The best driving roads in France

Sort every road in France by score and the top of the list stops looking like a list. It looks like a route. The Alpine entries run in an almost unbroken chain from the Chablais above Lake Geneva down to the hills behind Menton, and nearly all of them sit on or beside the Route des Grandes Alpes, which already runs that way from the lake to the Mediterranean. You could drive most of this page in a week without doubling back once.

At the top, the scoring agrees with everyone else. Col de Turini takes it at 90, the highest we have scored in France, and it is the same road the Monte Carlo Rally has been running in the dark for decades. Second place is where it stops agreeing. Col du Mollard scores 89 on the back of 45 hairpins in 23.7 km, more than any other road in the country, and outside cycling almost nobody names it.

The other cluster is the Pyrenees, and it uses the whole range rather than one end of it. Six of the top twenty are there, from Col d’Erroïmendi in the Basque country to Col de Jau in the Pyrénées-Orientales, about 270 km apart. Add the fourteen in the Alps and that is the whole of it. The top twenty has no third region.

Both clusters are a long way from most people, and that matters less than it sounds. France has more scored roads than any country on the map except the United States, and they are not all in the mountains. The map opens on what is good near you first, wherever you happen to be, and for most people that turns out to be a Sunday morning rather than a fortnight.

Timing matters more here than on any page so far. Most of the Alpine cols on this list are closed by snow from roughly November to May, and the highest of them open last. That is worth planning around rather than worrying about, because the two ends of the chain do not follow the same calendar: the Pyrenean half sits lower, and the Alpes-Maritimes end behind Nice is drivable in almost any month, which is how the rally comes to be running it in January.

Every number on this page comes from the shape of the road itself, measured the same way in every country, which is why a col nobody writes about can outscore one that is on a poster. Drivers add the rest: mark a road as worth it and that verdict lands on its page beside the score.