"It's a big issue for a lot of the French racers," the British competitor Mark Turner said by phone from Le Havre.
In another Nissan-powered car in the same category, Jordan Tresson, a Frenchman, the winner of the GT Academy contest in 2010, will drive in the race for the first time, alongside two French racers, including Franck Mailleux, who helps train the GT Academy drivers and who was Ordóñez's teammate last year.
The 23-year-old, who eventually finished second, was one of several French racers to have the words on his helmet.
Pinturault was among several French racers who wore "Je Suis Charlie" messages on their helmets, showing support for their home country after a traumatic week of terrorist incidents.
PARIS — Yoann Offredo is a French bicycle racer who did a very un-French thing in the Milan-San Remo classic in March: He attacked.
Once the nearly exclusive domain of French sailors, racers from Belgium, Italy, Ireland, Spain, Australia and Britain are in the fleet.
The 1912 record-setting French Deperdussin racers, the German Albatros fighters of World War I, and the later American Lockheed Vega were among the aircraft that used this type of construction.
This Chitty, which features many salvaged car parts and a wood-paneled rear section mimicking some French boattail-racer designs of the 1910s and '20s, has a suitably interesting history.
1944 Sallanches, France Christine Goitschel, (born 1944, Sallanches, France), French Alpine ski racer who won the gold medal in the slalom at the 1964 Winter Olympics in Innsbruck, Austria.
The literary critic Hugh Kenner argued that his most famous (and most famously absent) creation, Godot, was himself based on a Monsieur Godeau, a French national champion racer.
