For Heatmap: How The 24 Hours Of Le Mans Became a Laboratory for Cleaner Cars
The irony of it wasn’t lost on me.
Last Wednesday morning, I found myself trudging through the noxious wildfire smoke that had blanketed all of New York City, my eyes burning under a dark orange sky as I struggled to breathe through an old KN95 mask I dug out of a kitchen drawer. Twelve hours later, I would be on a plane to Paris and on my way to witness the 100th anniversary of the 24 Hours of Le Mans.
Let’s just say leaving your city during an ecological crisis to go to a car race will give you some mixed feelings.
On one hand, I had wanted to see this race since I was a car-crazed kid, and I was there to write a feature I had been planning for months. On the other hand, it is never lost on me that the biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. is transportation, including cars. In recent years, I have found it hard to get excited about horsepower when the world is literally on fire. That was doubly true when my clothes stank of torched Canadian forest.
What I got instead was a pleasant surprise at the famed Circuit de la Sarthe: a lot of people, including those who put on this race, agree with me. And making the event more sustainable is now a key part of its future.
