TAKEN FROM MOTOR SPORT, OCTOBER 1970

One of the few attributes of the Le Mans 24 Hours race is that it goes on for much longer than most races, but this year the local inhabitants must be feeling that someone is exaggerating, for the Le Mans race is still going on! Hollywood is in the throes of making yet another epic about motor racing. Will we ever forget the Frankenheimer film Grand Prix that was destined to end all motor-racing films, and very nearly did?

The latest epic is a film about the Le Mans 24 Hours, and production has been going on since June, with the full Le Mans circuit in use, on and off, ever since then. The locals are making a fortune, for one thing that Hollywood does is to spend money, but just as Monte Carlo got very tired of motor racing after Frankenheimer and his crowd had been there for a week, the people round the Circuit de la Sarthe must be getting equally tired. However, this film is being controlled by Steve McQueen (or was at the time of writing), and apart from being a very convincing actor, McQueen is a chap who does as much as he says. Whereas Frankenheimer took lessons at the Carroll Shelby School of Racing Driving before embarking on his epic, so that he would know what racing was all about, McQueen races anyway and his performances with a 908 Porsche in open competition were no disgrace. Consequently he is trying to present a film about Le Mans that bears some resemblance to reality, but he is having a hard time for his backers think that blood, fire, crashes, bitterness and mean-mindedness are reality. They can’t see that such things are there but only are a small part of reality, they want to enlarge them out of all proportion, just as Frankenheimer did in Grand Prix.