The Tour Auto doesn't care how much horsepower you brought. It cares if you finish. Five days, 2,200 kilometers, Paris to Nice. Two closed-road rally stages every morning, a circuit race every afternoon. Stages aren't revealed until the night before. No reconnaissance. No practice. Just a road book and whatever nerve you brought with you.
speedarticle embedded with the Mecanicus crew for the 2025 edition, riding along in a 1969 Mini Cooper S Mk2. Car number 155. 630 kilograms. 120 horsepower. 1293cc with twin SU carbs feeding a straight-cut four-speed through a disc-type limited-slip diff. Prepared by Mini World Center. Driven by Valentin Simonet, a French racing driver with proper results. Co-driven by Quentin Leblond, founder of Mecanicus, who'd co-piloted a Morgan on the Tour the year before but had never shown up with his own car and his own team.
The grid around them was not friendly. Shelby Cobras. Jaguar E-Types. A Ford GT40. Porsche 911s in various states of homologation fury. The Mini looked like a typo on the entry list. But as Quentin puts it, the Tour Auto "is the only event that will put together 300 classic cars in race mode, where you will be able to see a 69 Mini battling with a 250 GT." Same roads. Same clock. Same rules. The only thing animating all of them being the passion.
Valentin wasn't intimidated by the company. "The weight is very low. We have 650 kilograms, so it's like nothing. The car is very small, so you can turn whenever you want and you can play." Play is a generous word for what they did. On the racetracks, lined up against Alfa Romeo GTAs and cars with three times the displacement, the approach was simpler. "You have to steal all the time."
Stage one, Paris to Dijon, was clean. The car felt alive. Stage two brought the Anneau du Rhin and real fights with cars that had no business being close. By stage three, the longest at over 600 kilometers, the crew was locked in. Three specials and a circuit at Charade, where they pulled a decisive late overtake and placed second in their plateau on the opening special. That same day, the Ford GT40 leading VHC overall blew its transmission with one lap to go. The Tour Auto doesn't care how much horsepower you brought. It cares if you finish.
Stage four into Avignon saw the Mini at its sharpest. Leblond and Simonet had refined a method for racing stages blind, and it was working. They were in the thick of the Plateau 3 fight and climbing. The final day ran through Mont Ventoux. 1,600 meters of elevation gain on the Giant of Provence. The kind of road where 630 kilograms and 12-inch wheels stop being a disadvantage and start being the whole point. They held. They finished. Third in Plateau 3. Tenth overall in VHC Competition.
Valentin described the shift between before and after. "Before, there is stress because you're always scared about forgetting something. When the race starts on Tuesday morning at 5:30, everything goes away and just remains the pilot, your friend, the car, the road. You smell the road." And when it's over? "A huge relief."
For Quentin, the Tour Auto is something older and more personal. He used to bring his kid to every start. Followed it as media for years before getting behind the notes himself. "Once you come in, you enter this bubble. Five days a year that we all wait a whole year to happen. I don't think you will find any event that gathers as many feelings and emotions in such a short period of time."
They brought the smallest car to the fight. They brought it home on the podium.
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