Racing started near Albi on the tree-lined Circuit des Planques by the river Tarn in 1933. Unusually, the pits and startline were situated on the shortest of straights before the road twisted through St Antoine, dipping and climbing to St Juéry. There the cars slowed for an extreme hairpin before negotiating the first of two railway level crossings and a hump leading onto two flat and fast legs that completed the lap. Shortened and renamed the Circuit Raymond Sommer in 1954, it was closed on safety grounds in 1960.