Le Mans through the ages

You may have heard about Allan McNish's enormous crash at Le Mans this weekend. As you can see from this footage, the fact that he walked unscathed from the wreckage is testament to the safety of the sport in 2011...


...so picture the balls of steel they must have had to storm around those hallowed curves in a GT40 in 1969. Well, don't picture their balls... I mean watch this:


And for a little overtaking-other-cars action, how about the gruff purposefulness of 1977's Martini Porsche 936?


Given the length of the event, it's easy to assume that there are sections when the drivers are simply going through the motions, but this just isn't the case; they're at full-throttle for hours on end in some of the world's most extreme racing cars, weaving through tricky cambers and confusingly altering light levels. It's massive crashes like McNish's that remind us spectators just what the drivers are dicing with. They are true petrolhead heroes.