The Le Mans 24 Hours.

Le Mans is not a day out from Paris. Practice begins on the Wednesday, qualifying runs deep into the Thursday night, the drivers’ parade fills the city centre on the Friday evening, and the race itself starts at four on the Saturday afternoon and ends at four on the Sunday. Between those points you will move between the circuit, a hotel that is rarely in Le Mans itself, and dinners on the other side of a town of 140,000 people that has temporarily taken in a quarter of a million more.

This Journey is therefore not a transfer. It is a car and a chauffeur held at your disposal for as many days as you are in the Sarthe — typically Friday to Sunday, often Wednesday to Sunday.

What the weekend actually looks like

The Circuit de la Sarthe is 13.626 km long, of which a large part is ordinary public road the rest of the year: the Mulsanne straight is the D338, closed for the event and broken by two chicanes since 1990. That geography is the reason access is difficult. The roads that take you to the circuit are the roads that are the circuit, and they shut.

The practical consequence is that the last two kilometres to a paddock entrance can take longer than the two hours from Paris. A chauffeur who knows which approach is open at which hour, and who can drop you at a gate and disappear rather than hunt for a space in a field, removes most of that.

The night is the point

Most first-time visitors underestimate what happens after midnight. The Porsche Curves at two in the morning, with brake discs glowing through the fences, is the reason people come back every year. It is also the moment when no taxi exists, no shuttle runs, and your hotel is forty minutes away through closed roads.

A car held on standby means you decide when the night ends — and that someone who has not been awake for twenty hours is the one driving.

How we build it

The drive out is made before the Thursday crush where possible, in a Mercedes S-Class or V-Class depending on the party and the luggage. The chauffeur stays in the area for the duration, not in your hotel’s car park waiting for instructions by text. For teams, sponsors and hospitality groups arriving from several addresses, we run several vehicles under one point of contact.

Accommodation in the Sarthe sells out roughly a year ahead, so the useful order is: secure the hotel, then the car. We also take the reverse case regularly — guests who fly into Charles de Gaulle on the Friday and are at the circuit before the parade.

We wrote the longer version of all this — dates, access, where to watch, what a weekend costs in time — in our guide to the Le Mans 24 Hours from Paris.