Thanks for that Paul, I hadn't seen the additional gallery. It's useful, as I didn't know that Heather had made it onto the podium. I'd asked Jean-Pierre Chardon if she could, and been told no. I can now look through her footage for any views from there.
There's a funny story about the safety announcement from the podium. In 2011 and 2015 Heather got to see the script. The English was Google translated by the look of it. 'Do not drive to more both frontally' was one classic line in 2015.
https://youtu.be/78wr8UAJmpEI was determined to ensure that the script was in English this time. So I showed them a section of my 2015 film on an ex-LEL laptop to show that the English was initially garbled, but got edited as the starts progressed. They were a bit puzzled, because they didn't have any safety announcement on file. After some consideration, it was decided to have one, and that the one from 2015 would be the template. So they typed the French from my 2015 video into Word, with gaps for the English, which I filled in from the evolved and edited 2015 text.
They added couple of instructions, one about not passing trucks and buses on the inside, and one from Velocio. I translated those and got Heather and Danial to proofread it. That's what was read out, although only the first few rows heard it, so I put the text on the unofficial Facebook PBP page.
There was a similar problem with the press accreditation. It seemed that there was a bit of a hole in some of the preparations, due to the changed arrangements from previous editions.
The controls largely run themselves, so I expected those to be much as before. In 2015 the tracking system had a blip when Fougeres went offline for a while, so I did wonder how that might have been tweaked.
We took the precaution of scoping out the start on Saturday evening. It had cleared enough for us to get a drone view of the area. I had thought of riding the start myself to get footage, but decided that the chance of something going wrong was too high. In 2015 I'd qualified, and was a paid-up participant. I also realised that I would immediately get dropped on the hill after the cobbled roundabout beyond the gates, so wouldn't get the shots of the lead car and motorbikes I wanted.
At some point I'll make a video, but it has to be informed by blogs and other accounts.