Ferrari F12 Berlinetta on tour

Dashing away from Le Mans on Sunday night is always a chore on the back of very little sleep. Better to take an extra day off work and head home at your leisure on the Monday – especially as that allows a chance to retrace the wheeltracks of the heroes you’ve just been watching.

The day after the Le Mans Classic, we took the Ferrari F12 Berlinetta for a tour of the bits of the Circuit de la Sarthe that are public road for most of the year. It’s an exercise that never grows old, especially at the wheel of something special.

There’s a delicious contrast between the spectacle of hard-core motor racing on a Sunday and a mundane rush hour on the same roads the following morning. We join the circuit between white vans and articulated trucks at Tertre Rouge, where the D338 passes under the D323 and becomes the Mulsanne. In traffic conditions we can happily bypass the dreaded chicanes – although a couple of roundabouts that are not in play for the racers break up the great straight anyway. Still, it’s enough to get a feel for the length of the famous stretch of road and take in the views the drivers absolutely don’t see from side to side as they pound down it during the race. The D338 is busy, but when we turn off at the Mulsanne Corner roundabout we find the D140, better known as the run up to Indianapolis and now the fastest part of the race track, is much quieter.

This is my favourite bit of Le Mans, largely because this remarkably narrow blast through the woods looks unchanged from previous eras. It’s so atmospheric and the Ferrari’s 6.3-litre V12 soundtrack just bounces off the trees in a pleasing manner.

The right-hand kink at Indianapolis is always more of a corner than you expect and it’s fun to imagine how it feels to brake heavily from 180mph for the banked left-hander. Today, the racing line would risk a head-on collision, which would be unfortunate in a car worth £240,000, so we stick to the wide line.

Arnage is a junction where the D139 crosses and here we turn right for my other favourite bit that hasn’t changed much. The force of the Ferrari’s incredible acceleration gives us a fleeting glimpse, just for a second, of what it must be like… But instead of sweeping right at the Porsche Curves, we trundle away from the track and down to the following roundabout. Barriers and a chap sternly wagging his finger warn us away from a cheeky blast along the circuit’s most challenging permanent race-track section.

Still, it had been a perfect coda to another memorable visit to a grand old lady among Europe’s race venues.