- [Voiceover] The 24 Hours of Le Mans
is the world's oldest
active sports car race
dating back to 1923,
and, as you can imagine,
after almost a century of racing,
Le Mans has undergone numerous changes.
In some cases, the existing
technologies were tweaked
as manufacturers achieved new
and sometimes dramatic breakthroughs.
One example is tire technology.
The very first Le Mans
competitors used Michelin tires,
and even today the
majority of racing teams
choose Michelin rubber.
In other cases, safety concerns
prompted race organizers
to ban some features
or practices entirely.
Gone are the days of
the open cockpit design,
and single-driver teams are
no longer permitted either.
However, of all the banned practices,
perhaps the most infamous
is the Le Mans start.
In the early days of Le Mans,
the race started in a peculiar way.
The drivers stood on one side of the track
with their cars parked on the other side.
At the drop of the flag, the
drivers ran across the track,
jumped into their vehicles,
started the engine,
and drove away.
These starts were notoriously unsafe.
In their haste to start the race,
drivers would often
ignore their seat belts,
which were a recent
innovation at the time,
and sometimes even neglect to
properly close the car door.
As you can imagine, this unsafe behavior
led to race day mishaps and even deaths
as drivers would either
attempt to secure the belts
while driving or simply choose
to not fasten them at all.
In 1969, renowned Formula
One racer Jacky Ickx
protested this dangerous practice.
At the start of the race, he
refused to sprint to his car
along with the other drivers.
Instead, he calmly
walked across the track,
carefully buckled his
safety belt and drove away.
Ickx was nearly struck by a
competitor's car on his walk,
and another race, John Woolfe,
died in a crash on the first lap.
Ickx went on to win the 1969 race,
and the classic Le Mans start was banned
from that point forward.
The 1970 race began
with a modified version
of the classic Le Mans start.
This time, the drivers were
already seated in their cars
and safely belted in.
When the flag dropped, the
racers started their engines
and sped away, but the
start of the 1971 event
marked the biggest change of all
as the race began with a rolling start,
also known as an Indianapolis start,
a practice which continues to this day,
and it seems this new
way to start the race
agreed with Jacky Ickx too
as he went on to win Le
Mans a total of six times
in 15 attempts between 1966 and 1985.
