For more than a century, the annual Grand Prix de Pau transforms the streets of Pau in the south of France into a racetrack as visitors enjoy a spectacular festival of motor sport events.

Staged over two weekends, the festival includes the Pau Grand Prix, a main event in the FIA F3 European Championship, and the Historic Grand Prix, which combines racetrack competitions, parades, vintage car shows and private track sessions. Since 2017, the festival has also included the FFSA GT French Championship, the French Formula 4 Championship and European Formula Renault 2.0 racing. The 2005 Pau Grand Prix saw victory for a young Lewis Hamilton, who has since become a Formula One World Champion.

Rain during the first weekend of the 2018 event provided nature’s ubiquitous challenge for both the racing drivers and the PA system. Beautiful sunshine over the second weekend allowed the drivers to use full throttle, presenting a different challenge for the PA.

Audio Equipements Spectacles (AES) designed and provided the sound system for the public areas of the event, including the five grandstands located at key spectator points around the track. To achieve the best sound quality possible, AES Manager Jean-Noël Cazalis, chose a high-impedance solution. Being a major provider of event sound, and with the contract for the Grand Prix of Pau for three years, AES was able to invest substantially in the system and chose Community R Series loudspeakers, which provided the sound quality, high output, controlled coverage and all-weather capability they wanted. Powersoft M Series amplifiers completed the system.

‘The public areas were very large and the locations to install loudspeakers were quite distant from them,’ Cazalis explains. ‘After discussing the project with Sequoia Audio-DV2, we bought seventy-six Community R.15Coax and twelve R.35Coax loudspeakers, with Powersoft M30D-DSP amplifiers to drive them.’ Cazalis continued, ‘Everything went extremely well. The critical parameters of coverage and intelligibility comfortably met our expectations. The system performed perfectly, with a lot of headroom.’