Circuit de la Sarthe: Inside Le Mans and the Mulsanne Straight
For most of the year, the most famous straight in motorsport is simply the D338, a departmental road running south out of Le Mans towards Tours, complete with roundabouts, painted centre lines and ordinary French traffic. Then, every June, the barriers go up, the road closes, and the same stretch of tarmac becomes the Ligne Droite des Hunaudières, better known in English as the Mulsanne straight, the defining feature of the Circuit de la Sarthe and of the 24 Hours of Le Mans. No other top-level racing venue lives this kind of double life at this scale, and none carries a century of consequences in its asphalt quite like this one.
Public roads with a double life
The Circuit de la Sarthe measures just over 13.6 kilometres, which makes it one of the longest circuits still used for front-line international racing. Only part of it is a permanent racing facility. The pit straight, the Dunlop curve and chicane, and the section down to Tertre Rouge belong to the purpose-built complex that also contains the smaller, permanent Bugatti circuit. From Tertre Rouge onwards, the track heads out onto genuine public roads: the long run towards the village of Mulsanne, the right-hander at Mulsanne corner, and the stretch through Indianapolis and Arnage before the track returns to private land near the Porsche Curves. Outside race periods, delivery vans and commuters drive over the same braking zones where prototypes shed hundreds of kilometres per hour. That is why the circuit cannot simply be resurfaced or reshaped like a normal track: every change is also a change to the local road network, negotiated with the authorities of the Sarthe department.
The shape of the lap
A lap begins on the pit straight beneath grandstands that dwarf anything else in endurance racing. The track climbs through the Dunlop curve, under the famous Dunlop bridge, one of the oldest surviving landmarks of the venue, then falls away through the Esses towards Tertre Rouge, the corner that launches cars onto the public-road section. After the long Hunaudières run comes the tight right at Mulsanne corner, followed by the flat-out rush towards Indianapolis, a corner whose name nods to the great American speedway, and the slow right at Arnage, the slowest point of the lap. The Porsche Curves, added in the early 1970s when the track was rerouted away from the old Maison Blanche section, form a high-speed sequence that drivers consistently describe as the most demanding part of the circuit. The Ford chicanes, introduced in the late 1960s, slow the cars one final time before the pits. The rhythm is unique: long periods of full throttle punctuated by brutal braking events, repeated for a full day and night.
The Mulsanne straight
The Hunaudières straight runs for roughly six kilometres and for decades it was an unbroken, flat-out blast. It made Le Mans an engineering contest as much as a driving one: teams built special low-drag bodywork purely to gain speed on this one road. The straight produced the most extreme velocities in circuit racing, culminating in 1988 when the small French WM team, using a Peugeot-powered prototype built around straight-line speed, was timed at around 405 km/h. Speeds like that on a narrow, crowned public road lined with trees and guardrails eventually became indefensible, and in 1990 two chicanes were installed, dividing the straight into three sections. Even so, the Mulsanne remains the fastest part of the lap, with modern Hypercars still reaching well beyond 300 km/h before braking hard for the corner at its end. The straight also has a curious pre-racing claim to history: in 1908 Wilbur Wright made his celebrated public flying demonstrations at Les Hunaudières, on ground beside what is now the straight.
From 1923 to the centenary
The Automobile Club de l'Ouest, founded in the early twentieth century, organised the very first Grand Prix in 1906 on roads near Le Mans, and in 1923 it created something genuinely new: a race lasting twenty-four hours, intended to prove the reliability of touring cars rather than pure speed. The first edition, held in May 1923, was won by a French Chenard et Walcker. From that experiment grew the most important endurance race in the world. The event has been interrupted only by economic crisis and war, and its hundredth-anniversary edition in 2023 drew a crowd of more than 300,000 people, with Ferrari winning outright on its return to the top class after half a century away. Over a century, the race has served as a rolling laboratory for the road car: disc brakes, aerodynamic experimentation, fuel-efficient diesels and hybrid systems were all proven over twenty-four hours here before becoming ordinary.
The hard lessons of 1955
No honest account of the Circuit de la Sarthe can pass over the 1955 disaster, the worst accident in motorsport history. Early in that year's race, Pierre Levegh's Mercedes was launched into a spectator area opposite the pits; more than eighty spectators were killed along with the driver. The consequences reached far beyond Le Mans: Mercedes withdrew from racing at the end of the season, Switzerland banned circuit racing for decades, and the sport was forced to take spectator protection seriously for the first time. Le Mans itself was rebuilt, with the pit straight widened and crowds moved back. The circuit has kept changing ever since, corner by corner: the Ford chicanes, the rerouting around Maison Blanche, the Mulsanne chicanes of 1990, endless revisions to barriers, run-off and kerbs. The traditional sprint across the track at the start, immortalised in photographs, was abandoned around 1970 because it encouraged drivers to begin the race with their harnesses unfastened.
Names that made the race
Le Mans crowns manufacturers more visibly than drivers, and the honour roll doubles as a history of the sports car. Bentley gave the race its first era of dominance in the 1920s. Ferrari owned much of the 1950s and early 1960s until Ford arrived with the GT40, took a one-two-three finish in 1966 and won four years running. Porsche's first outright victory came in 1970 with the 917, the beginning of a record that now stands at nineteen overall wins, more than any other manufacturer. Audi added thirteen victories between 2000 and 2014, including the first win for a diesel-engined car in 2006. Among drivers, Denmark's Tom Kristensen stands alone with nine victories, ahead of Jacky Ickx with six; Ickx also changed the race forever in 1969 by walking, rather than running, to his car in protest at the dangerous start procedure. Graham Hill remains the only driver to have completed the so-called triple crown of Monaco, the Indianapolis 500 and Le Mans.
Twenty-four hours in real time
What separates Le Mans from almost everything else in racing is duration as a competitive dimension. A modern winning car covers more than 5,000 kilometres, roughly a season of Grands Prix compressed into a single day, and does it through dusk, full darkness, and dawn on a road where slow amateur-class traffic and 340-strong-kilometre-per-hour prototypes share every corner. Each car is run by three drivers under strict driving-time limits, and the race is as much about the pit crew, the strategists and the engineers managing energy and tyres as it is about the person at the wheel. The event now anchors the FIA World Endurance Championship, and the Hypercar era has pulled in more major manufacturers than the race has seen in decades. Meanwhile the adjoining Bugatti circuit, opened in the 1960s, keeps the site busy year-round, hosting the French round of the motorcycle Grand Prix world championship.
Explore on the map
The best way to grasp the scale of the Circuit de la Sarthe is to see it in its landscape: the permanent track knotted around the museum and the Bugatti circuit, then the long tongue of public road stretching south past Hunaudières towards Mulsanne and looping back through Indianapolis and Arnage. You can trace the whole lap, and find every other circuit, speedway and motorsport venue we have catalogued worldwide, on our interactive map. Zoom in on the D338 and you are looking at the fastest ordinary road in the world.