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“I remember the Mulsanne at night as a feeling of loneliness, like you’re in a cocoon. You’re watching the revs creeping up fraction by fraction and just sailing into the night.”
Motor racing has always been more than a sport. It was created to spread the gospel of humanity’s greatest new invention—the automobile—and put new mechanical innovations to the test. In 1923, a Frenchman named Charles Faroux created the 24 Hours of Le Mans as the ultimate automotive laboratory, on a course made of French country roads, some of which had been used for racing as far back as 1906. Le Mans became the place where, almost every year, usually in June, teams arrived with their latest cars sporting national colors—red for Italy, green for Britain, blue for France, white and later silver for Germany—for the ultimate test of speed and endurance. Key to winning was night racing, and the heart and soul of the track was the longest straightaway on earth, named for the French village where it ends, Mulsanne.
This story originally appeared in Volume 10 of Road & Track.
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The Bentley Boys and their boss, W.O. Bentley, were the first to create a dynasty at Le Mans, winning four straight years starting in 1927. The most famous of the Bentley Le Mans entries remains Old Number One, a Speed Six that was one of only a handful of cars to win twice in a row. The name comes from its racing number in 1929, the first of its victories.
What was it like to power Old Number One down the Mulsanne straight in the black of night? The headlights of the era used low-wattage bulbs, or even carbide lamps, intended more to warn others of a car’s presence than to provide meaningful illumination at speed. Acetylene lighting was set up at the course’s slowest corners and the main grandstands, while the start/finish straight was electrically lit. But much of a night lap—especially on the Mulsanne—was spent in almost total darkness. Early in the evening, restaurants lining the Mulsanne (with tables perilously close to the action) provided some light. But as the crowds thinned around midnight, darkness reigned. Old Number One’s headlamps, made by Zeiss, could knife into the blackness perhaps a couple dozen feet. Imagine throttling top speed, overhead cam spinning, four valves per cylinder popping open and closing in rhythm, with no power steering, no seatbelts, and no safety equipment of any kind, really.
In 1929, Old Number One drivers Woolf Barnato and Tim Birkin pulled so far ahead, and Bentley dominated this race so completely, that the company's founder, W.O. Bentley, ordered his mento ease off. One driver, Jack Dunfee, became so annoyed by the slow pace that he told his boss: “Isay, W.O., do you want me to get out and push the bloody thing? I’ve just stopped and had a drink at the Hippodrome,” a horse-racing track that bor-dered the Mulsanne (apparently, Dunfee wasn’t joking). His frustration increased later in the night when his headlamps went out as he was hurtling down the Mulsanne at 100 mph, and he had to pit to have them replaced.
The No. 1 car won, followed by No. 9, No. 10, then No. 8—all Bentleys.
The Bentley Boys famously drove the race cars home after their victories. On British soil, they were received by wild packs of fans celebrating Britain's conquering of France. If not for those victories at Le Mans in the Twenties, Bentley probably wouldn’t even exist today. Bentley still names models after sections of the Le Mans track, rolling homage to this triumphant era.
How the American Phil Hill helped kick off Enzo’s Le Mans Domination
During the Fifties, an all-out battle between the Brits (Aston Martin, Jaguar), Germans (Mercedes), and Italians (Ferrari, Maserati) translated to sky-rocketing attendance at Le Mans. But in 1955, the race also saw the deadliest crash in motorsport history: A French driver launched a Mercedes 300 SLR into the grandstands, killing dozens. Yet speeds kept rising on the Mulsanne, and the Ferrari 250Testa Rossa’s 1958 victory kicked off Maranello’shistoric Le Mans dynasty, with wins in seven of the next eight runnings.
It’s Been called one of the greatest drives o fall time and the toughest Le Mans in history. The 1958 running of the 24-hour classic is a major reason why the Mulsanne straight, the California race-car driver Phil Hill, and the Ferrari 250 Testa Rossaall remain colossal icons in the motoring world.
On the night of June 21, with the clock ticking past 10 p.m., Hill was awoken in the Shell Oil bunkhouse behind the pits and told to prepare for his stint. He’d only recently debuted with the Ferrari team and was co-driving at Le Mans with Olivier Gendebien, a Belgian World War II hero. Gendebien was finishing his stint in second place. The sun had set, and a furious squall had descended on the French countryside. Hill climbed into the Testarossa, which had no roof to shield him from the pounding rain. He ripped off into the night, shifting through the four gears only to find the road in front of him all but invisible.
Because of the conditions, the race had already proved to be a crash fest, with one Jaguar driver killed. Hill was chasing another Jaguar for first place, while other D-types and Porsche 718s were close behind. He began to peel off laps in the darkness. Outright speed on the Mulsanne was key, because the 3.7-mile straight made up over 40percent of the entire track length. The Mulsanne straight had a blind right-hand kink that drivers took flat out, even though they couldn’t see what was on the other side until they were already there.
“I’d try peering over the windscreen, but my goggles got covered with mud and dirt,” he recalled. “I tried angling my head back and sighting over the top of the screen with my eyes screwed into slits.”Slower cars on the Mulsanne were topping out at90 mph while Hill passed them at nearly 160. He was “driving so blind,” he could hear some other cars before he could see them.
Shortly after midnight, Hill overtook the leader and charged out in front. By 2:30 a.m., he’d built a miraculous lap-and-a-half lead, which equates to more than 10 miles. He recalled one harrowing moment: “I was boiling down the Mulsanne, trying to see through the darkness and the rain, when suddenly two cars appeared directly in front of me, side by side, doing maybe half my speed and blocking the whole road. I was too close to use my brakes, and I couldn’t risk going off the course at speed. So I just tromped the gas pedal and, somehow, passed between them.”
The Flying Ford that made 200 mph de rigueur on the Mulsanne
Competition is the impetus for innovation. Which, in racing, translates to rising speed. Consider that the Ferrari 250 P that won Le Mans in 1963 maxed out at around 180 mph on the Mulsanne. Three years later, at the height of the Ford-Ferrari war, the GT40 routinely cracked 200 mph. The advancements in top speed made the Mulsanne all the more important to victory. And even more dangerous.
“The Mulsanne straight, if you’ve got a good car, is a place to use the superiority that you’ve got,” says Richard Attwood, a Le Mans champ and one of the few still-living drivers of the original GT40 at the Circuit de la Sarthe. “You used all of the Mulsanne straight. We never eased off, unless it was raining or there was any sort of danger. Once you started on the Mulsanne, you went flat out.”
When Ford set out to create the GT40, engineers aimed to build the first racing car that could consistently top 200 mph. According to the original engineering paper on the GT40, “with the exception of land-speed-record cars, no vehicle had been developed to travel at speeds in excess of 200 mph on normal highways.” Exactly what the Mulsanne straight was.
From the cockpit at night, in clear weather, you’d make the right-hander at Tertre Rouge, squeeze on the throttle, and feel your brain smush against the back of your skull. Bruce McLaren, who won Le Mans in 1966 in the GT40, described the straight this way: “Driving at night, once you’re accustomed to it, you find that the very high speed is much safer than during the hours of daylight. The main danger at Le Mans was the little cars with a top speed around 90 mph that were cruising nearly 100 mph slower than we were, but in the darkness they couldn’t help but see our lights coming up behind, and they stayed out of our way.”
So much has been written about the GT40, but one narrative that doesn’t get a lot of play is the story of how this car, in the spring of 1966, became the most highly developed technical marvel in the history of racing up to that time. Key to the effort was investment in parts that would make it a killer on the Mulsanne at night.
Take the windshield wipers—critical because it often rained at night. Engineers used blades from a Boeing 707 aircraft, mounted on a DC motor that drove them from 105 to 114 wipes per minute, with 30 ounces of pressure on the glass. All light bulbs—high-intensity quartz-iodine units—came from heavy-duty-truck bins. Lights mounted on the sides of the GT40 for identification purposes often got ripped off by trackside straw bales. Engineers designed the circuitry so every wire was the shortest it could be for weight savings and less voltage leakage. The wires could withstand temps up to 275 degrees.
Consider that the greatest threat to all of these systems, from the engineers’ point of view, was vibration. Then think about what that could also do to a driver’s focus after hours and hours of racing, in the dark, at over 200 mph on the Mulsanne.
Now let us set a scene. It’s not long after midnight on June 19, 1966, and Carroll Shelby is pacing with members of Ford management in a dimly lit corridor leading from the Le Mans grandstands to the paddock. They could hear the pounding rain outside. As one man present remembered, they paced “like expectant fathers in a hospital waiting room.” Ken Miles is leading in the No. 1 GT40. A Ford man comes down the corridor with a clipboard to update Shelby on Miles’s lap times. He is clocking 3:39, which is faster than he was told to go during the opening laps, which meant he was running near or at top speed on the Mulsanne—at night, in the wet.
“The old man is really running in that rain,” Shelby said of Miles.
You know what happens next. If you don’t, watch the movie. Or better yet, read the book.
In preparation for the clash with Ferrari atLe Mans in 1966, Ford engineers asked two GT40 drivers—Phil Hill, who’d won the F1 world championship in a Ferrarifive years earlier, and Ken Miles, who’d done the most GT40 development driving—to annotate a map of the track. Pictured here are their findings: speed, tach, and gear for each driver. Notice the top speed and revs for both on the Mulsanne: 220 mph at 6250 rpm, the highest tach reading of anywhere on the circuit.
In France, black cats are lucky, and never luckier than when found leading the way at the 24 Hours of Le Mans. The black cat is the logo of Marchal headlights, which have adorned the faces of race-winning Ferraris and Porsches. Like the Le Mans 24-hour race, Marchal was founded in 1923 in France. As we know, night driving is in the Le Mans DNA, and competition to sell headlights to the teams was nearly as tough as the race itself. So, to promote its business, in 1964, Marchal commissioned a truly outrageous truck: the Marchal Citroën H-Van.
It was based on a Citroën HY, a front-wheel-drive van offering the utilitarian charm of a Quonset hut parked on a Traction Avant. Ordinarily constructed from thin steel panels corrugated for strength, the HY was a common sight on post war French streets, delivering baguettes, wheels of brie, or possibly hot new camshafts for a rally-prepped Renault Alpine. Also a relatively common sight was the use of the HY as a rolling billboard. Small companies might hire a sign maker to paint the HY’s sides; more ambitious efforts were popular enough to keep a small coach building industry humming along.
One of the largest of these shops was Carrosserie Le Bastard. Just as French black cats are lucky, Le Bastard is not the pejorative that English speakers might expect. Le Bastard could point to a near-century-long tradition of coach building excellence, from ambulances used in the Tour de France to a wild, be finned truck advertising Bicpens. It was Carrosserie Le Bastard that Marchalhired to create the bizarre creature you see here.
The Marchal van featured smoothed body work and glass side panels showing Marchal wipers, spark plugs, and other accessories. A bright red S.E.V. Marchal logo sat proudly on top, but the centerpiece was up front. No fewer than 18 headlights were mounted in the huge grille, ready to light up the Circuit de la Sarthe like a stadium track.
The HY was not just clever advertising but also a working truck. Parked just off the Mulsanne straight during night practices, it served as a mobile outpost for Marchal’s technicians to adjust lighting to suit racers’ demands. Later the company broadened the scope of these efforts to ordinary customers, dispatching a fleet of Citroënvans with headlight-adjustment kits.
Today the Marchal name survives as a shadow of its former glory, licensed to a boutique Japanese company producing yellow-hued lights for Honda motorcycles and vintage Datsuns. The HY van also survives and can be found at the Museédes 24 Heures du Mans, a short distance from the Mulsanne straight. There it sits, one of a few commercial vehicles tucked among thorough bred race cars. At night, a passing security guard might shine a flashlight over the shapes of sleeping racing machines. And all through the place, pairs of cats’-eyes glitter in the dark. —Brendan McAleer
The Circuit de la Sarthe’s 100-year history is defined by a series of attempts to restrain ever-increasing speed.
Climb in the mighty ground-effect 956 from Stuttgart.
“I remember the Mulsanne at night as a feeling of loneliness, like you’re in a cocoon. You’re watching the revs creeping up fraction by fraction and just sailing into the night.”
Just a glance at a Porsche Le Mans car of the Seventies or Eighties is enough to get the engine in your ribcage pumping. To look at these cars is to marvel at the courage of drivers who could floor them down the Mulsanne at night. Porsche first won Le Mans in 1970 with the 917K. Then came the 936 and the 956. Today the marque remains the most successful in Le Mans history, and outright speed on the Mulsanne is a major reason why. The ground-effect 956 of 1982 was indeed a game changer.
“I remember the Mulsanne at night as a feeling of loneliness, like you’re in a cocoon,” says Derek Bell. “You’re watching the revs creeping up fraction by fraction and just sailing into the night. I used to hold the steering wheel with my knees, lift my visor to wipe the sweat out of my eyes, and check everything over. Just hearing the engine whirring all the way back there, you feel alone, but in a beautiful way.”
The Brit no longer holds the title for the greatest number of Le Mans wins; five now puts him in joint third place. But nobody has competed through more eras or in a greater variety of sharp-end machinery. He made his debut in a Ferrari 512S in 1970 and drove for the last time there in a McLaren F1 in 1996, at age 55. His time with Porsche in the Eighties brought the most success, with four outright wins.
One was in a 1982 Porsche 956, launched that year to take full advantage of new sports-car regulations. It combined the 936’s race-proven powertrain—a twin-turbocharged flat-six with an air-cooled block and water-cooled heads—and the newly discovered black magic of ground-effect aerodynamics. The 956 developed huge downforce with minimal drag, making it only slightly slower on the Mulsanne than the legendary 917, a car in which Bell recorded a calculated peak speed of 246 mph in 1971.
Having won Le Mans in a Porsche 936 in ’81, Bell teamed with Jacky Ickx for 1982 and manhandled the competition in a race that saw unusually little bad weather. “Generally, you start to get down that straight,” he recalls, “and you get into fifth gear—assuming you want to talk about the days when men were men—and then you’re on full throttle for one whole minute. And you’re already traveling at 200 mph. You’re covering a lot of ground. But for those wonderful moments when I was at high speed—which were most of the years, in the best cars, in the fastest cars—we didn’t have too much trouble. You were just in another world.”
The trickiest issue on the Mulsanne was weather. When it rained, “it was horrible,” Bell says. “Don’t forget that it’s a major road, it’s a highway. So the trucks and coaches and all the cars going up and down 360 days a year make grooves in the road, and it undulates on each side. It’s got a crown and furrows, which your tires get into. In the dry, that’s all right, but in the rain, it’s bloody tricky. With water in those gullies, if you have to move from one lane to the other, the car can be fishtailing everywhere. In the wet, it was twice as hard—and Le Mans is eight miles around, so it might piss down with rain while it’s dry on the other side of the circuit.”
In 1982, in the new 956, Bell captured his third outright Le Mans victory. And in that 50th running of the 24-hour classic, Porsche claimed the top five spots.
Cracking 250 mph on the Mulsanne, and Jag’s first victory in over 30 years.
In the Eighties, with drivers Derek Bell, Jacky Ickx, Hurley Haywood, Al Holbert, and Klaus Ludwig, Porsche became so dominant that the fans got bored. They turned up just to see which car would set the new speed record on the Mulsanne. And then to watch Porsche win. Enter Jaguar, which showed up in force in 1988, determined to topple the German juggernaut.
“Any other track in the world, I doubt you’re ever 10 seconds full throttle. There, it’s a bit over 50 seconds on the Mulsanne.”
In 1988, the factory teams squared off in a not-so-friendly competition, not just to win Le Mans but also to see who could clock the fastest speed on the Mulsanne. Peugeot set the mark at 252 mph. But Jaguar brought home the checkered flag because of the reliability of the XJR-9 and the skill of the drivers. One of them was Andy Wallace, the Brit phenom making his debut at Le Mans that year. He’d never raced at night.
“That was the first time,” Wallace recalls. “We didn’t even do any testing in the dark or anything, and there was no test day that year. So it was straight to the race and night practice. Yeah, it’s a massive shock. You can build yourself up for it, you can bicycle around the track, you can walk around it, you can stop and look everywhere. But suddenly when you’re traveling at over 200 mph, everything looks different. And if you’re driving for one of the top teams, nobody’s going to be pleased if you drop a couple of seconds at night. If anything, you should be faster—the tires have more grip, it’s cooler, the engine’s got more dense air to breathe. Any other track in the world, I doubt you’re ever 10 seconds full throttle. There, it’s a bit over 50 seconds on the Mulsanne.”
The right-hand kink midway proved sketchy, Wallace recalls. “Even doing it in the light was quite a challenge. You’re traveling more than 240 mph, and you can see it coming. But it’s sharp enough you can’t see around it. You arrive and make such a small input, it’s almost like moving your elbow. At night all you’ve got is what passed as an excuse for lights, so that point when you turn in becomes really critical—much more than it would be in the daylight. That said, I never missed it!”
Specifically with the Mulsanne in mind, Jaguar developed the XJR-9 for long, flat-out runs, almost like a land-speed-racing car. You can see how chief development engineer Tony Southgate and his team crafted the shape to be as slippery as possible. Notice the angle of the rear wing and the skirts around the rear wheels.
“To me it was the best that money and technology could put behind you as a driver,” recalls Davy Jones, who also debuted at Le Mans in the XJR-9 in 1988 and is the last American to win outright (in 1996). “My first time at Le Mans, going down the Mulsanne, it’s like you’re cooking along, sixth gear, your first lap, you’re maybe at three-quarters throttle, getting a feel for the thing. You go through the kink, then you go up this hill, and that’s where they tell you that you want to stay on the throttle, but with your left foot you want to graze the brakes to get a little heat into them, because after you crest the hill, it’s heavy braking for a second-gear turn. You instantly go from the fastest to the slowest spot on the track. My first time, when I hit the braking zone, I’m pushing the brake and pushing the brake, and the corner’s coming faster and faster, and suddenly I slide wide past the turn. It was a real eye-opener because I was only at three-quarters throttle.”
And at night? “It’s surreal. You’re in the car, and you have the lights from the tach and the switches, and you have your headlights. You jump on the straight, and you’re shifting, and you hit sixth and you’re clicking along. And when you come up on other cars, you see their taillights. Either you come up on them really quick or you’re racing with them. The headlights back then were just whatever headlights we had. Going down the Mulsanne at night at that time, we were out driving our headlights. If you’re alone, and it’s dark, it’s like you’re flying at night, but you’re on the ground—wide-open throttle, for what feels like forever.”
The Collision Avoidance System frees up drivers to get on with what’s ahead, not behind.
You’re a factory driver blasting down the Mulsanne in the middle of the night in your GTE-Pro car. Headlights appear in your rearview mirror. It could be any number of things—a competitor, a slower GT car, a much quicker prototype. Imagine trying to figure that out . . . at 180 mph.
Following a rear-end collision between an LMP1 car and a C6.R at Le Mans in 2010, Corvette Racing started trialing a rearview-camera and radar system hooked up to a monitor in the cockpit. Pratt & Miller, longtime operator of Corvette Racing, teamed up with Bosch to create the Collision Avoidance System (CAS), which debuted with the C6.R at Sebring in 2013. Naturally, it’s been featured in all subsequent Corvette race cars.
The CAS display marks out approaching cars with chevrons that grow in size as the cars close in and generates arrows indicating which side they’re passing on. Scales indicate how far away cars are in meters and seconds. In its latest iteration, the system can track up to 40 objects.
Drivers “use it almost subconsciously at this point,” says Ben Johnson, technical director for Corvette Racing. “It’s in their periphery. They don’t need to see specifically what cars are behind them.”
Events like Daytona and Le Mans have been described as 24-hour sprints in the modern era. It used to be that coaxing a car home after a day’s worth of running was an accomplishment, but modern sports cars are so reliable that drivers can push for the full 24 hours. “There’s at least one car from each manufacturer that’s going to have a fairly flawless race,” Johnson says. To get and maintain a competitive edge, you have to sweat the details. CAS frees up drivers to get on with what’s ahead, not behind.
Now many sports-racing cars use CAS. Teams can purchase the latest CAS-M3 Evo for around$21,000, and Bosch also sells the radar-only CAS-M Light, which uses lights on a compatible gauge cluster instead of a monitor to show the traffic behind. It’s one more high-tech piece of gear for teams to buy, but it sure beats getting rear-ended. —Chris Perkins
On Thursday, June 5, 1997, unemployed Danish racing driver Tom Kristensen was playing tennis on Court 5 at a club in his hometown of Hobro when his phone rang. He picked up his cell with its long antenna.“This is Tom,” he answered. On the line he heard the voice of Ralf Jüttner, manager of Joest Racing. “Tom,” Jüttner said, “would you be interested in driving at Le Mans 24 Hours?” So began the Dane’s journey from Tom Kristensen to “Mr. Le Mans.”Just nine days later, Kristensen debuted in Joest’s No. 7 TWR Porsche WSC-95. How skilled was this guy? Consider that his rookie year at Le Mans, at night, he smashed the track record. And . . . did it again just minutes later. Kristensen went on to win with co-drivers Michele Alboreto and Stefan Johansson. Today he’s the most successful Le Mans driver ever, with nine outright victories—a feat that’ll probably never be matched.
Audi’s DOMINANCE culminated in the R18 E-Tron, ushering in the HYBRID ERA.
The biggest change to the Mulsanne has been the arrival of two chicanes in 1990, added to reduce increasingly surreal terminal speeds and satisfy the FIA’s new stipulation that no circuit could have a straight more than two kilometers long. But don’t be fooled. It was still 200-plus on the back straight. The Audi era spanned from 2000 to 2014, with 13 victories. But behind the monolithic statistics were huge changes in technology and complexity—exemplified by the 2012 R18 E-Tron, the first hybrid Le Mans winner.
“To be honest, I’m happy I never drove with the big-balls kink when it was flat out all the way down,” says Allan McNish, a three-time Le Mans winner who arrived after the chicanes were added. “Listening to the old guys talking about cars floating through the kink gets the hairs on the back of my neck standing up.”
McNish took his first win at Le Mans with Porsche and briefly drove for Toyota in Formula 1. But the Scot’s career is most closely associated with his time as an Audi works driver in the era when the automaker dominated the 24-hour race.
“When I started in the R8, there was a tiny display screen with a dimmer switch to turn it up or down at night, just like in a road car,” McNish remembers. “By the time we had the R18, I think there was a total of 120 parameters we could adjust through the controls on the steering wheel. Obviously, that needed a bigger screen so you could see what was going on. There was so much light in the cockpit that glare was a real issue in the dark, to the point that we had special gloves for the night with an anti-dazzle finish.”
Let Tom Kristensen, the most successful Le Mans driver ever (nine checkered flags, seven with Audi), take you on a spin down the Mulsanne: “At the exit of Tertre Rouge [the turn onto the Mul- sanne] it’s important to take a lot of speed into the first part,” Kristensen said in a 2010 interview with the New York Times. “I usually drive on the right-hand side of the track and only switch to the left about halfway through the straight. Because of the many ruts in the road there are just a few places on the straight where you can change sides without bottoming.
“At the 300-meter sign you start concentrating on the chicane. I only brake about 170 meters before the chicane. You arrive there flying at more than 340 kilometers per hour [211 mph] and hit the brakes extremely hard at first. That produces almost 3 g, which is quite a physical strain. Because of the ruts, you’ve got to perfectly control your braking power when turning in because otherwise the front wheels might lock. Only after having crossed the ruts can you brake a little harder again.”
Huge leaps forward in lighting technology changed night driving during the Audi era, first with LEDs and later with laser technology, both of which have since made it to road cars. “The lasers were a huge help because they gave clarity at distance,” McNish recalls. “So you could pick up the entry point or the braking point much earlier, especially going into the first chicane or the Mulsanne corner at the end of the straight. There’s no runoff there, no Get Out of Jail Free card.”
And when the rain came? “When you get those first drops hitting the screen at night, you really can’t tell how hard it’s raining,” McNish says. “Your eyes deceive you. You can generally go a lot faster than you think you can.”
Amazingly, even with chicanes added to the Mulsanne, the cars kept going faster. The R18 E-Tron packed a turbodiesel and two electric motors into a package weighing just 2017 pounds (dry weight), with 627 lb-ft of torque and brain-curdling cornering abilities. “When I won Le Mans with Porsche in 1998, the qualifying lap—on a qualifying tire—was 3:38, and we were doing 220 mph on the straight,” McNish says. “By 2013, we were doing low 3:20s, but going slower on the straights, about 205 mph, because the regulations had pulled us back. So all of that difference was in braking or corners.”
To sum it up: “It’s a cruel mistress, that place,” McNish says. “The second-and third-place trophies I’ve got are beautiful, and they’re definitely cherished, but they’ve got some bittersweet memories.”
The 2021 24 Hours of Le Mans, the 89th running, was the first to feature the new top class of Hypercar, in place of Le Mans Prototype 1. Here was a new formula giving manufacturers the opportunity to build competition-spec versions of existing hypercars rather than exclusively purpose-built, bespoke prototypes. The car you see here set the fastest lap time in Le Mans history in qualifying last June. In the end it also proved that we are living through the first Le Mans dynasty of a factory team from Japan.
When the Argentine driver José María López first landed in Europe as a kid to compete in the minor leagues, he came to see Le Mans as a spectator. He recalls the first time he watched a prototype rocket down the Mulsanne. “It was amazing,” he says. “I dreamed that one day I might be racing here, no matter what category. Funny how life can change.” Right? Today López, along with Mike Conway of Britain and Kamui Kobayashi of Japan, is the defending Le Mans champion. And he’ll be the first to admit that to win Le Mans, you have to take advantage of darkness.
“We all know that the race is often decided in the night,” says López. “Because it is a time when you can gain a lot. But it is also a time when you can lose a lot.”
The 2021 Toyota GR010 Hybrid represents the pinnacle of modern sports-car technology. Driving this machine down the Mulsanne is a vastly different experience from piloting cars of earlier generations. But some things remain the same. “At Tertre Rouge, the last corner before the straight, you can easily touch the grass,” López explains. “So accidents sometimes happen here. Once you’re on the straight, the first thing you do is look forward for traffic.”
But from here the driver is barraged with massive loads of data. The days when you simply hammered the throttle and pointed into the future are gone. Today’s Le Mans cars are probably more technologically advanced than spacecraft were in the days of the GT40.
“So much is going on,” López says of time on the Mulsanne. “You’re speaking to your engineers, because this is the first place where you have time to think and speak, because you’re not as busy as you were in the first sector. We have more than 30 switches on the steering wheel, and you can set up the car, electronically speaking. You need to check the level of the battery because it’s a hybrid car. You check consumption of fuel. Then there’s brake temps, because the next braking zones are very tough. Tire temps, brake balance, differentials, traction control. People say that because cars have a lot of electronics now, it’s easier to drive. I don’t think so. Drivers today have so much information to digest. You’re using everything you can to adapt and change, to be quicker.”
All of that happens on the Mulsanne straight, night and day. But nighttime is when the racing can be most critical. Today’s lighting systems are much more advanced than 20th-century headlamps. But the cars are so quick that those lights only go so far, literally. “We can see, but not too far,” López says. “The lights do the job for 30 to 50 yards.” Tire technology has come a long way too; it gets cold at Le Mans at night, and the softer compounds are critical.
Ultimately, it all comes down to what’s in a driver’s head, heart, and right foot. That is what brings us back to Le Mans every June.