La Folie Des Cols

Five nights in the French Alps, self-guided, twelve hundred kilometres of mountain passes and two hundred of them off-road.

The organisers put it plainly: these are the off-road Alpine passes where everyone else is in a 4×4. Taking a two-wheel-drive car bought for a few hundred euros over them is the entire premise.

Twelve hundred kilometres across the French Alps take in a cumulative altitude gain of over thirty-two thousand metres, climbing as high as 2,550 metres, with 199 kilometres of the route off tarmac and gradients reaching more than fifteen per cent. The high tracks of the southern French Alps are where this sort of thing is possible: old military and forestry roads above the treeline that are legal to drive, spectacular in a way the tarmac passes are not, and entirely unforgiving of a worn clutch or a tired cooling system. Five days is enough to cover the best of them without the schedule becoming a forced march.

All the campsites, the stickers, a roadbook and a communications device for the event are included, and the entry is priced by team size: €500 solo, €900 for two, €1,100 for three and €1,200 for four, which makes a full car considerably cheaper per head. Early September 2028 is the window, which is the right one, since the high tracks are snowbound for much of the year and the summer traffic has gone by then. Low gearing, decent tyres and ground clearance matter more here than power, and the sensible preparation is a sump guard rather than anything that makes the car faster.