- This topic has 5 replies, 4 voices, and was last updated 11 months, 1 week ago by
.
-
Posts
-
First run in 1923, The 24 Hours of Le Mans was conceived as a trial of endurance and reliability for road-going production cars, at a time when breakdowns and malfunctions were still a common occurrence. Its rules tried to duplicate the challenges of everyday motoring of the time, decreeing that weights had to be carried to the equivalent of three passengers, that all tools and spares had to be carried on the car, and that the only person allowed to work on the car was the driver.
The event didn’t attract a lot of attention outside France until it was catapulted into the headlines by a sensational result in 1927. Not long after dark, at around 9.40pm, a car left the track just past the blind bend at Maison Blanche (White House), hit a fence and rebounded back into the middle of the road. The ensuing pile-up involved seven cars, including all three cars of the Bentley team. The first two Bentleys were completely wrecked, but the driver of the third, S.C.H. ‘Sammy’ Davis, saw something in his headlights – he could never say exactly what – that put him on the alert, and braked harder than usual for the corner. On sighting the pile of wreckage he managed to throw the Bentley into a broadside skid to avoid piling in head-on.
Finding that the car was still drivable, he nursed it to the pits, where he changed the bent off-side front wheel, improvised repairs to the rest of the damage as best he could (all unaided, as the rules dictated), and set off again, determined not to give up. After running for nearly eighteen hours with a bent chassis, a misaligned front axle and out-of-sync brakes, among other damage, Davis and his co-driver Dr Dudley Benjafield drove the car not only to the finish but to victory. From then on the fame of the race (and of Bentley) was assured, and over the next few years it became an international battleground in which the world’s top manufacturers of performance cars competed for fame and prestige. In 1965 the city of Le Mans honoured the man whose actions had given the renown of its race such a boost by naming a street Rue S.C.H. Davis.
By the 1950s the event had left all pretence of everyday motoring well behind. Although there were still classes for production sports cars, a rule that allowed ‘prototypes’ had resulted in the contest for outright victory being dominated by thinly disguised racing machinery. Unfortunately development of the track, which at that time consisted entirely of public roads closed for the occasion, and facilities had not kept pace with the vast increase in speeds, as was tragically demonstrated in the early evening of 11 June 1955.
The main contenders in the 1955 race were Ferrari, Mercedes-Benz and Jaguar. The Jaguars and Ferraris had at least a tenuous connection to road cars: the Jaguar D-Type had a tuned version of the engine used in all Jaguar’s road cars and the production E-Type of five years later was derived directly from it, while the dividing line between road and racing Ferraris was always a bit hazy in those days. But the Mercedes-Benz 300SLR took full advantage of the loose regulations defining a ‘prototype’ and was an out-and-out racer, little more than a two-seater version of the contemporary W196 Formula 1 car. All were fast cars, reaching over 180mph down the three-mile Mulsanne Straight.
The pace was blistering from the 4.00pm start. After the initial leader, Eugenio Castellotti in a Ferrari, slowed with mechanical troubles, Mike Hawthorn’s Jaguar and Juan-Manuel Fangio’s Mercedes-Benz diced for the lead as if this were a Grand Prix rather than an endurance race, passing and re-passing, repeatedly breaking the lap record and thrilling the crowd. All that ended around 6.30 as the pair of them approached the pits on Lap 35, when there occurred the worst disaster in the history of motor sport.
Hawthorn and Fangio were coming up to lap Fangio’s slower team-mate, the French veteran Pierre Levegh (pronounced ‘Le-vegg,’ not ‘Le-vay’), who was himself about to lap Lance Macklin’s Austin-Healey 100S. Hawthorn had been signalled on the previous lap to come in for his first routine pit stop next time around, but he was leading Fangio at the time and, determined to stay in front of the German car (and this was only ten years after the end of World War II), he was in no mood to slow down any sooner than he had to. He hammered past Levegh’s Mercedes and then Macklin’s Austin-Healey, passing to Levegh’s right and Macklin’s left, before pulling over to the right, in front of Macklin, and braking hard to slow for his pit stop.
Macklin had seen Hawthorn coming in his mirror and had moved over to the right-hand edge of the track to make way. He would have known that Fangio would be following through at any moment, and probably also that Levegh was about to lap him. It would have been natural for him to check his mirror again, and at racing speeds even the time taken for a quick glance in the mirror can make all the difference. In any event, Macklin seems to have been caught on the hop by Hawthorn’s manoeuvre, not least because the Jaguar’s disc brakes were more powerful than the Healey’s drums. Already as far over to the right as he could go, Macklin swerved abruptly to the left to avoid tail-ending Hawthorn’s slowing Jaguar, and may have momentarily lost control. His swerve took him right into the path of Levegh’s faster Mercedes. Levegh had no time to do anything but stamp on the brakes. The impact launched the Mercedes into the air.
Most unfortunately the collision happened just before a very slight right-hand bend. It was little more than a kink, but that was enough for the Mercedes’ flight to end, not on the road but on top of the earth bank that was the only thing separating the spectators from the track. It somersaulted along the bank and hit the concrete wall of a spectator tunnel, disintegrating to send components flying for 100 metres into the packed crowd, including the entire front axle assembly, the engine, and the bonnet cover. Fuel from the ruptured tank started a fire in the remaining wreckage on the bank that became quite lethal when the magnesium alloy used for the bodywork ignited.
Nobody wore seat belts in those days, it being widely considered better to take your chances of being thrown out in an accident than to be trapped in a burning car. Levegh was hurled from the tumbling wreck and died instantly from head injuries. His body lay on the track in full view of his wife in the pits opposite.
Macklin’s Austin-Healey was catapulted backwards along the road, bouncing off the pit counter and injuring four people who were standing there, to come to rest against the barrier on the opposite side of the track. He escaped without serious injury.
Fangio always maintained that Levegh raised a warning hand just before the collision, and that this may have saved his life. He threaded his way through the chaos unscathed.
But in the spectator enclosures it was a horrific bloodbath. The death toll is usually given as 82, but the French police records have never been released and estimates have gone as high as 130. Well over a hundred were injured, many seriously.
The race was allowed to continue. Nowadays, when even a fairly minor incident brings out the safety car, this appears starkly incredible to many people, but back in the 1950s such precautions were unheard of, and nothing short of complete blockage of the track was likely to bring a race to a halt. The official reason given for letting the race go on was that stopping it would have led to the resultant mass exodus of spectators clogging all the roads leading to the circuit, obstructing access for the emergency vehicles. There is some logic in this argument.
At an emergency board meeting at Mercedes-Benz headquarters in Stuttgart it was decided to withdraw the remaining two cars as a gesture of respect for the dead. At 1.45am the legendary Mercedes racing team manager Alfred Neubauer signalled them into the pits, and the team quietly packed up and went home. Before they left they approached ‘Lofty’ England, the Jaguar team manager, suggesting that he should withdraw his cars too. This he declined to do, on the grounds that Jaguar, and indeed Hawthorn, were entirely innocent of all blame for the accident – a position he maintained for the rest of his life.
Sir Stirling Moss, who was Fangio’s co-driver, maintained for the rest of his long life that the Mercedes decision to withdraw was wrong, leaving them open to the implication that they were admitting blame for the accident and handing the race on a plate to Jaguar. His opinion may just have been influenced by the fact that he and Fangio were in the lead at the time and, given the 300SLR’s proven pace and reliability (it won every other race it was entered for that year, usually with Moss driving), they would have been likely to remain there.
‘Lofty’ England’s decision left a bad taste in many mouths, especially since Hawthorn, partnered by Ivor Bueb, went on to win the race. There was no celebration. I’ve heard that Hawthorn’s own reaction was pretty muted, but a press photographer caught a shot of him holding the victor’s champagne when he happened to be smiling, and a French newspaper splashed it across the front page with the scathing headline, ‘À votre santé, Monsieur Hawthorn’ (‘Cheers, Mr Hawthorn’). To this day Hawthorn has attracted criticism for going on to win after being so closely involved in such a horrendous accident, but it should be remembered that he was under team orders from a hard-headed and ruthless manager. England once sacked on the spot a driver who’d previously won Le Mans for Jaguar, for ignoring a pit signal.
By no means everybody shared England’s stated conviction of Hawthorn’s innocence. Hawthorn himself was a very long way from smiling when he got out of his car immediately afterwards. He was distraught, convinced that he had caused the disaster. Macklin was of the same mind, as were quite a few others. Certain members of the Jaguar team countered with aspersions on Macklin’s and Levegh’s competence, claiming that Levegh was out of his depth in a car as fast as the Mercedes. Both were in fact experienced drivers, but the accusations were particularly ugly in the case of Levegh, who was dead and could not defend himself. Not only was he well-used to driving big cars at Le Mans, having driven 4.5 litre Lago-Talbots there four times, on one occasion finishing fourth, but of the three drivers involved he was surely the least blameworthy. Hawthorn’s manoeuvre may be regarded as ill-considered and Macklin’s reaction as panicked, but Levegh, confronted abruptly at close quarters with a much slower car swerving right into his path, never stood a chance. True, at 50 his age may have slowed his reactions, but he had hardly any time to react anyway. Even Fangio, who himself was 44 at the time, might have come a cropper in those circumstances.
The debate has raged ever since. I have even seen uninformed commentators going so far as to make hysterical accusations of mass-murder, usually against Hawthorn. While researching this piece I came across two much more responsible accounts, both sober, well reasoned and taking proper account of mitigating circumstances. One blamed Hawthorn, the other Macklin.
Mike Hawthorn’s admission of guilt was not to last. Three years later his autobiography ‘Challenge Me the Race’ was published, in which he disclaimed all responsibility for the accident. Although he didn’t actually say who he thought was to blame, on reading the book Lance Macklin assumed Hawthorn was accusing him, and brought a suit for libel. We will never know what conclusions the minute examination of the events in a British courtroom might have led to, for before the case could be heard Hawthorn was dead, killed in a senseless accident on the Guildford By-pass. Driving his hotted-up Jaguar saloon, he was dicing in the rain – with a Mercedes-Benz.
Failing that, probably the most expert verdict we have is a masterly frame-by-frame analysis produced by the late Belgian journalist Paul Frère in 1975 of the only footage that exists of the collision, shot by a French spectator who was injured in the ensuing carnage. He came to the same conclusion as that of the official enquiry: that it was a ‘racing accident,’ just an unlucky combination of circumstances with no one driver exclusively to blame. Frère was not only a highly intelligent and well-informed motor sport journalist of many years’ standing, but a trained engineer and a one-time racing driver himself who regularly drove at Le Mans in the fifties. Indeed, he came second in an Aston Martin in this very race and won in a Ferrari in 1960. I think he was as expert a witness as you’re likely to find, and I am content to believe him.
Personally, I will confine myself to the following observations:
a) There can be no doubt that Hawthorn’s actions, no matter how justified, triggered the accident;
b) Any manoeuvre that forces another driver to take emergency evasive action is normally considered to be bad driving;
c) Nobody should be accusing anyone of anything criminal, based on split-second snap decisions taken in the heat of intense competition driving.But leaving aside which driver was to blame, and the shortcomings of the track and spectator arrangements that the enquiry blamed for the disaster, there is the question of the other factor that turned a racing accident into a major catastrophe. Many drivers have rear-ended a car in front without becoming airborne. How did Levegh’s Mercedes come to be launched so high into the air?
The accepted explanation has always been that the sloping tail of Macklin’s Austin-Healey acted as a ramp, and most accounts still repeat it. I have long been dubious about this, for if you juxtapose the front of a Mercedes-Benz 300SLR with the back of an Austin-Healey it is hard to see how it could have happened unless the Mercedes’ nose was off the ground already; and careful examination of the various films of the accident has now convinced me that it didn’t. The footage is all in grainy monochrome, but enough can still be seen to draw some interesting conclusions, and I am surprised that they don’t seem to have been drawn more widely.
The French amateur film of the collision shows that contact was made between the front right corner of Levegh’s Mercedes and the rear left corner of Macklin’s Healey. If you freeze the film just as the Mercedes begins to lift (there is a still on the Wikipedia page about the disaster) you can see a dark space on that front right corner where the silver bodywork ought to be. There can only be one explanation for this. The bodywork has been smashed and torn away to expose the wheel. In fact you can just make out the wheel itself.
Likewise, if at the right moment you freeze the film shot from just behind the pits, of the Healey cannoning backwards towards the pit wall, you can see that most of the left rear wing has been torn off and the whole wheel is exposed.
My conclusion is that the bodywork of the Mercedes did not ride up on the bodywork of the Healey. Rather, both sets of bodywork crumpled and the two tyres came in contact. Tyre marks on the road showed that Levegh’s wheels had locked under braking. Macklin’s revolving left rear wheel catapulted Levegh’s locked front right wheel, and the rest of the car with it, into the air.
What this also reveals, poignantly, is the hairsbreadth chance that turned collision into catastrophe. The footage shows Macklin’s car careering across the track at an angle, straightening up at almost the same moment as contact was made. If he had reacted more quickly (though we should remember that we’re talking split seconds here) the collision might not have happened at all, for there was just room on the track for three cars abreast and Hawthorn was well over to the right. If he had regained control a fraction of a second later, the Healey would have been too far over for tyre-to-tyre contact. But Macklin got his car pointing straight at the exact moment that his rear wheel was aligned with Levegh’s front wheel. The narrow tyres used in those days made it a matter of no more than a few inches either way. It was incredibly unfortunate.
And if only Levegh hadn’t been braking and his front wheels had been free to revolve, maybe his car wouldn’t have been launched upwards so violently. But what driver, doing 150mph and seeing a much slower car swerving in front of him, wouldn’t have instinctively stood on the brakes?
In the immediate aftermath of the accident several major races were cancelled or postponed, and several countries imposed temporary bans on motor racing while consideration was given to improvements in spectator safety. Switzerland went further, outlawing all forms of motor sport for nearly seventy years. The ban was not lifted until 2022.
Before the 1956 race the area around the pits and grandstand at Le Mans was remodelled. The road was widened and the kink straightened out. The pits and grandstand were demolished and new ones built further back from the track. That was only the beginning of the many alterations and improvements that have been made over the years since. The Circuit de la Sarthe (as it is known) wears a very different aspect today.
Mercedes-Benz withdrew from all forms of competition at the end of the 1955 season, not returning until the 1980s.
The accident haunted Lance Macklin, once a happy-go-lucky bon viveur off the track, for the rest of his life, and he retired from racing after being involved in another fatal accident later in the season. He outlived the other two drivers involved by many years, dying in 2002 at the age of 82.
Perhaps surprisingly, the Austin-Healey he was driving is still in existence. After being impounded by the French authorities it was returned to Healey’s, where it was repaired and then sold. Having passed through several hands, it was stored for many years by an owner who bought it in 1969, until it was auctioned in ‘barn find’ condition in 2011, fetching £843,000. It has since been restored.
Quite awful accident, Richard. I sought out some of the video and still-images after reading your blog, and I have to say that Hawthorn does look, physically, like the villain of the piece. Whether he was the actual villain or not, his face relaxes into a rather smug expression that does him no favours. I was reminded of the comedian Rob Beckett, but with a scowl rather than a smile.
Motor racing is a very different beast to road driving. Whereas one always expects the road motorist to allow sufficient time to avoid hazards ahead when following another vehicle, the same isn’t true of racing cars. Irrespective of his expression (obviously) it’s hard not to see Hawthorn as at least partly to blame, if not guilty of initiating the disaster. Clearly it would be meaningless to lay all the blame on him. If I carelessly throw a match aside, I can hardly be responsible if there is dynamite and petrol and bundles of kindling hidden in unexpected places. That said, to brake hard in front of another vehicle travelling at 150 mph or more is quite astonishing, especially having just passed it.
The old joke has it that accidents are often caused by the nut behind the wheel and this looks to be the case here. It also appears that romantic daredevil attitudes, a lack of concern or appreciation for the safety of drivers and spectators, and a certain ruthlessness that is still found in many sports, not just car racing, today, played a huge part.
Great blog again. Aren’t disasters facinating?
Thank you, Richard. As I read your account I wondered about Hawthorn’s personality and possible similarities to some of the heroes of the two world wars – talented and determined men whose skills and outlook were sometimes too abrasive for civilian life. This piece seems to confirm that On This Day: Mike Hawthorn, Just what DID happen on 22nd January 1959? | HistoricRacingNews.com
My mother’s childhood autograph book contained Mike Hawthorn’s signature. She wasn’t interested in motor sport but her father was keen on all activities to do with cars, so I suppose that’s how the signing came about. I assume Grandpa didn’t get beer thrown over him or she might have said.
On the lighter side of motoring enthusiasm, Grandpa gave me my first driving lesson. I was five or six. He sat me on his knee on the driver’s seat and I held the steering wheel while he drove along the quiet road outside his home.
Richard, did you hear the recent item on Radio 4 on the anniversary of the loss of the Penlee lifeboat? Unexpectedly they played the last call between the lifeboat captain and Falmouth coastguard. The shock of hearing it made me weep.
Thanks for that interesting link, Libby. One thing it doesn’t mention about Hawthorn is how fond he was of his beer – yes, despite the kidney problems – and of horseplay under its influence. I suspect the fate of the autograph hunter was his idea of a joke rather than any act of aggression. Hawthorn’s sense of humour was not subtle. Once Stirling Moss was standing under a tree in the courtyard of the hotel where the drivers were staying for the French Grand Prix, when he felt what he thought was rain. Looking up, he saw Hawthorn perched up in the tree, calling down, ‘I’ve always wanted to piss on you from a great height.’ Hmm…
Even so, I don’t think he was quite as nasty as some like to make out. I would suggest that his apparent callousness and subsequent denial were his way of shutting away the guilt he couldn’t face. Having overshot his pit, he had to go round again and so had a whole lap to realise the full horror. When he got out of the car tears were running down his face, which somewhat gives the lie to the assertion that he didn’t care about the people who died.
And though his cutting up (I think we may call it that) of Macklin was ill-judged and regrettable, it pales in comparison to the tactics of blatant intimidation and deliberate accident-causing introduced into Formula 1 many years later by those lauded multiple champions Ayrton Senna and Michael Schumacher. Had it not been for the catastrophic consequences it would been a minor incident and soon forgotten.
***
No, I missed that, Libby. That would be the call that was suddenly cut off? Yes, very emotive, even though that wasn’t actually the end of the lifeboat.
Fantastic blog Richard, as ever. A difficult one for me to read, as I’ve always found reading about this incident, its sheer violence and the scale of the death toll, deeply troubling. That the sport I love, and a race I love, and a driver I have always been a fan of (Hawthorn) could have been (in whatever way) responsible for such slaughter is difficult to think about.
As far as blame is concerned, I wish people wouldn’t look at it that way. At least, not as far as the drivers are concerned. I find Hawthorn’s late move to be perhaps inconsiderate (it is to be remembered that then as now, it was the responsibility of the driver being lapped to stay out of the way). I find Macklin’s swerve to be perhaps a little excessive (the film shows the Healey getting a big moment of oversteer – the big Healeys were famously tail-happy) which kicked the rear of the car into Levegh’s path. As with the points you noticed about the bodywork, the Healey’s tail stepping out is not something that I’ve ever seen referred to in the copious analysis committed to ink in the years since. Poor Macklin would have had most of his attention on the Mercs coming up behind and probably did overreact slightly to seeing Hawthorn suddenly slowing. Could Hawthorn have predicted this? Possibly. Could Macklin? Hard to say. As everyone has agreed, we’re talking split seconds, and the accident happening at precisely the wrong place. Seconds and inches either way and the incident would be a footnote.
No, to my mind, attributing blame to any of the drivers is like blaming John Derry for the horrendous death toll at the Farnborough air show accident three years previously. Yes, technically he initiated the manoeuvre that overloaded the section of wing skin that triggered the disintegration of the DH110, which then impacted in the crowd leading to many horrific deaths. But you can’t *blame* him for the deaths. The question of blame, even ‘villainy’ is spectacularly wrong-headed in this case. Blame the organisers, perhaps, or the governing body for allowing racing at close to 200mph on a track with virtually nothing that could be called a safety feature. Blame the police for what can legitimately be called a cover-up – when I worked at Autosport I was told by a longstanding reporter there that many of the victims are still listed as ‘missing’…
As you say, Richard, when we live in an era of drivers using their vehicles as offensive weapons (what Senna and Schumacher shamefully did on occasion, we now see the entitled little twerp Max Verstappen doing every other weekend – where will it end?) it seems perverse to lay the blame on drivers making small mistakes in the heat of competition. I am biased, being a fan of Hawthorn, but the French press did a hit job on him rather than blame the race and its organisers. Judging him from a bit of footage after an incredibly stressful and exhausting 24 hour race is akin to tabloid journalists declaring Sally Clark guilty of infanticide on the basis of the look in her eye when the verdict was read out.
(Not that it particularly matters but I suspect Jaguar would have won even without Mercedes pulling out. Moss and Fangio only had a lap on Hawthorn and Bueb, the lap they had gained when Hawthorn drove slowly round back to the pits after the accident, and the Mercedes’ drum brakes would have declined in effectiveness and not have allowed them to keep up the same lap times, while the Jags’ disc brakes stood up a lot better).
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.