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  McQueen created the most enduring cinematic testament to the reality of Le Mans. Another actor, Patrick Dempsey, has actually driven in the race and gone to the podium to accept a trophy. He finished second with his own team, Dempsey-Proton Racing, in a Le Mans GT class in 2015. He has run the 24 Hours four times since 2009.

  The 1970s and ’80s were a great period for auto racing in general, but an explosion in popularity meant that Le Mans was thrown into competition for mind share with a dizzying range of other major motorsports events, from Formula One to the Indy 500 to various sports-car contests. The impact of NASCAR’s evolution into a monumental spectacle, and ultimately America’s favorite type of racing, shouldn’t be underestimated.

  It was in this period that Cale Yarborough, a recently retired NASCAR legend, brought a big, rude stock car, a Camaro, to Le Mans. The story was entertainingly recounted by Bob Ottum in Sports Illustrated in 1981. “The Camaro looks as if it might have been picked up from some raggedy-pants U.S. trackside and plopped right down in the infield paddock at Le Mans, smack in among the sleek Lolas and glittering Ferraris and some Porsche prototypes so functionally streamlined that they look like horizontal teardrops,” Ottum wrote. “Spectators and other drivers are strolling around to look at the Camaro. There is a great deal of Gallic shrugging and rolling of eyes.”

  (For what it’s worth, Ottum’s piece, from the heyday of Sports Illustrated, turned me on to the possibilities of journalism set free from the “just the facts” constraints of newspaper reporting. I read about Yarborough’s ill-fated thirteen-lap stint at Le Mans in the ­Camaro—which could top 200 miles per hour on the ­Mulsanne—with a rapt attention bordering on the obsessive. I read it at least a dozen times, digesting every change of pace, every stylistic flourish, and every incongruous pitting of the big, loud American car against the snazzy, sexy European machines.)

  The closing decades of the twentieth century were also when the most significant change was made to the Circuit de la Sarthe itself. It became clear in the late 1980s that prototype cars of increasingly immense horsepower were treating the Mulsanne Straight in the same way that a Saturn V rocket treated liftoff.

  Didier Theys told me about his first Le Mans, which was in 1982. “On one of the long straightaways of five miles, I was in a Porsche prototype and I was going 245 miles per hour,” he said. It was the fastest the man had ever moved in his entire life, at least on the ground. But he wasn’t afraid—not exactly. At that speed, a different state of consciousness appears. You could call it resignation, but not of the depressive variety. Rather, it is a resignation born of extreme rationality, manifesting itself against the obvious urge toward terror. “Every time you’re over 180 mph,” Theys said, “You’re just a passenger behind the steering wheel.”

  And Le Mans was always, initially, jarring. “There was really no other racetrack like Le Mans in the 1980s,” Theys noted. “You’d get in the car for the first time, hit the long straight, hold onto the wheel, and say ‘Shit! This is fast!’” But practice soothed the nerves. “On the next lap, it’s more like slow motion. Then by the third lap you start to see more. And by the fourth lap, your body has adapted.”

  Think about that for a moment. Race-car drivers train their entire lives to both control and accept their machines. The best racing happens when the driver can unleash the unstable beast that his car can be, much as a jockey will release a thoroughbred horse when the final turn is in sight. But although a driver might go flat out, he or she (racing in the twenty-first century isn’t entirely the boys’ club it was for its first 100 years) always keeps a sliver of control in the pocket of the fireproof racing suit, a way to pull back from the brink. It wasn’t like that in the old days at Le Mans. If you weren’t willing to take on 245 miles per hour, you could be sure that the guy behind you was, which meant you would probably lose.

  Joey Hand, who had briefly led at the 2016 Daytona in his Ford GT before mechanical failures started to mount, said something similar. For him, Le Mans was an initiation.

  “Le Mans is one of those places you can’t respect until you do it,” he said. “You know, I could tell myself that I’ve done Daytona, so I can do Le Mans.” But Le Mans is an order of magnitude different from Daytona.

  “Le Mans is high intensity, all the time,” Hand said, his American English cheerfully unaccented. He could be from anywhere, could probably have done anything. But he chose to become a professional driver. (“Since I was eleven years old, I’ve driven racing vehicles as fast as I can,” he said. “That’s what I do.”) In 2011, Hand won Daytona with Chip Ganassi in a prototype car, then took third at Le Mans with BMW in the GTE Pro class. Now he was heading for another turn on the dance floor.

  “Le Mans is a white-knuckle situation,” he said. The GT cars aren’t set up with a lot of downforce, so their tires can’t grip as much in the corners. “You’re more hanging in than anything else,” he said. “And that’s just driving your own car. You also need to deal with getting passed by the prototypes”—more than fifty cars of different classes are all racing at the same time. “Your eyes are popping out of your head.”

  But after 1990, when the Mulsanne was broken up by the “chicanes” that were intended to constrain speeds on what was becoming, even by the grim standards of Le Mans, just too deadly, the golden period that had lasted since roughly the mid-1960s seemed to have been wrung out, and Le Mans drifted. As competition thinned out in the prototype class, and big car companies limited their commitments to sports-car racing, the stage was set for Audi to exert an awesome influence over Le Mans, first with its R8 prototype (the name found its way to a V-10 mid-engine supercar) and later with an innovative turbo-diesel prototype that would spend half a decade dueling with Peugeot’s own diesel-powered cars.

  Diesel engines hadn’t yet made an impact at Le Mans, but in the early twenty-first century they suddenly became the only way to win in the prototype class (the sports-car classes stuck with good old-fashioned high-octane racing gasoline). In the 2010s, yet another technological innovation appeared at Le Mans: diesel-electric hybrids. Audi added the technology to its serially victorious TDI diesel designs, but in 2015 Porsche jumped into the party. Using its own innovative gas-electric hybrid, the 919 took down its corporate sibling (Porsche and Audi are both part of the VW Group) in a new class, LMP1-H, created to address the arrival of the exotic new hybrid engines.

  The early twenty-first century has been a good one for Le Mans for one key reason: the 2000s and 2010s have shown that the Circuit de la Sarthe has lost none of its capacity to validate intricate, sophisticated new propulsion systems in a trial-by-endless-fire scenario. The most advanced racing engines now are not found in NASCAR, Formula One, or IndyCar machines—they’re found, as it seems they always should be, in Le Mans cars.

  Modern-day endurance racing and the twenty-first-century version of Le Mans present some challenges that the old-timers never directly faced. One of these is, in fact, the existence of two general classes of cars on the track (prototype and GT), one of which brings vastly more power and technology to the table. Different types of cars have always taken part in the race, but only in the last two decades have the prototypes become so powerful and technologically advanced that they have to establish an uneasy détente with the rest of the field.

  The prototypes and the GT cars aren’t really racing against each other, although the vehicle that turns the most laps over the allotted time frame—always a prototype, given the superior speed of that class—officially wins the race. Under these conditions, the difficulty of managing a car at frighteningly high speeds isn’t the first thing on a driver’s mind, especially if he or she is running in the GT class.

  “The first challenge is traffic,” Theys explained to me. Theys always raced prototype cars at Le Mans, and for him, racing alongside the GTs presented some tactical difficulties. “You’re running at different speeds, especially in corners. So you can catch a GT
, but then you have to ask yourself if you should dive into the apex of the corner to catch him or pass.” The apex is the “center” of the turn; it represents a center point a driver aims for to create the straightest racing line possible through a curve, to sustain speed and shorten the length of a lap, thereby improving time.

  This might not sound like a big deal, but when a race can be won by a small fraction of a full lap, it’s actually critical to deal correctly and opportunistically with the traffic issues. “If you wait two corners, the guy who’s two seconds behind you will be in your tailpipe,” Theys told me.

  “Between GT and prototype, there needs to be a respect. It’s not that the drivers aren’t as good,” Theys said, dismissing a common endurance-racing stigma, the assumption that the best drivers get the prototype seats, while the ones who’ve lost their edge and are just hanging on, or those starting out, man the GT cars. “Each guy has his own race,” Theys stressed.

  A sort of mutual respect does indeed tend to develop, based on the degree to which racing drivers are the best judges of the mechanical aspects of their machines. Nobody understands physics quite like the professionals who live it, at the levels of speed most people experience only when taking off in a jetliner.

  “A prototype car can go around a GT very easily,” Theys said. But the inverse isn’t even remotely the case. A GT car has less downforce and is heavier. “So once a driver commits to a line going into a corner, he can’t change.”

  For a prototype driver, that makes passing in traffic a simple, binary decision. “Either I go for it,” Theys said, “or I’m patient.”

  Beyond the thousand small yet critical decisions during a race that lasts all day and all night, another factor comes into play at Le Mans. “You really need to trust the car at that speed,” Theys said. “And you have to trust the team that built the car, the team in the pits, and the people who supply the critical parts. I’ve had friends who lost their lives at Le Mans because a tire failed, or had something go wrong and they found themselves upside down in a tree.”

  The crashes at Le Mans can truly come out of almost nowhere, grimly punctuating the imperative of turning steady, error-free laps. Theys recalled a devastating crash in 1999. “That was my first year with the Audi factory team, and we were under a yellow [caution] flag, but I couldn’t see anything for two laps, and I got on the radio and found out that the crash had happened in the Indianapolis corner.”

  The Indianapolis corner occurs after the Mulsanne Straight. “I couldn’t see the flipped car,” Theys said. He couldn’t see it because the Scottish driver Peter Dumbreck had gone airborne in his Mercedes at 190 miles per hour, and then flipped over three times into the trees adjacent to the roadway. Miraculously, he walked away from the crash.

  “That’s Le Mans,” Theys said. “It’s high speed.”

  Danger mixed with exhaustion mixed with significant technological innovation—that combination is what makes Le Mans Le Mans and has kept the race relevant since the early 1920s. There is also the inalienable Frenchness of the event, the way it articulates a specifically Gallic claim to an idea about auto racing—that it should be very fast and impressively grueling, not dissimilar to the Tour de France. For the French, life is a combination of inimitable flair and dutiful struggle. You want to look good while you’re complaining about your miserable lot.

  Even the Le Mans weather can be an ordeal. Because the race is held in June, it can get extremely hot in the cars for the drivers. But it also typically rains. So you struggle to drive your high-performance race car through the night, in the wet, with your windshield wipers on. The spectators get drenched, but they cheer the circus anyway, as they collectively concoct a sort of automotive version of a big music festival out of a damp day in the French countryside listening to the savage roar of fast machines pushing their limits. For the French, this is a party, as it has been since the 1920s.

  On the track and in the pits, it definitely isn’t a party. It’s serious business. The race is, at that level, all about keeping the car running for twenty-three hours so that it can be there at the end to win in the twenty-fourth. Drivers have to pick their spots and avoid risky passes but not skip out on obvious opportunities. They are usually in constant strategic conversation on the radio with their teams in the pits. Nightfall adds a conservative, position-holding element to the driving, but it also demands that the teams switch the risk-taking back on at dawn.

  But they can’t take too much risk. A mistake, even a minor one, can mean a trip to the garage and the loss of several laps, which over the course of twenty-four hours, remarkably, can be enough to bring decisive defeat. The circuit is also sprawling and long, so it can be difficult for teams to have a strong sense of where their cars are on the course.

  A win at Le Mans meant that a manufacturer and a racing team had survived a profound test. That was why, in the 1960s, Ferrari was so proud of its dominance on the Circuit de la Sarthe. It was also why Ford chose Le Mans, never having run the race before, to make its mark on European racing.

  Chapter 7

  The GT40

  If given the opportunity, I could probably jump into the new Ford GT race car and get around the Circuit de la Sarthe in passable fashion. It’s not that different from the road car, or from any other modern supercar that’s been modified for racing. The tricky part would be getting used to driving in a racing suit, wearing a helmet and gloves. The car has a dual-clutch transmission that makes shifting gears fairly simple; there’s no clutch on the floor. It has power steering. There’s even a hydration system, for sending fluids along a tube to the helmet. The biggest challenge would be getting comfortable in the snug interior, but I’m not a big guy, and tight little sports cars have never been a problem for me.

  The GT40 that raced at Le Mans is a completely different story. To a twenty-first-century sensibility—to people raised on technology, never far from central air-conditioning—the rudimentary nature of a 1960s race car is borderline appalling. Cars were basically all engine and tires, with the body shaped as tightly around those two elements as possible. Driver comfort and ergonomics matter nowadays, but in the mid-1960s, if you complained that a car wasn’t comfortable, you could quit being a real driver and explore job prospects for chauffeurs. The GT40 was true to this harsh ideal. The enormous engine filled the entire rear of the car. The tires were huge. The rest of the car, including the driver, was just along for the ride.

  And what a ride it was. At 2,682 pounds, the GT40 was only slightly heavier than a Mini Cooper, the small car recently created by BMW as an homage to the influential original Mini designed by Alec Issigonis in the late 1950s. But Mini Coopers don’t put out 485 horsepower, or attempt to surpass 200 miles per hour on the Mulsanne Straight. There were several reasons the GT40 won Le Mans four years in a row in the mid- to late 1960s, and speed was definitely one of them. The car was just so, so fast.

  There’s a place called Classic Car Club in Manhattan—a sort of hyper-elevated rental-car agency for automotive enthusiasts who are willing to pay big bucks to have new McLarens and vintage Porsches at their disposal. Operating out of a warehouse on the Hudson River, with an Airstream trailer for an office, Classic Car Club also has a replica GT40. It’s not the real thing, but a close approximation, done up in the famous Gulf livery that motorsports enthusiasts are obsessed with, a combination of turquoise and orange.

  The first thing you notice about the GT40 is that it’s small. You expect such a historic machine, even a copy, to be imposing—but it isn’t. That’s because it’s about the size of a modern compact sedan and is essentially a thin shell of aerodynamic sheet metal wrapped around a lightweight skeleton, with a massive V-8 engine dropped in behind the driver’s head. Enormous tires complete the picture.

  It’s a beautiful thing, but in a way blunt. You can gaze upon a sculptural Jaguar E-Type—which Enzo Ferrari called the most beautiful car ever—or a fiberglass-bodied Corve
tte from the Boogie Nights era of the 1970s, or a Porsche 911 from the 1980s, or a Lamborghini Miura, or a Dino Ferrari (named for Enzo’s deceased son), or even many of the lovely Ferrari road cars designed by Pininfarina and built in the 1950s and ’60s that now fetch tens of millions at auctions, and you may respond as if you’re appreciating an authentic piece of fine art.

  I’ve never been able to do that with the GT40. Its beauty is more rude, purposeful. The new GT, by contrast, is a stunner, with a far more attractive design than its illustrious forebear had. The flying buttresses and the tightly sweeping lines of the rear end guarantee that. It’s a car with drama.

  The GT40 has often been described as “industrial.” It contrasted vividly with the Ferrari 330 P3, at least visually. Under the hood, the rival cars for the 1966 running of Le Mans were very different, with Ford’s immense 7.0-liter V-8 outclassing the 330’s 4.0-liter V-12. But on the outside, the 330 P3 was everything that makes a Ferrari a Ferrari. (The P stands for “prototype,” which in the 1960s was the vehicle class that, as today, aimed for outright wins in Le Mans and other endurance races; the GT40 would also compete in this class, even though it carried the “GT” name.) The 330 was, naturally, rosso corsa, but it was also an elegant combination of the fine-boned and the utterly burly, with a delicate and curvaceous front end flowing boldly up to form the powerful front fenders before tucking in over the doors, then surging upward again to form the even more powerful rear haunches. The windshield was almost a half bubble, and the roof curved smoothly down over the engine compartment in a fastback style, ending at the integrated rear spoiler. It was a magnificent essay in Italian racing design, visual poetry carved from aluminum.