The Wacky Racers

‘I think the whole thing’s crazy. Nobody’ll finish. Cars aren’t designed to stand that sort of strain for 24 hours.’

Thus spake one Walter Owen Bentley when he first heard of a motor race in France with a new gimmick: that competitors would start racing and not stop until the hour hand on the clock had done two complete laps. His cars then went on to win five of the first eight Le Mans 24 Hours.

But craziness has stalked this race since the very first in 1923, which saw one competitor take to the track not in a car, but on a bicycle he’d just stolen which he then proceeded to pedal the wrong way around the circuit, dodging the cars hurtling towards him. I’ll tell that story and those of other mad Le Mans antics in another tale soon, but for now I want to concentrate not so much on the men, as their machinery.