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.

Meanwhile, the non-headliner cars were compelling in and of themselves—bombastic Corvettes battling Ferraris, Porsches and Aston Martins, each with a unique approach to speed. Here, gearheads can contemplate macro differences rather than who’s got a more advantageous front spoiler angle on a given day.

I’m not a diehard racing fan. Races, by their nature, become abstract as soon as the pack breaks apart, which usually happens within minutes. Then you’re scanning a leader board to see who’s in front and wondering whether you just witnessed an important position change or someone getting lapped. What Le Mans offers is the chance to glimpse dramatic moments, because over the course of 24 hours there are going to plenty of them.

You don’t have to know who’s on which lap to appreciate a 458 Italia battling a Corvette out of the Arnage corner, or a pair of P1 cars shooting out of the Porsche corners and charging down toward the chicanes flanked by crowds on both sides of the fence. The race is so epically long that you can enjoy these little vignettes without worrying too much about their impact on the race standings, because the standings really don’t mean much until you get close to the end. And even then, Le Mans is a cruel mistress. The Porsche 919 Hybrid was winning after 20 hours. But it’s a 24-hour race, and Audi seems to have a way with this one.

What I’m saying is that you don’t need to know who Mark Webber is to enjoy Le Mans. If you’re into cars, travel or just world-renowned parties, this is an event to put on your must-do list, a futuristic four-wheeled battle royale set in the bucolic French countryside. The 2015 race is already on the schedule, slated for June 13-14. Get a hotel or get a tent, but get to France and soak in the experience at the best race in the world.