Do you have what it takes? A proper question to ask before you venture a drive up the Col de Turini. Hands of uncommon sensitivity and speed, practiced through long hours at the wheel of a good car, and feet that know the road, precisely when to push and when to hold back.

Few roads carry as much Porsche mythology as the Col de Turini. Vic Elford and co-driver David Stone took the victory in 1968’s Rally Monte Carlo in a 911T after a dramatic final night stage battle with Gérard Larrousse’s Renault Alpine. The 911 won again in 1969 and 1970, both times with Sweden’s Björn Waldegård, one of the great drivers of any era, behind the wheel. Three consecutive wins (something that I think has not happened since). The pavement there keeps something from every driver who has passed through. The rubber markings are the archive of a rich motoring history.

Long before there were cars on the Turini, there were soldiers. The pass sits below the Authion Massif, a series of peaks and plateaux that for centuries commanded the border between France and Italy, overlooking the ancient salt route to Turin. Control the Authion and you controlled the Alpes-Maritimes. In 1793 and 1794, French Revolutionary forces mounted assault after assault against fourteen thousand Savoy troops dug into those heights before finally taking them. A year later, a young general named Bonaparte was fighting on these same slopes, not yet Emperor, not yet myth, just a man of ambition trying to hold a mountain.

The ruins of the forts they built afterward still stand above the treeline. In April 1945, German mountain troops made their last stand inside them before the French army took the Authion back, corner by corner, fort by fort. The last position fell on the twelfth of the month. Three weeks later the war in Europe was over. The road that winds below all of this was paved for commerce, not combat. Many years later, it became something else. The Turini is not a driving road that happens to have history. It is a human corridor that happens, for now, to have some of the world’s best driving on it.