18/06/2005
FEATURE BY MIKE LAWRENCE
As we approach Le Mans 2005, we perhaps should remember Le Mans 1955, and the worst crash in motor racing history. The actual date was 11th June, 1955, but it is natural to count the anniversary by the event rather than the day.
The 1955 World Sports Car Championship opened with the Buenos Aires 1000 Kms, which had an almost exclusively south American entry, but it resulted in a win for Ferrari. Next up was Sebring which was won by Mike Hawthorn and Phil Walters in a private Jaguar D type. A Ferrari was second and so Ferrari led the WSSC.
Mercedes Benz returned to sports car racing with the 300 SLR at the Mille Miglia when Stirling Moss, assisted by Denis Jenkinson won a famous victory. There were no Jaguars in the event, they tended to rattle apart, but a Ferrari was third. After three rounds, the Championship table read: 1. Ferrari, 18 pts; 2, Jaguar, Mercedes Benz, 8 pts.
The Jaguar D type had been built with Le Mans as its main objective, though you could order one from you local dealer. to put the price into context, a D type cost five Morris Minors. Today, you will not get much for the cost of five Ford Fiestas. A D type had come close to winning Le Mans on its debut in 1954, what it gave away in engine capacity, it clawed back with aerodynamic efficiency and Dunlop disk brakes.
To counter Jaguar's superior braking, Mercedes Benz equipped its cars with air brakes, a panel which covered the tail of the car and which the driver could flip up under heavy braking. Though its inequity has often been admired, it was a crude expedient and an admission by M B that their drum brakes were lacking..
There was a very strong field at Le Mans in 1955 with works teams from Aston Martin, Cunningham, Ferrari, Jaguar, Lagonda, Maserati and Mercedes Benz all hoping for an outright win. Cars from no fewer than 24 different constructors made the start, There can have been few races with so many stories, it was the WSSC debut of Cooper and Lotus and the final bow for Cunningham. There were teams from Bristol,Triumph, and MG, a lone Austin Healey and the extraordinary 'twin boom' Nardi which was so unstable that it was literally blown into the weeds by the wash of a faster car.
Porsche was growing ever more strong and its 1500cc cars would finish 4th, 5th and 6th, while French constructors fought for the Index of Performance, the parallel handicap event, with their light and slippery little cars mostly powered by Panhard engines. Works Stanguellinis made their first appearance outside of Italy and, for the first time, a Connaught sports car raced outside of the UK. Le Mans 1955 was the last time that a Salmson would appear in a race,
The early stages of the race were led by Eugenio Castellotti's Ferrari 121LM, with Juan Manuel Fangio (Mercedes Benz) and Mike Hawthorn (Jaguar) battling for second as though all three were in a ten lap sprint. Just after the first hour, Castellotti retired and the Fangio/Hawthorn dice became one for the lead.
Time and again they passed and re passed each other, breaking the lap record it was a repeat of their epic battle in the 1953 French GP. As he came near to completing his stint, Hawthorn had an advantage of about 200 yards, but he had a problem. He was due to hand over to Ivor Bueb, making his debut in the big time, while Fangio was due to hand over to Stirling Moss, the world's best sports car driver.
At about 6.30pm, Hawthorn headed for his pits. The road was narrow and there was no pit lane in the modern sense, just an apron marked by white lines. Hawthorn was determined to hand over while in the lead, he overtook Lance Macklin in the Austin Healey and braked hard. The 'Healey was going full chat and Macklin was in danger of ramming the Jaguar in the back. He had no option but to ease to the left it had to be a gradual move, a sudden jink would have sent him into a spin.
Pierre 'Levegh' was close behind in a Mercedes Benz 300 SLR travelling perhaps 50 mph faster than Macklin and Levegh had nowhere to go as the 'Healey moved in front of him. Levegh braked hard and raised his hand to warn Fangio who was about 50 yards behind. Fangio was to say that Levegh's gesture saved his life and, perhaps, the lives of dozens of spectators. That was typically gracious of Fangio, but he could see precisely what was happening and it is a fair bet that Fangio was on the anchors before Levegh raised his hand.
Levegh's car hit the low, sloping, back of the 'Healey. Had it been many another car, there would have been a simple smash, but the tail of a 'Healey was a launch pad. The 300 SLR rose in the air and flew towards a protecting earth bank. Had Levegh been launched fifty yards further back, it could have been merely a very nasty fatal crash, not a catastrophe. His car, however, hit the bank as the road swung right into the Dunlop Curve. The 300SLR hit the bank almost head on and broke into pieces. One section tore back along spectators the car had just passed. As it cut through them it exploded in a ball of flame. There had been much magnesium in the car's construction and magnesium burns fiercely.
The crowd was packed, they had prime places opposite the pits. It was early in the race, not yet the time to head off for a meal. At four in the morning many would be sleeping in tents. Some spectators were decapitated, some were fried alive, some were killed by what amounted to shrapnel.
As Levegh's car went into the crowd, Macklin's was knocked to the right into the pits, injuring several people, and then bounced back across the track sideways on, blocking it. It was a miracle no further accidents occurred.
The exact death toll was never properly counted. More than 80 spectators, men, women and children. died at the scene. Others were terribly injured and died later. The death toll most frequently quoted is 87, but that is almost certainly an under estimate and, besides, does not take into account the survivors who went through life scarred by burns and shrapnel and who lost arms and legs.
The organisers knew that if they stopped the race, the roads around the circuit would have been jammed and ambulances needed to get through, lots of ambulances, more ambulances than the city of Le Mans could provide. Only a few people out of the 300,000 present knew how bad the crash had been. News trickled around the circuit over time so there was no mass exodus. The few who had portable wirelesses would have heard news bulletins and perhaps not taken the story in since cars were still racing.
The organisers made the right decision, but they were criticised for it afterwards by people who felt that racing should not have continued while people lay dying. The injured needed doctors more than they needed some sentimental mark of respect. Ambulances needed clear roads in and out of the circuit. The number of injured was so huge that hospitals for miles around had to be alerted.
After nearly ten hours of racing, Mercedes Benz held a comfortable 1 2. Then at 1.45 am came a call from Stuttgart to withdraw the team. It was a dignified gesture and by any reasonable standard, Mercedes Benz was the moral victor, but the record books say that the winners were Hawthorn and Bueb in a Jaguar.
After the race, wild stories circulated, including one that Mercedes Benz had a secret fuel additive in a hidden tank and this had caused a separate explosion which added to the death toll. It was nonsense. It was also just ten years after VE Day and while a German team dominated the race, French makers contested the 750cc class.
I have never been an apologist for Mercedes Benz, the company most likely to irritate me. Let me put this clearly: Mercedes Benz was not at fault in any way. Mercedes Benz acted with dignity, unlike Jaguar. The behaviour of certain people at Jaguar, notably the team manager, 'Lofty' England, was a disgrace. Mercedes Benz had the race under control at the ten hour mark.
Pierre Levegh was blamed by some, anxious to shift blame from Hawthorn. 'Levegh' was a pseudonym adopted by Pierre Bouillion, in honour of his uncle, Alfred Velghe, one of the greatest pioneer racing drivers who had raced under an anagram of his surname. Someone even suggested that a man who used a pseudonym was mentally unbalanced there were no depths to which some people would not go to defend themselves.
The Jaguar camp, in particular, turned nasty and suggested that Levegh was too inexperienced and too slow. In fact, Levegh had driven more miles at Le Mans than anyone in the 1955 race and he had lapped faster than four of the six Jaguar works drivers. Jaguar had signed Ivor Bueb who had never raced a sports car of more than 1500cc, had never raced at night, and had never raced for three hours, the usual stint at Le Mans, let alone 12 hours out of 24.
The official inquiry declared that no one driver was to blame, but there is no question that Hawthorn triggered the sequence of events, as he knew only too well at the time.
One could say that it was only a 'racing accident' and there were many contributory causes, but the fact remains that Hawthorn caused Macklin to brake and change direction and it is a general principle of driving that anyone who causes another to brake or change direction is at fault.
Lance Macklin, the innocent party in the accident, and a very gifted driver, retired from the sport a few months later. Three years later Hawthorn published an account of the accident in a British national newspaper which caused Macklin to take out a writ for libel, but Hawthorn was dead before the case came to court. Mike died on the Guildford bypass in January, 1959.
Mercedes Benz's withdrawal meant that neither Fangio nor Moss ever won Le Mans and the only person to come out of the sorry story with credit was Ivor Bueb. He was ready to take over from Hawthorn and he saw the crash. He got in the car and he kept it on the island, Bueb's conduct under trying circumstances was widely admired and doors began to open for him. 'Ivor the Driver' was never of the top drawer, but he was a great personality (and practical joker) who was to win Le Mans again in 1957 and be an occasional Formula One driver. He died in a French hospital in 1959 after crashing in an F2 race. He should have recovered, but the doctors did not notice that he had a ruptured spleen.
It used to be a grim joke among racing drivers that you should choose in advance the country in which you had your big crash. In the 1950s, France was not high on that list.
The accident at Le Mans contributed to the decision of Mercedes Benz to withdraw from racing at the end of 1955 though, in fact, the company was still not financially strong and it had achieved all its objectives in racing.
There was a temporary ban on motor racing in France, which meant the cancellation of the French GP and the Reims 12 Hour race. The Swiss GP was also cancelled under a temporary ban which soon became permanent,
Despite the temporary ban on racing in France and the permanent ban in Switzerland, the Le Mans tragedy had little effect on road races in general. This goes against received wisdom. When I wrote about the Le Mans accident ten years ago, it was a story I believed. When writing this piece, however, I have access to the Internet and can check a few points. I have discovered a site called Racingcircuits.net which lists every circuit in the world.
In 1955, Switzerland had only one active circuit, Bremgarten, at Bern, which was used once a year. The headline is that motor racing was banned in Switzerland, but there was only one car meeting a year. Your Switzer is not big on excitement, he likes to rise early to clip the grass with scissors and comb it into place. Then it is breakfast of muesli and yoghurt, both very nourishing. A Switzer's idea of a wild time is to yodel. By the way, Orson Welles was wrong, the Swiss did not invent the cuckoo clock, that's way too frivolous for Johnny Switzer, the cuckoo clock comes from Bavaria.
Two years after the Le Mans catastrophe, in the 1957 Mille Miglia, 'Fon' de Portago had a tyre burst on his works Ferrari and crashed. De Portago and his passenger were killed together with nine spectators, five of whom were children. The Mille Miglia was never run again as a race. It had been banned in its traditional form after the 1938 event when a car went into spectators and killed children, but it had been revived in the confusion which follows a war.
The only race which may have been cancelled as a result of the Mille Miglia crash was the Bari Grand Prix, for sports cars, and I cannot discover whether a race at Bari was even scheduled after 1956, road races came and went.
Road racing thrived well into the 1970s. Throughout history, road races had come and gone, only a few had a long history. They were staged because the local council thought a race would bring money and attention to a town. The French city of Caen was one such. It staged an annual race from 1952 to 1958 (1955 was cancelled). It ran as many races after Le Mans '55 as before. The race was no longer promoted when the expense outweighed the benefit. The demise of the Caen GP had nothing at all to do with Le Mans '55.
As time went on, expense increased. First it was teams and drivers wanting more, but those demands were met. What became
Less sustainable were all the safety measures which were being demanded from the end of the 1960s. These had nothing to do with Le Mans '55, they had more to do with Jackie Stewart's campaign and the death of Jim Clark.
Unless you were around at the time, you cannot appreciate the impact of Clark's death. Whatever the reason Jimmy's Lotus left the track, it was hitting a tree that killed him. People began to wonder why the tree was there or, at least, why there was not a tyre barrier around it. Then they looked at the temporary tracks put up once a year and began to see the real or metaphorical tree that killed Jim Clark.
Once there were road races in any town that had a budget to attract a field, but that free and easy approach was killed by minimum safety standards which crept in in the late 1960s. As soon as Armco entered the equation, the cost of preparing a circuit went up and the local Chamber of Commerce could no longer justify the expense.
I know there are books out there which claim that Le Mans 1955 changed motor racing, but it did not. There were minor changes made to the Le Mans circuit for 1956, a chicane was added for 1968, and there was a major re think for the 1972 race, a generation after 1955.
Motor racing actually learned very little from Le Mans '55. It was only ten years after WWII and the attitude to happenchance death on a large scale was different to the attitude today. Despite the claims made by those trying to sell books, Le Mans 1955 changed nothing. The one thing that changed the sport was economics.
It was the money, always follow the money.
To check out previous features from Mike, click here