Montlhéry: The Banked Concrete Giant South of Paris
Some thirty kilometres south of Paris, on a wooded plateau in the Essonne, stands one of the great survivors of motorsport history. The Autodrome de Linas-Montlhéry opened in 1924 as France's answer to Brooklands and Monza: a steeply banked ring of reinforced concrete on which a car could hold full throttle for hours on end. Grand Prix legends raced here, record hunters practically lived here for weeks at a time, and endurance classics filled its grandstands long after the Second World War. Unlike almost every other banked autodrome of its era, Montlhéry is still standing, still complete and still in use. This is its story.
Born of the roaring twenties
The driving force behind the autodrome was Alexandre Lamblin, an industrialist who had made his fortune building radiators for aircraft engines and who also owned a sporting newspaper. In the early 1920s France, the very birthplace of Grand Prix racing, had no permanent circuit of its own. Britain had enjoyed Brooklands since 1907, and Italy had opened its autodrome at Monza in 1922. Lamblin regarded this state of affairs as a national embarrassment and resolved to fix it with his own money. He acquired an estate on the plateau of Saint-Eutrope, near the medieval tower of Montlhéry that gives the place its name, and commissioned the engineer Raymond Jamin to design a permanent speed track. What followed was one of the more remarkable construction feats of the decade: a small army of labourers raised the great concrete ring in a matter of months, and the autodrome opened in the autumn of 1924. The location was chosen with care. The plateau lay close enough to Paris for spectators, journalists and manufacturers to reach it easily, yet far enough from the capital for engines to be run flat out day and night. That last detail, as we shall see, would come to define much of Montlhéry's career.
A wall of concrete
The heart of Montlhéry is the anneau de vitesse, a banked speed ring of roughly two and a half kilometres. Its two great curves are banked so steeply that their upper reaches feel almost vertical to anyone standing on them; a car does not so much corner around the ring as ride it, pressed into the surface by its own speed. The engineering solution Jamin chose was as elegant as it was audacious: rather than piling up earth embankments in the manner of Brooklands, he carried the concrete bowl on a forest of slender reinforced-concrete pillars. Seen from outside, the banking rises like a viaduct; walking beneath it feels like standing in the crypt of some strange modern cathedral. Every height on the wall corresponds to a speed, and drivers learned to read the concrete like a dial, climbing higher as they went faster. In 1925 the autodrome gained a road course as well. A winding circuit was laid out across the neighbouring plateau and linked to the ring, producing combined layouts of up to roughly twelve and a half kilometres. With that addition, Montlhéry could host not only record attempts but full-scale Grand Prix racing, and France finally had a permanent home for its greatest race.
Grand Prix glory and tragedy
The road circuit was baptised in the most demanding way possible: with the French Grand Prix of 1925, a marathon contest between the supercharged Alfa Romeo P2s and the French Delage team. The race turned to tragedy when Antonio Ascari, comfortably in the lead for Alfa Romeo, crashed fatally out on the plateau section. Alfa Romeo withdrew its remaining cars out of respect, and the Delage shared by Robert Benoist and Albert Divo won a sombre race. Ascari's young son Alberto would grow up to become a double world champion in the 1950s, forever linking two eras of the sport to that afternoon at Montlhéry. The Grand Prix returned repeatedly between the wars. In 1927 Benoist and Delage crowned a season of utter dominance with victory on home soil, and in 1934 Louis Chiron won for Alfa Romeo at the very moment the new German teams of Mercedes-Benz and Auto Union were arriving to change Grand Prix racing forever. Through the 1930s the autodrome remained the default home of the French Grand Prix, its combination of flat-out banking and twisting road section producing races quite unlike anything else on the calendar.
The capital of record breaking
If Grand Prix racing brought Montlhéry glory, record breaking brought it a livelihood. Because the ring could be lapped at unvarying full throttle, and because there was no evening curfew of the kind that constrained Brooklands, the autodrome became the place in Europe to attack long-distance world records. British drivers and manufacturers crossed the Channel in droves; figures such as George Eyston became near-permanent residents, grinding out hour records and twenty-four-hour records on the concrete. The most extraordinary campaign of all was mounted by Citroën in 1933, when a modest saloon nicknamed the Petite Rosalie circulated for more than four months, covering around 300,000 kilometres at an average of over 90 km/h and rewriting the record books as a rolling advertisement for the company's reliability. Motorcycles wrote their own chapters here too. In 1961 a Velocette Venom became the first 500 cc motorcycle to average more than one hundred miles per hour for twenty-four hours, a mark set on this very concrete and one that stood for decades. For half a century, whenever a manufacturer needed to prove endurance beyond argument, the road led to Montlhéry.
Endurance racing and the long goodbye
After the Second World War the site passed into the hands of UTAC, the French automotive testing organisation, which used the plateau for vehicle development while keeping the circuit alive for sport. The post-war decades were busy ones. The Bol d'Or, France's famous endurance race, was run here for long stretches of its history, and from the 1950s the 1000 km de Paris brought the world's leading sports cars and their star drivers to the banking. But the autodrome had been designed for the speeds of the 1920s, and its concrete wall offered no forgiveness. A catastrophic accident during the 1964 edition of the 1000 km de Paris killed the drivers Peter Lindner and Franco Patria along with several track officials, and the writing was on the wall for top-level racing. By the end of the decade international car racing had essentially left Montlhéry, retreating to safer, more modern circuits, though club events, motorcycle races and record attempts kept the old ring from falling silent altogether.
A survivor among ghosts
Consider the fate of Montlhéry's contemporaries. Brooklands was carved up by aircraft factories and never reopened. The banking at Sitges-Terramar in Spain fell silent within a few years of opening. Monza's later high-speed bowl stands abandoned, and the banked AVUS curve in Berlin was demolished outright. Against that roll call of ghosts, Montlhéry is a miracle: the ring, the pillars and much of the road course survive essentially intact, and UTAC continues to operate the site as a test facility. Better still, the engines keep coming back. Historic gatherings such as the Vintage Revival Montlhéry and Les Grandes Heures Automobiles now fill the autodrome with pre-war Grand Prix cars, record breakers and classic motorcycles, letting spectators watch machinery climb the same concrete wall it climbed a century ago. Few places in motorsport offer so direct a connection to the heroic age, not as a museum piece but as living tarmac and living concrete.
Explore on the map
Montlhéry is only one point in the dense constellation of French motorsport, which stretches from the public roads of Le Mans to the Mediterranean sweep of Paul Ricard. To see how the old autodrome sits in that landscape, and to discover the circuits, speedways and hillclimbs that surround it, open our interactive map and zoom in south of Paris. From there you can wander outward across France and the rest of the world, one historic venue at a time.