Where to stay

Hôtel Arbor
You are probably not going to get much sleep during the week of Les 24 so you may as well stay virtually trackside. This three- star hotel with 44 rooms is located right on the famous Mulsanne Straight, just by the Michelin Chicane, so you will have an amazing view of the race, night and day. Bring your ear plugs. Doubles from £53. Hôtel Arbor, Ligne droite des Hunaudières, 158 Route de Tours, Mulsanne, 00 33 2 43 39 18 90

Hotel de France
For race enthusiasts, a visit here is a must – and the hotel makes a good base during race week. Do as the drivers used to, and make the 50km journey to Le Mans, then return to enjoy this lovely quiet provincial town. The 22 well-equipped and individually designed bedrooms are all named after drivers, and behind the building’s art deco facade there is no shortage of sporting memorabilia to admire. Doubles from £51. 20 Place de la République, La Chartre-sur-le-Loir, 00 33 2 43 44 40 16, lhoteldefrance.fr

Mercure Le Mans
Centre Hotel During the week of Les 24, not surprisingly Le Mans a place overrun with visitors. Many pilgrims choose to camp in the numerous tented villages within the race site itself. Others rent houses in the surrounding countryside. Some simply stay awake night and day! However, for a city centre base the Mercure is hard to beat. Housed in an elegant 19th-century mansion, it offers bright, modern rooms and convenient access to the best sights. The tram provides a good route to the circuit. Doubles from £49. 19 Rue Chanzy, Le Mans, 00 33 2 43 40 22 40, accorhotels.com

Travel Information

Le Mans is situated 200km to the southwest of Paris in the Pays de la Loire region. This year’s event runs on 13 and 14 June.

GETTING THERE
P&O operates frequent car ferries from Dover to Calais, with crossings taking 90 minutes. Le Mans is a four-hour drive. poferries.com Eurostar runs a regular service from London to Paris. Fast trains from Montparnasse reach Le Mans in one hour. eurostar.co.uk, sncf.com

RESOURCES
Pays de la Loire Tourism Board has helpful ideas and suggestions for seeing Le Mans and the entire region. paysdelaloire.co.uk

FURTHER READING
2014 24 Hours of Le Mans by Jean-Marc Teissedre and Christian Moity (Etai, £34). A must for car buffs, this yearbook packs in numerous colour photos, memories and reams of stats to pore over.

Where to eat

Prices are for three courses excluding wine, unless otherwise stated.

Auberge de Mulsanne
Dine here at night once the race is underway. The noise of the cars, passing by at over 200mph just metres away, is deafening and incessant – and a surreal experience. The food is good, traditional, correct, and served with some style and panache. £29. Hôtel Arbor, Ligne droite des Hunaudières, 158 Route de Tours, Mulsanne, 00 33 2 43 39 18 90

Le Bistrot des Jacobins
After visiting the market, sit just beyond the Cathedral walls, enjoying a relaxing café crème or une pression (draught beer) while watching the world go by. 1 Rue des Jacobins, Le Mans, 00 33 2 43 77 18 26

Le Mans Légend’Café
The Légend is, well, a legend, and another must for race lovers. Come to this bustling and popular city centre café-bar to admire the paraphernalia of decades of Les 24. The atmosphere is undoubtedly the major draw here, though the food is not at all bad either. Enjoy the Légend’s burger, huge salads or pizzas, which can all be washed down with beer, cocktails and a decent selection of local wines. £18. 9 Bis Rue du Port, Le Mans, 00 33 2 43 77 15 09, lemanslegendcafe.com

Le Relais de Ronsard Restaurant
The Hotel de France is steeped in history and continues to be a mecca for drivers and fans alike, so a meal here is a must. The timbered dining room is as traditional as the food. Come here to admire not just the cars but also the menu of local specialities, including rillettes, foie gras and grilled beef fillet, as well as some decent Loire wines. £29. 20 Place de la République, La Chartre- sur-le-Loir, 00 33 2 43 44 40 16, lhoteldefrance.fr

Food Glossary

Food and Travel Review

It’s Friday, the day before the start of ‘Les 24’, the legendary French race. We make our way to La Chartre-sur-le-Loir, a quiet market town in the little-visited department of Sarthe, on the edge of the Loire Valley. Dozens, if not hundreds of fans are already here, assembled in Place de la République in front of the ivy-clad, art deco Hotel de France. Those gathered are mainly French, though there are plenty of British accents too, alongside German, Danish, Italian, and countless other tongues. Many pilgrims have made the journey in style – Aston Martins, Ferraris, Porsches and Bentleys are parked up wherever you look.

Sitting in full view of gawping onlookers on the main square is a pale-green Ford GT40 – the iconic car that won Le Mans for four consecutive years in the 1960s and helped make the event the spectacle it is today. We’re about 50km south of Le Mans but already the tension is building.

‘The Hotel de France is steeped in racing history,’ explains enthusiast Patrick Crew, a walking encyclopedia of the annual event. ‘In 1953, Aston Martin’s manager chose the hotel as a team base – not least for the quality of its food and wine. Some of the most legendary drivers have stayed here-Bruce McLaren, Sir Stirling Moss, Sir Jackie Stewart – as well as Steve McQueen when he was making the film Le Mans.’ In fact, the ‘King of Cool’ listed it among his top hotels – high praise, indeed.

By midday, the restaurant’s traditional dining room is heaving. During race week, some 150 covers are served each lunchtime. Waitresses scrurry to and fro with plates of food and bucket upon bucket of chilled wine. Chef Eric Lematelot, who has worked the pass for 27 years, mops his brow with a Gallic shrug, calm and unfazed by the apparent madness.

‘C’est toujours comme ça. It’s always like this for Les 24. We see the same guests, year after year. And we always serve the foods of the month of June, such as white asparagus, strawberries and cherries. The classic meal here is local foie gras marinated in Jasnières wine, followed by fillet of beef with Béarnaise sauce. To finish, crème brûlée. The English like this dessert very much.’ The food is traditional, fresh and seasonal. And if the staff are somewhat under pressure right now, no one seems to mind as the crowds, the cars and the anticipation are all part of the experience.

Owner Martin Overington took the baton little more than a year ago from the Pasteu family who had run the hotel for more than a century. ‘I’d been coming here for years and I’ve always loved the place,’ says Martin. ‘It is very much part of the fabric of Le Mans. When I heard it was up for sale, I got involved to safeguard its history. I love cars and have always been into petrol. When I was a boy, I cut lawns because I loved the smell. And I equally love food and wine. It made sense.’

Over lunch, we enjoy some of the local wines, most notably a minerally Jasnières, a tiny appellation that is less well known than Loire siblings like Vouvray, Touraine, Anjou and Chinon. The wine’s creator, Monsieur Gigou, has a cave just outside the village. Can we visit, I wonder? ‘Of course,’ says Martin, ‘I can take you in the Citroën H.’ So it’s in this beautifully restored, quintessentially French delivery van that we rumble along the back roads of wine country. Spending an hour or two in the cool limestone caves excavated by hand, we taste Coteaux du Loir rosé and red wines and, best of all, a magnificent range of Jasnières made from the versatile chenin blanc grape. These range from bone-dry sparkling ones to dry with invigorating green apple, and honeyed, luscious moelleux tipples made from grapes affected by noble rot.

‘We cultivate the vineyard biodynamically,’ explains Joël Gigou, ‘and make the wines as naturally as possible with no additives whatsoever. Because of a high natural acidity, Jasnières wines can mature and evolve for decades. These are wines for people with lots of patience.’ On the return to Le Mans, down the tree-lined, arrow-straight D304 – the ‘Route du Mans’ that the competition cars used to speed down on their way to the track – it occurs to me that Le Mans is a sporting event for people with the will to wait. And that goes for the gastronomy too.

We make our way into Le Mans itself and the bars all around Place de la République are already overflowing like the plastic cups of pression (draught beer) that the world and his dog are drinking. We manage to nab a table at what is undoubtedly the most famous watering hole, the Le Mans Légend’Café. Not only do the fans love it, but the teams themselves make their way here at the end of race week. Every inch of its interior is adorned with racing memorabilia: dashboards, jumpsuits, steering wheels and dented wings; a table made from a motorcycle, photos of the good and the great.

But after a jubilant night comes the morning of the race, and time to wander into town to pick up some provisions for a trackside picnic. Rue du Docteur Leroy, just off Place de la République, is the best for food shopping. We purchase a big pot of rillettes de grand-mère from La Rouelle de Veau.

This charcuterie speciality is belly pork slow-cooked in its own fat with secret seasonings (each butcher has his or her own mix) until the meat can be pulled apart in strands, to be spread thickly onto fresh, crispy baguette, which we get a few doors up at La Gerbe d’Or. This bakery, with tyres stacked up outside, stays open all night during race week offering not only bread but patisseries, sandwiches and salads too. At Aux Fromages Fins, we pick up oozy camembert fermier and a local goat’s cheese, then select a couple of bottles of Chinon from the wine boutique opposite. It keeps us going for at least a few hours.

Now they’re off. After much pageantry and formality – a parade of beautiful women carrying flags, Miss Les 24 in stilettos seated atop a vintage car, the belting out of La Marseillaise – at precisely 3pm the cars accelerate with a deafening roar, four different classes all on the same track at the same time. Within no less than three and a half minutes the quickest are back and, from then on, the sound of the motors is relentless and mesmerising. It is sunny and hot and thirst-inducing; the beers are cold and quenching; the champagne equally so. Then it rains, there are spins and spills and accidents, the yellow flag is waved, the safety car comes out. The rain stops, the sun soon heats things up again, and the cars go round and round. The race is young but there is an incessant energy – the sense of speed, danger, the smell of petrol and burnt rubber – that is intoxicating. Or maybe it’s just the beer.

Out in the zone known as the ‘village’, meanwhile, people are eating, but to be honest it seems more a distraction. This is not just fast food, it is speed food: it’s quick and it’s not cheap. Burgers, saucisses, frites, sandwiches, tartiflette, poulet rôti, Belgian waffles and crepes. There are numerous bars. At the Taverne des 24 Heures, I join the throngs for a plate of jarret grillé and frites, a tankard of pression. Eating elbow to elbow at trestle tables, the spit-roasted knuckle of pork is tasty and unctuous: this is food to rip into with your bare hands, a quick pit stop before getting back to the action.

Soon the sun dips below the horizon and the lights of the Ferris wheel and the fairground rides light up the sky, while the headlamps of the cars – white for the fast prototypes, yellow for the grand tourers – pierce the blackness. The hardcore fans don’t miss a minute of it, staying up alongside the drivers, occupying a favourite corner and undergoing their own test of stamina.

At 2am on Sunday morning, I’m beginning to doubt my own abilities. We’re dining at Auberge de Mulsanne, on the famous Mulsanne Straight, our table no more than 10m from the track. You can feel the legs shake as the cars blaze past. We’ve come here to eat and drink while viewing the race from an utterly unique vantage point. The dishes, like the cars on our periphery, arrive in a procession. First up is rillettes de canard (rillettes are the ubiquitous speciality of Le Mans), which are moist, salty, fatty and delicious. Next, filet de bar, a sea bass fillet grilled with rosemary. Then a plate of simply cooked magret de canard, a selection of Loire Valley cheeses, and a delightful fruit tart to finish.

We sample a rather sharp Jasnières, a pleasant rosé from Coteaux du Loir, and a darkly coloured Saumur-Champigny that is excellent with the duck. They all make a fitting accompaniment to the sport we are here to witness. Because, in truth, the dishes are not just great in taste but also come and go as speedily as the cars. And so it goes on: we sleep, we wake, we have breakfast, another beer, another glass of champagne, and the cars go round and round. The weekend of Les 24 is an amazing experience. This is far more than just an annual jamboree. For many, it is clearly the highlight of the year, something eagerly anticipated, and lived through with an extraordinary fervour. At the finish, you can’t help but feel a certain sense of deflation that it’s all over. Indeed, not only for the racers but also the huge entourage that supports them.

For the people of Le Mans, for whom the race is a part of their very identity and soul; for the tens of thousands of devoted fans who make their way here each year from all around the world. For them all, the words of Michael Delaney, the racing car driver character played by Steve McQueen in the film Le Mans, seems to encapsulate the spirit: ‘When you’re racing, it’s life. Anything that
happens before and after is just waiting.’