DEAR DIARY:
First thing, it's important to establish that Cale couldn't help crashing the car. The brakes went blooey coming around that corner and the only safe spot to spin it out was blocked by 30 or so folks standing around eating jambon sandwiches and drinking red wine. So he stuck it in the fence. And it was a dandy—the nose of the Chevy Camaro was slammed so far underneath the guardrail that 15 of those Frenchmen all pulling on a rope couldn't snake it back out. That was the first pity of it all, because until then France was experiencing maybe the most unusual sight and certainly the wildest sound in all the 49 years of the 24 Hours of Le Mans. It was a good old American stock car in there with the sporties, an outlaw car creating a hammering roar that can only be called iron thunder.

The real pity is that Cale Yarborough, at 41, had turned out to be a natural for that course: Right at the start he had cranked the Camaro down the Mulsanne Straight at about 210 mph—that's two hundred and some miles an hour—and had pulled back in to allow, "Well, I didn't come over here to poke around; I could be back on the farm, poking around on my combine."

And, of course, that's when the whole crew began to get excited and the tensions started to build, because, up until then, nobody had really figured that any of this could work. Even the cynical oldtimers were getting caught up in it and then, when....

But wait. This is getting ahead of the story, and the best thing to do is to take it from the beginning and tell it straight. It's a sort of saga; it could be called A Yankee Goes to Le Mans.

"Wait a minute," Cale says. "You mean A Rebel Goes to Le Mans."

Well, either way.