What makes the 24 Hours of Le Mans the best race in the world

We Americans tend to measure our grand automotive contests in terms of miles: Daytona 500. Indy 500. Coca-Cola 600. That’s a long race, 600 miles. So the 24 Hours of Le Mans doesn’t intuitively fit our frame of reference. That’s a long time, but so what? What we want to know is how far you go with the hammer down. And in that language, the one we can understand, this isn’t the 24 Hours of Le Mans. It’s the Le Mans 3000.

Or 3,209.63, to be exact—that’s the distance covered by this year’s winning Audi R18 e-tron Quattro. That’s New York to Los Angeles, more or less, flat out. Or six years’ worth of Daytona 500s cracked off in a single day. It’s an endurance test for the cars, the drivers and most certainly for the fans.

Everything about Le Mans is a spectacle. The crowd is enormous—263,000 this year. The track is more than eight miles long and cars can still average 150 mph per lap despite the addition of multiple chicanes. You can watch the race from grandstands or a Ferris wheel or one of the mom-and-pop businesses that line the track, parts of which are a public road during the rest of the year. And the cars. Man, Le Mans has the cars.

Formula One is cool, sure, but it amounts to the ultimate spec race as teams conform to regulations that determine every minute measurement on the car, inside and out. At Le Mans, the rules are loose enough to allow plenty of creativity. In the fastest class, P1, the three manufacturers each took a different approach, leading to a grid that included a diesel, a high-strung V-8 and a turbocharged V-4 paired with various forms of hybrid energy-capture systems. And at different points in the race, each of them looked like the surefire winner.