In the end the race passed off without incident.
Although some team personnel came down with food-related illnesses, on the whole the race passed without serious incident.
On Saturday, there was little elevation change as the race passed through the agriculturally rich Eure-et-Loir department.
Minutes later, a group of boys on bikes raced passed, sending two balloons floating into the sky.
The 2010 and 2011 races passed without serious incident, and the Singapore Grand Prix began to establish itself as one of the season's most popular.
The 2007 race passed the baton to a new generation, and was neck and neck until Nicolas Sarkozy shaded it, in the television debates and at the polls.
As the race passed Batemans Bay it was the evergreen Wild Oats XI with the slightest of advantages at the front end of the flotilla.
Mark Webber, a Red Bull driver, who was second in the series before the race, passed Button on Lap 6, forcing Button to ninth.
Busch, the series points leader coming into the race, passed Johnson with about a dozen laps left and was opening up a comfortable margin when his brother Kurt Busch scraped a wall, forcing a caution from Laps 198 to 201.
Apart from a couple of harmless explosions as the Tour de France cycling race passed through the Navarre region, ETA has been unable to inflict much damage since it took up arms again on June 6th.
As the race passed 3,000m and Wilson Kiprop made the early break that strung the field out over 50 metres, where they had previously been bunched, the crowd began to feel itself drawn into the race.
