LE MANS, France — “Everything is bigger in Le Mans.”Benoit Dupont, FIA World Endurance Championship head of sporting, made this clear Thursday to The Athletic at the Circuit de la Sarthe, just south of Le Mans in northern France.It’s a good summary of this sprawling event. The 2026 edition of the 24 Hours of Le Mans forms the jewel in the crown of the eight-race WEC season, as its only 24-hour race.The track is 8.4 miles long, comprising the dedicated roads of the permanent Bugatti circuit and the public roads that have hosted the race since the first edition in 1923. An estimated 350,000 spectators will attend during the 2026 race week.By comparison, the track at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway is 2.6 miles, with a race-day capacity of 257,000 for the Indy 500. And no one could call that event small in any way.The full-day race duration and the storied history of the race on that long course set Le Mans apart from other global motorsport events. It’s what keeps fans coming back to pack the bustling campsites, fan zones and grandstands each year.The unique length of the Circuit de la Sarthe also provides one of the ultimate thrills for a driver. After all, its Mulsanne straight runs 3.7 miles, and the cars here will hit top speeds of almost 220 mph.Elsewhere, the track’s Porsche curves are amazing corners, BMW WRT driver Kevin Magnussen told The Athletic.“Especially when you throw the car in at virtually top speed, dancing with the car at 186 mph,” he said. “Racing is great here because there’s so much slipstreaming and so much opportunity to race, so the race never settles.”Cadillac driver Jack Aitken has entered four Le Mans events. Since the start of 2026, he also represents the team in the WEC. As a one-time Williams F1 driver and regular in the IMSA SportsCar Championship, he’s well placed to describe what makes this long track stand out.“(As a driver) you see a lot of different circuits, a lot of different distances, different grids. But there’s nothing really like this week,” he told The Athletic. “Because of the geography of the place. It is so massive.“A lot of the track is quite spaced out. You have straights where you’re flat out for 20-25 seconds at a time, which compared to other tracks is just insane. It gives you a lot more time to process stuff and think about the big picture of the race and stay on top of the car — make sure that everything’s running well.”For so many people across the Le Mans event, keeping everything healthy is critical too. The 24-hour race is far from a test for the machines — the humans within them, supporting them and adjudicating them, are under strain too.They are tested even further, as the Saturday-Sunday spread will last longer than the 24-hour race duration, given the prerace warm-up session (long dropped from F1 race days) and grid ceremonies. The main prerace ceremony here lasts 45 minutes — over twice the equivalent in F1.The No 38 Cadillac, which was eventually stripped of its 2026 Le Mans pole, qualifies on Thursday. (Ker Robertson / Getty Images)“It is more like 36 hours that you are awake and working,” said Cadillac Jota team principal Dieter Gass. “With the fatigue, I think the emotions (postrace) get stronger than they normally do.”For the drivers and engineers, there are prerace strategy briefings to cover, too. That will limit how much rest they can cram in before the start. And then there’s the adrenaline factor — vital for pushing flat out at the wheel, but both helpful and a hindrance come the end of a race as long as this.“You’ll try and sleep between each stint. So maybe three times and get a good hour or two sleep each time,” Aitken said. “Before the final stint during the day, it can be quite tricky because by then the race is coming to its close and strategies are converging.“You can see where you’re going to end up, where the battles might be for the final spots. And it can be quite tricky to tear yourself away from the TV screen at that point.”In his role, Gass oversees the whole race for the two Cadillac Jota cars (the third Cadillac competing in the race’s top class, Hypercar, is run by the Wayne Taylor Racing organization). However, much earlier in his career, his view of Le Mans was much narrower.In 2000, Gass worked as a race engineer at the Audi Team Joest squad that secured a 1-2-3 in the top class, then known as LMP900. He spent the entire race duration on the pit wall.“I didn’t eat,” he said. “I only drank, because while luckily the lap time at Le Mans is three minutes something, you can quickly go to the loo, but you don’t have the time to do any bigger business!“These are the limiting factors. As a race engineer, you have 24 hours on the pit wall, and you are not moving for one minute. You get your food and drinks brought over if you have to have them. It’s really 24 hours of full immersion.”To ensure safety, the FIA, which jointly produces this race with the event organizer, the Automobile Club de l’Ouest, expands its systems and teams beyond those used at other WEC events.There are over 2,000 marshals brought in to cover the long track — working in shifts of three hours, rotated between three shift teams.In race control, which features the same monitoring systems used in the F1 and Formula E championships the FIA also sanctions, a team of 40 officials takes turns over two shifts overseeing proceedings. This is twice the staffing level for the other seven WEC races in 2026.These teams are also in place for the test that precedes the Le Mans race by a week, and for the FIA scrutineers, there is additional work to check the legality of each car postrace.“My colleagues from the technical department still have to dismantle the cars and check the cars at the end,” Dupont said. “(But) they do that mainly on the Monday after the race.“It’s a great sense of achievement (afterward). For sure, as a Frenchman, I’ve always loved and watched the Le Mans 24 Hours, which is the biggest automotive event in France. Being able to be part of it, it’s already an achievement.”However, the high levels of enduring emotion this race inspires are not solely due to fatigue.“I feel like this is like a real celebration of motorsport,” Magnussen said. “I don’t want to talk bad about the new fans of F1, because they’re great in a different way.“But they’re new to the sport, and I feel these fans here, although there are 350,000 of them, there is a bigger sense that they grew up with this, that they inherited it from their parents. It’s got that depth of tradition and history.”Come 4 p.m. local time Sunday in France, the 94th set of Le Mans winners will be crowned.If he is victorious, alongside his teammates Dries Vanthoor and Raffaele Marciello in the No 15 BMW, Magnussen says it would be the biggest achievement of his long motorsport career, which includes 185 F1 races for McLaren, Renault and Haas.That trio will start on pole position — after the No 38 Cadillac Aitken, which had slotted in 0.005 seconds ahead on Thursday night (measured as a “30 cm” difference over the 8.4-mile lap, per Magnussen), was penalized after qualifying.BMW is also entering the race after winning at the most recent round of the WEC — at Spa in May. This was its first victory in the top category of global sports car racing since it won Le Mans in 1999.While that result and even starting at the head of the pack counts for comparatively little in a 24-hour contest, where danger lurks around every bend and within each second ticking by, given 62 cars are competing at the same time, Magnussen reckons the Spa win will hand his squad an advantage the other Hypercar teams do not possess.“It lifts everyone’s morale coming into this race,” he said. “Everyone’s full of energy and pumped and everyone is in that positive mindset, and I think that means something.“Great value in terms of (how) this is a long race, and the strategists on the pit wall have to stay awake for the whole thing.”Ferrari has won Le Mans three years in succession since 2023. But its highest position in qualifying was eighth, while its 2025 winning car did not advance past the first part of qualifying, held on Wednesday evening.This, combined with the fact that all eight Hypercar designs have been aerodynamically refined for 2026, as well as the expected impact of this year’s new tires and the influence of the secret Balance of Performance ruling used by the WEC to standardize car speeds, has raised expectations of a close race among multiple manufacturers.“This race is going to be red hot the whole race for the 24 hours,” Magnussen said.