so I had to look at other sources ! " Ranging from small drawings to large canvases, each picture can take up to fifty hours of labour . "Modern prototypes take longer to reproduce because of the complexity of their forms" , the artist explains . "Shaping of the aerodynamic elements is very difficult to reproduce in colour. "

Ray Toombs prefers the older cars  for the purity of their lines, but he says they are also  not so easy to represent : "I had the chance to meet one of the chief engineers at John Wyer Automotive who had kept a copy of technical drawings from 1971. It was a great help for in that year, all Porsche 917s were slightly different and they were manufactured to different specifications. "  So Ray Toombs makes it a point of honour that his watercolours are faithful to reality. Moreover, did not Picasso say:  That art is a lie that helps uncover the truth?

Julien Hergault / ACO