FRENCH GREATS ❘ LE MANS
The race continued and proved to be one of the most exciting in Le Mans’ history. Ickx’s slow start may have relegated him and his co-driver to the back of the fi eld, but up against all the hares, this tortoise spent the next 24 hours picking off all 44 of the competing cars, one by one. Thanks to a combination of guile, reliable machinery and brilliant team management, he defi ed all odds and won the race. “It was not driving but rather chess that brought me to victory,” Ickx famously said. From the following year, the traditional, and often lethal, Le Mans sprint start was discontinued. The 24 Heures du Mans is the most famous endurance motor race on the planet. Unlike fi xed-distance races, where the winner is the one who crosses the line fi rst, in Le Mans it’s all about covering the greatest distance within a 24-hour period. Winning cars regularly clock up over 5,000km in all. The record so far is 5,410km, set in 2010 by the Audi Sport North America team.
THE BEST CARS IN THE WORLD It’s an unusual event in that amateurs and professionals compete side by side on the same 13.6km-long track. Under the current format there are 62 cars in all, each with a team of three interchanging drivers. Three classes of vehicle take part: the top class are the hypercars, then the LMP2 prototypes, and fi nally the grand tourers. Each of the team’s three drivers must not drive less than six hours or more than 14 hours out of the total 24. Speeds of more than 220mph are regularly achieved. But 100 years ago, when it all started, things were very different. The
inaugural 24 Heures du Mans was on May 26 and 27, 1923, with just 33 cars competing on wet and muddy public roads around the town. In the early years, before the Second World War, it was the British, Italians and French who dominated, in their Bentleys, Alfa Romeos and Bugattis. Ferrari and Jaguar dominated from the post-war years until the mid-1960s when Ford and later Porsche fl exed their muscles. Since the turn of the millennium it has been Audi and
From top, left to right: Tom Kristensen; the 1968 winning Ford GT40 driven by Ickx and Oliver; the 1950 Cadillac ‘Le Monstre’; 2003’s Bentley Speed 8; a 1969 Porsche 908 Langheck; a 1929 Bentley
46 ❘ FRANCE TODAY Jun/Jul 2023
Toyota hogging the podium. With 19 wins in all, Porsche has been the most successful manufacturer in the race’s 100-year history. The most successful driver, meanwhile, is Denmark’s Tom Kristensen, with nine wins between 1997 and 2013. “It obviously warms my heart when people kindly refer to me as Mr Le Mans,” says the driver, now 55 and no longer competing in this event. “But there’s more to it. Le Mans is one of the purest showcases of teamwork, dedication and consistency.” With such speed, and so many cars and spectators, inevitably there have been more than a few deaths over the years, as you’d expect with motor sport on public roads. The offi cial driver death toll is 22, with more than half of those along the infamous Mulsanne Straight (in French, La Ligne Droite des Hunaudières), which used to be 6km long before chicanes were added in 1990. However, no one in their wildest dreams could have expected the terrible tragedy of the 1955 race when over 80 spectators (no one agrees on the precise fi gure) and one driver lost their lives – the most catastrophic crash in all motor sport history. On lap 35, as the leading cars were approaching their fi rst pit stop, French driver Pierre Levegh, through no fault of his own, rear-ended British driver Lance Macklin at over 120mph. Levegh’s Mercedes-Benz 300 launched into the
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