It was a plot that would have been regarded as too fanciful, even for Hollywood. Any self-respecting studio would have rejected a script involving a big-shot movie star going to the Le Mans 24 Hours for the first time at the age of 54 and coming within an ace of victory. Simply, the writers would have been told to get out of Tinseltown.

But at Le Mans in 1979 facts proved stranger than fiction. Paul Newman could have won the French enduro that year and probably would have won but for a jammed wheel nut. But his eventual second place, with team owner Dick Barbour and Rolf Stommelen, was only the final chapter in a bizarre event. The winning machine spent an hour parked on the Mulsanne Straight as one of its drivers toiled to fix a car he and his brother had purchased — for cash — literally minutes before the start.

The idea of Newman doing Le Mans came from the man himself, according to Barbour. He proposed it after Dick Barbour Racing’s first assault on the race in 1978. They’d been team-mates at the 1977 Daytona 24 Hours aboard a pair of Ferrari 365 GTBs, entered by a New York main dealer, and started driving together in ’79. They did the Daytona 24 Hours at the start of the year in a Porsche 935 as a warm-up to Le Mans.