LONG TAILS

THE BEAUTIFUL AND BIZARRE RACE CARS DESIGNED TO CONQUER A SINGLE STRIP OF PAVEMENT.

- DANIEL PUND

It’s just a road, a highway between two French towns. Along its length are a garden supply center, a crematorium, an RV dealer, a KFC—the typical trappings of life . . . and death. The pavement is a bit crowned and rutted, and it’s only a smidge more than 40 feet wide. The road is designated D338. The French name, la ligne droite des Hunaudie? res, may sound a bit romantic to a native English speaker, but disappointingly, ittranslates, in part, to “straight line.”

It may be a commuter road, but the 3.7-mile chunk of D338 between Le Mans and Mulsanne, better known in English as the Mulsanne straight, is the spawning ground of more fantastical automotive oddities than any other place on earth.

This one straight makes up just over 40 percent of the entire length of the Circuit de la Sarthe, where the 24 Hours of Le Mans has run since 1923. Before 1990, maintaining a modest 150-mph average along the straight meant racers would need to keep their foot pinned to the floor for an interminable minute and a half. And with racers being racers, speeds eventually went well above 150. By the time the organizers and sanctioning body chopped the straight into three chunks with two chicanes in 1990, at least one car had topped 250 mph on it, a terminal velocity more than 15 mph faster than the fastest Indy 500 qualifying lap.

Typically, laboring under engine-displacement rules and therefore horsepower limitations, competitors turned the straight into an open-air laboratory for radical aerodynamic experimentation. The results were sometimes gorgeous, often comical, and occasionally even successful. None of the experiments were faster, prettier, or more common than the so-called longtails—those low-drag, tapered-tail streamliners that look more like mechanical tadpoles or land-speed-record cars than road racers.