Two roads to the same gulf
Eighty-five kilometres, eighty minutes: that is the motorway figure, the one the grid holds. A second road exists, and the Estérel Côte d’Azur tourist office names it: the Corniche d’Or, linking the Var and the Alpes-Maritimes over thirty kilometres, along the sea and above the creeks, completed in 1903 and running from Saint-Raphaël to Cannes.
We do not claim it is faster. It is not. We offer it when the client would rather see the Estérel massif than save ten minutes, or when the motorway is reported blocked and the comparison changes.
What we will not publish is a road number for that corniche. The official page describing it gives none, several secondary sources contradict each other, and a wrong number in a set of directions is worse than no number at all.
The La Foux junction, with no invented figure
Every road in the gulf converges at the La Foux junction, in the commune of Gassin. That is where the RD98a branches off towards Saint-Tropez, and it is the point the regional press describes as rarely free-flowing. A bypass project has been discussed for some thirty years.
We stop there, deliberately. No article we opened gives a journey time, no official count was found, and a quoted delay would be unverifiable. What we can do is shift the departure time so as not to arrive at the worst moment, and say so before the job rather than after.
The sea alternative exists and is official: the shuttle between Sainte-Maxime and Saint-Tropez is advertised at fifteen minutes by its operator, with tickets sold at the counter rather than online. In high season it is worth putting on the table.
Eighty minutes, and the summer that changes it
One regulatory detail says more than any adjective about what the peninsula becomes in summer: from 14 July to 31 August the town imposes a full halt to works and the dismantling of cranes. A council does not take that step for the view. It takes it because the traffic can carry nothing more.
On this route that translates into two simple rules. First: eighty minutes is a May or October figure, not a 15 August one. Second: the drop-off time is decided against the municipal scheme in force on arrival, which restricts paid passenger transport vehicles on certain streets in the evening.
The fare itself does not move. Two hundred and eighty euros in a saloon, three hundred and thirty in a van, tolls and parking included, confirmed at booking, whatever the journey actually takes.