WORDS Darrell Hartman
NOVEMBER 15, 2024
It is often said that the Le Mans 24-hour endurance race is more about stamina than speed, but in the days leading up to the 1955 edition, which would go down as one of the worst tragedies in motorsport history, you couldn’t help but notice how fast the cars were going.
The D-shaped Circuit de la Sarthe, located in the French countryside 120 miles southwest of Paris, consisted of public roads that were still regularly used by horse-drawn hay wagons. In 1950, the quickest lap around it had been done at an average speed of 102.7 mph. Four years later, a Jaguar and a Ferrari both surpassed 115 mph. In 1955, Ferrari’s Eugenio Castellotti demolished that record during practice, hitting 118.56 mph. The flat-out speeds achieved in practice were equally astonishing, with Juan Manuel Fangio, the driver widely agreed to be the world’s best, getting his Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR up to 181.57 mph on the 3.6-mile Mulsanne Straight.
After two years away from sportscar racing, Mercedes had returned with a masterfully engineered new machine. One of its drivers at Le Mans that year, John Fitch, later described the 300 SLR as “a ferocious racing car” with “a staggering complexity of parts.” Its body was made of ultralight magnesium alloy; Motor Sport reported that its fuel-injected 3-liter engine emitted an “unholy scream.” One month earlier, Fangio and the 25-year-old English driver Stirling Moss had powered theirs to a one-two finish at the Mille Miglia. In the hands of elite drivers like these, it seemed almost unbeatable.
The 300 SLR was virtually identical to the company’s championship-winning W196 Formula 1 car. Like Ferrari and others, though, Mercedes dubiously classified it as a consumer “prototype” in order to enter it at Le Mans. The disparity between these specialized racers and the slower production models on the track rankled some. For the second year running, Austin-Healey had withdrawn its team of near-standard production cars in protest over the proliferation of bogus “prototypes.” For many others, though, the enormous gap in vehicle capabilities was just another defining element of the classic race also known as La Ronde Infernale.
Though notoriously grueling for car and driver, Le Mans was not considered all that dangerous. The eight-mile circuit had been rebuilt in 1949 to modern specifications after the old track was destroyed by German bombing. In the six years since, four drivers had been killed there, an unremarkable number by period standards. Tunnels ran under the track so that spectators could cross safely, and the viewing areas were protected by four-foot-tall earthen barriers.
Some of the best action was to be seen at the start-finish line, where a straightaway encouraged dramatic overtakes as other cars entered and exited the pits. A handful of naysayers had begun to complain that this section of the racecourse was unsafe. The quarter-mile-long pit area was undivided from the main track; it was also narrow, with no deceleration lane, and a right kink leading up to it gave harried drivers one more thing to think about as they approached this busy area at speed. Mercedes team director Alfred Neubauer later claimed that he had, for this reason, warned his drivers to pull over well in advance when pitting. Some of Neubauer’s fears were confirmed during the Wednesday evening test drive, when a DB-Panhard entering the pits collided with Moss’s Mercedes. French driver Jean Behra, who was standing nearby with two journalists, sustained head and leg injuries that prevented him from racing for Gordini that weekend.
Another topic of discussion leading up to the race was the hinged fap that Mercedes had attached to the rear deck of its cars. The driver pulled a dashboard lever to raise it, creating drag and an additional boost of stopping power that was sure to come in handy at the end of the Mulsanne Straight, where the dramatic comedown from speeds of around 180 mph created overtaking opportunities. An impressed Moss called the system “unbelievable,” but it left rivals confused. Seeing a Mercedes “wind brake” flip up for the first time, a Porsche driver assumed the car’s trunk latch had broken. Others complained that it obstructed their views on corners. The night before the race, Mercedes complied with an official request to cut a second Plexiglas window in its metal braking faps. This sort of compromise was typical during an age of motorsport in which teams were free to conduct experiments, including strange ones, and worry about the safety implications later.
Mike Hawthorn pictured at Silverstone in 1956.
Mercedes’ wind brakes were its answer to the powerful disc brakes used by Jaguar, whose highly aerodynamic D-Type was one of the other fastest cars on the circuit. Jaguar had become a force at Le Mans in recent years, winning in 1953 and losing to Ferrari by less than three minutes in 1954. For Jaguar, the fact that it had no Formula 1 team made the 24 Hours an especially important prize.
Its star driver in 1955 was 26-year-old Englishman Mike Hawthorn. Fangio had decimated the Grand Prix competition the year before with Mercedes, but Hawthorn, racing for Ferrari, had finished third. People were still talking about the French Grand Prix of 1953, when he’d won a sixty-lap duel against Fangio by a single second after overtaking the unflappable Argentine on the last corner.
The six-foot-two Hawthorn was blonde, handsome, rowdy, and stylish. His habit of wearing butterfly-shaped bow ties in the cockpit had earned him the nickname Le Papillon. His Jaguar teammate Norman Dewis later remembered him as “genuinely debonair.” Hawthorn embraced the oftrack hedonism that was typical of the era. He liked beer and women, and often disappeared after a day of driving to indulge in both, sometimes with carousing buddies who drove for other teams. These included Moss and the lesser-known Lance Macklin, who was also competing at that year’s Le Mans. Macklin had a privileged and well-traveled background; he’d spent part of his childhood in Monte Carlo, attended Eton, and gone to college in Switzerland. Though talented, the playboyish Macklin had never taken the profession as seriously as Moss or Hawthorn. “Sometimes it was a nightmare to make him practice at all,” one of his Aston Martin teammates later recalled. “If there was some blonde he was after, he just wouldn’t show up.”
One of the best results of Macklin’s career had been at Le Mans, in 1951, when he’d logged a third-place finish in an Aston Martin. The Austin-Healey 100S he’d secured for 1955 was a private entry, since the manufacturer’s team was once again sitting out the race. Macklin’s was the first Austin-Healey to be outfitted with disc brakes, but these were far less impressive than the Jaguar’s, and the experienced Macklin was realistic about his prospects. He could compete with other roadsters, but one of his main tasks would be to keep out of the way of faster cars like Hawthorn’s.
The “wind brake” in action on Fangio/Moss Mercedes.
Memories of the war were still fresh in the minds of the public.
Hawthorn’s celebrated French Grand Prix victory over Fangio had been in a Ferrari. This time around, he was driving a British car against a German one, and there was more national pride involved. Hawthorn’s anti-German prejudice was one of his defining passions. He was known to confront British motor enthusiasts and chew them out for buying “bloody Kraut cars,” and when driving himself to races in Germany, he timed his refueling stops to avoid buying gas in a country that he still, in many ways, viewed as the enemy. These feelings were no secret; they were, in fact, probably the reason that Neubauer had never approached him about driving for Mercedes and had signed Moss instead.
Nor was this sentiment unique to Hawthorn. Memories of the war were still fresh in the minds of the public; Nazis had imprisoned French resistance fighters in an internment camp just a few miles away from the Circuit de la Sarthe. The prospect of a Le Mans victory for Mercedes, the German powerhouse, ignited national sentiment in the French and British that can be hard to appreciate today. Aware of these sensitivities, Neubauer had assembled a six-man driving team for Le Mans that included just two Germans, Karl Kling and Hans Herrmann. Its biggest stars were Fangio and Moss. Its biggest curiosity was a 49-year-old Frenchman named Pierre Levegh.
Levegh was known to French racing fans, and his selection made sense from a PR perspective. Otherwise, the balding Parisian garage owner was a surprising choice. He was past his prime, and he hadn’t exactly distinguished himself in his prime, either. He had, however, shown himself to be capable of near-greatness at Le Mans.
Levegh had dreamed of winning the prestigious French race since adolescence. He’d attended every edition of Le Mans since 1930 and, beginning in 1938, had driven in it six times. After failing to secure a car for the first two postwar races, he had co-driven a factory Talbot to a fourth-place finish in 1951. The following year, aged 46, Levegh entered a Talbot that he’d done all the work on himself – and insisted on going the distance alone. When dawn broke on Sunday morning, many of the other fastest cars had retired, leaving Levegh and his Talbot with an astonishing three-lap lead. Each time he came in for refueling, he refused to hand the wheel over to his increasingly frustrated partner. His mileage total surpassed 2,000. He was 70 minutes away from glory, and borderline catatonic from exhaustion, when his car stopped running. Shortly after his race ended, Levegh was seen lying motionless on the grass behind the pits with a rug draped over him. Most chroniclers report that he made a shifting error that destroyed his crankshaft, although this account is disputed. Levegh himself never explained what happened.
That year, Mercedes finished first and second in front of a devastated and somewhat hostile French crowd. (The next year, the rules were changed to limit each driver’s time at the wheel to 18 hours.) The politically astute Neubauer, who’d brought all German drivers that year, made a mental note to put Levegh in a Mercedes when the team returned to Le Mans. When it did, in 1955, he followed through, pairing Levegh with another amateur driver, an American named John Fitch. Unlike the rest of the Mercedes team, Fitch got to know Levegh a little during the lead-up to the race. The Frenchman had a “habitually solemn demeanor,” he later wrote, and a “general air of deep reflection.” He spoke no English, and it only added to his air of somber mystery that Pierre Levegh was not his real name. He had changed his name from Pierre Bouillin to Pierre Levegh as a young man, in tribute to an uncle who’d been a race car driver – and originally, it was said, to keep his mother from knowing about the dangerous hobby he’d taken up.
Though he was generally not one for mingling, Levegh confided to Fitch before the 1955 Le Mans that he felt uncomfortable in the SLR. When the head of the Mercedes press department, Arthur Keser, teased Levegh for his oversized crash helmet, the Frenchman was unamused. It was the type worn by American fighter pilots, he explained, and offered “special protection.”
The Mercedes drivers Levegh, Fitch, Kling, and André Simon (a Frenchman who’d been brought in last-minute as a replacement for the injured Hermann) were expected to circulate, not win. These lower-tier drivers would be racing in the shadow of the 300 SLR being piloted by Moss and Fangio, a dream team that gave Mercedes even more of a presumptive edge against Ferrari and Jaguar. Hawthorn, for his part, had more confidence in his own abilities and his D-Type than he did in his co-driver, Ivor Bueb, who was competing in his first endurance race. Surely whatever small lead he could gain over Mercedes would start to disappear once the drivers swapped. Fangio took the first stint in his Mercedes car. Neubauer spat on the ground to wish him luck.
Drivers sprinting to their cars at the start of the 1955 24 Hours of Le Mans.
The drivers dashed across the pits and into their cars at 4 p.m. exactly. (The theatrical ‘Le Mans Start’ was discontinued for safety reasons in 1970.) Fangio’s luck failed him immediately: his gear stick got stuck inside his trouser leg, and he started in the rear of the pack.
Castellotti took an early lead in his Ferrari, setting a new lap record on his first flying lap. Hawthorne slid into second after passing the Ferrari driven by Umberto Maglioli on the Mulsanne Straight. Fangio, once he’d gotten his khakis clear of his machinery, spent his first two laps battling all the way into fourth. Then he overtook Maglioli, in full view of the grandstand crowd, at the end of another record lap.
Ten new lap records would be set – by Castellotti, Fangio, and Hawthorn – within the first two hours. The pace at the front was bone-rattling, more like a Grand Prix than an endurance race, and spectators were transfixed. Around the grandstand area and elsewhere, they stood on tables, chairs, and boxes in order to get a better view over the four-foot-tall earth barriers.
Half an hour in, the top three cars had pulled away from the next-fastest group and begun lapping others. At 5:10 p.m., 70 minutes into the race, Castellotti’s foot slipped off his brake pedal. As he struggled to avoid spinning out, Hawthorn, and then Fangio, overtook him.
The race now became a duel for the ages, with Hawthorn fighting tenaciously to stay ahead. Fangio took the lead and promptly lost it. He took the lead again on the 18th lap and held it longer, causing Hawthorn to succumb to a moment of mental weakness. Hawthorn later recalled thinking that it was perhaps inevitable for him to be overtaken by a man-and-machine combo as awesome as Fangio in a 300SLR. “Then I came to my senses and thought: ‘Damn it, why should a German car beat a British car?’” He reclaimed the lead on the Mulsanne Straight.
The battle between Hawthorn and Fangio that kicked off that year’s Le Mans was all the more compelling because it represented a “clash of personalities,” Neubauer later wrote. “The small, wiry Argentinian took the bends with consummate artistry, never risking too much, yet never losing the slightest chance. The fair-haired Englishman, on the other hand, had something hard, almost brutal, in his driving, that demanded the maximum from his car and from himself.” Was his go-for-broke driving emotional, or part of a predetermined strategy to force the Fangio-Moss Mercedes beyond its limits? This point would be debated for years afterward. Norman Dewis, co-driver of the third Jaguar, claimed that Hawthorn had been instructed to “push on as hard as hell with no thought of finishing.” Others who knew the fiery Englishman disagreed. Aston Martin driver Tony Brooks believed that Hawthorn let his emotions get the better of him when he made his fateful first pit entry at 6:29 p.m. “I think it was a rush of blood to the head,” he said.
The Hawthorn/Bueb Jaguar at the 1955 24 Hours of Le Mans.
“I think it was a rush of blood to the head.”
The aftermath of the worst tragedy in motorsport history.
Hawthorn got the signal to refuel and change drivers after completing his 32nd lap. On the upward slope leading to the pit straight, with the grandstand approaching, he lapped Levegh’s Mercedes for the first time and began to gain rapidly on a slower car that he had lapped three times already: Lance Macklin’s Austin-Healey.
Macklin, traveling at about 135 mph, had glimpsed a green Jaguar and a silver Mercedes in his rearview mirror and edged to the right to let the faster cars pass. Hawthorn overtook him, as expected, and then did something that Macklin later characterized as a misjudgment: he pulled back in front of the Austin-Healey — “rather violently,” Fangio claimed — and braked for his pit entry. Macklin slammed on his brakes. Realizing he was about to rear-end the Jaguar, he swerved left to avoid it.
Levegh’s Mercedes collided with the sloping rear of the Austin-Healey at 150 mph and launched into the air. Macklin remembered feeling the “searing heat” of its exhaust on his face as it sailed over him, and seeing Levegh hunched over the wheel as his Mercedes flew off the track. It landed on an earth embankment, crashed into a concrete stairwell, and exploded like a grenade, sending shards of hot metal hurtling into an open public enclosure next to the grandstand.
Survivors positioned on both sides of the track said that the impact sounded like a bomb going off. What they heard next was screaming chaos. The enormous impact had torn the engine mount and front axle from the SLR’s chassis and sent both of these large pieces scything through a shoulder-to-shoulder crowd. Fifty people were killed in an instant, many of them decapitated. In the words of one eyewitness, the approximately ten-by-forty-foot area in which they had been standing had become “a clear patch with lots of bits.”
It began raining at dawn, and the grounds had turned to mud by the time Hawthorn and Bueb claimed a hollow victory.
The burning chassis of Levegh’s Mercedes sat atop the embankment; his dead body lay beneath it. Marshals sprayed water on the flames, which only made the magnesium components burn stronger. It would be hours before the blaze went out.
The collision had sent Macklin’s Austin-Healey spinning backwards through the pits. It mowed down a gendarme, a photographer, and two race officials; all four were gravely injured. Miraculously, Macklin exited his vehicle unhurt.
Fangio, who’d been roaring up behind Levegh, had cut such a tight path through the careening vehicles that a streak of green paint from one of the British cars was later found on his Mercedes. He later said that Levegh, by raising his arm in warning right before the collision, had saved his life.
Hawthorn overshot the Jaguar pits and got out of his car looking distraught. Because the rules prohibited driving backwards, team manager Lofty England ordered him to do another lap before handing the car over to Bueb.
It took hours for the full scale of the disaster to become known. Life mostly went on as usual outside the area that now resembled a warzone, and jaunty accordion music continued to play over the PA system as panicked spectators fled and gendarmes and volunteers entered the carnage, using advertising boards as stretchers. Doctors attended to the dead and wounded; priests administered last rites in French and German.
The organizers kept the race going and made no public announcement, reasoning that the ensuing panic and mass exodus would impede emergency vehicles. Radio listeners and television viewers learned that dozens had been killed before most people at the race did. Neubauer approached Jaguar about doing a joint withdrawal and was rebuffed. After holding an emergency meeting in Stuttgart, the Daimler-Benz board of directors told him to pull the two other cars from the race at around midnight. By the time he finally did, at 1:45, they were running first and third. Having held the lead for several hours, Nebauer later explained, the team “could now afford to retire.” It had packed up and left the track by daybreak.
It began raining at dawn, and the grounds had turned to mud by the time the Hawthorn-Bueb Jaguar claimed a hollow victory. The death toll had risen into the eighties, with more than one hundred injured. Front-page newspaper photos of Hawthorn sipping from a bottle of champagne would come back to haunt him. He later wrote of the disaster: “It was as though we were at the point where a great rock had been hurled into a pond, sending out waves of shock and horror and indignation which would later flow back, bringing consequences which no one could foresee.”
Mike Hawthorn and Ivor Bueb after winning the 1955 24 Hours of Le Mans.
The rush to assign blame began immediately. Mercedes and Jaguar declared their innocence in press statements, but the early prevailing sentiment ran against the Germans and the supposedly incompetent Levegh. In his 1958 memoir, Hawthorn implicitly blamed Macklin, who in turn sued his ex-friend for libel. The proceedings ended a year later, when Hawthorn died in a road accident near his home in Surrey.
The scholarship of the intervening decades — including whole books on the 1955 Le Mans disaster by Mark Kahn and Chris Hilton — seems to agree that the driver who set the deadly chain of events in motion was Hawthorn. (Macklin, who died in 2002, claimed that Hawthorn admitted as much right after the accident and even apologized to him for it.) Years after the heat of the moment, the pointlessness of Hawthorn’s risky maneuver outside the pits stands out. Endurance races are decided by minutes, not seconds. By pulling ahead of Macklin instead of tucking in behind him, Hawthorn could not have hoped to gain more than a couple seconds on Fangio.
Years after the heat of the moment, the pointlessness of Hawthorn’s risky maneuver outside the pits stands out.
An official inquiry exonerated all drivers. The decision to continue the race, initially criticized as heartless, has come to be viewed as the right one. It almost certainly saved lives. The editors of Motor Sport argued in an editorial later that summer that it also probably preserved the existence of Le Mans. The racing press accused governments and the popular press of overreacting — “DEATH RACE,” blared the Daily Mail — but in hindsight, clearly something had to be done about the fact that a split-second misjudgment by an elite driver could create mass carnage. France banned all motor racing pending an investigation of the incident. Switzerland banned all motor racing, period, a restriction that endured until 2018. The 1955 Italian and Spanish Grand Prix were canceled. Races with a reputation for being dangerous came under special scrutiny: Nürburgring was called off that year, and the deadly Carrera Panamericana was discontinued.
The Automobile Club de l’Ouest, organizer of Le Mans, redesigned the track and spectator areas in light of the tragedy, moving the pits back nearly 50 feet and making other safety improvements. The 1956 race featured no fatal incidents – and drew even bigger crowds.
A memorial plaque near the grandstand area where the crash took place, photographed in 1969.
Not that the lessons of 1955 ended here. In many ways, they were just beginning. The Le Mans disaster laid bare the grand illusion that motorsport had evolved beyond the bloodiness of its early years. The primitive scenes of violence from the grandstand area, which appeared in newsreels around the world, made it gruesomely clear that the sport’s safety standards had failed to keep up with the increasing speed and deadliness of its cars.
The moment marked the end of an age of innocence, which is probably one reason the scale of the 1955 Le Mans disaster has never been surpassed. Though it stands alone in this respect, the incident also served as just one example in a larger argument. Were horrific crashes like this one unavoidable? Or could more be done to prevent them without compromising the fundamental draw of the sport? The racing establishment of this era resisted self-reform, and only got serious about redefining safety standards following crashes in which innocent bystanders were killed and public outrage ensued. Le Mans was the most devastating of these disasters, but not the only one. Another was the 1957 crash during the Mille Miglia that killed two drivers and nine spectators, which led the Italian government to outlaw racing on public roads, and landed Enzo Ferrari on trial for manslaughter.
Change did not come swiftly. On the contrary, Formula 1’s deadliest season, in which separate accidents claimed the lives of four drivers in five months, occurred in 1958. Ferrari’s Wolfgang Von Trips and 15 spectators were killed at the 1961 Italian Grand Prix. It would take years before elite drivers stopped dying at alarming rates, and for the popular image of them as peacetime fighter pilots — fast, courageous, likely to be killed in action — to fade away. Even then, the argument that death had always been part of racing hindered efforts to protect drivers and contributed to a lingering expectation of self-sacrifice. World champions like Jackie Stewart could raise safety concerns, but they continued to be ignored until the death or near-death of a famous driver called attention to them. For example, Formula 1 drivers considered the Nürburgring so dangerous that they boycotted it for the 1970 Grand Prix, but it was not until Niki Lauda’s near-fatal crash there, six years later, that the track was comprehensively reimagined.
Safety considerations are paramount at the top levels of racing now. Since Ayrton Senna’s shocking death in 1994, only one Formula 1 driver, Jules Bianchi, has been killed while racing. Both tragedies forced the adoption of universal safety measures — including new standards for safety barriers, reductions in pit-lane speeds, the adoption of virtual safety cars, the halo, and more — far quicker and more comprehensively than the old disasters ever did.
Mercedes abandoned racing at the end of the 1955 season. It already had plans to do so, having proven itself as an all-conquering force in Formula 1, but the Le Mans disaster certainly made this a harder decision to reverse. Fangio went on to win that season’s Formula 1 title, his third and last for Mercedes. (He won again in 1956, with Ferrari, and in 1957, with Maserati.) In the short term, the Mercedes recusal helped Jaguar to dominate Le Mans and Ferrari to become more of a force in Formula 1. It was also part of a multi-decade identity shift for Mercedes, which would go on to pioneer anti-lock brakes, anti-collision radar systems, and other consumer safety technologies. It would be another 40 years before Mercedes got back into racing, and it did not win its next Formula 1 championship until 2014, with drivers Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg.
Its cars were terrifyingly fast all over again. This time, though, they were far less deadly.
Niki Lauda’s near-fatal crash at Nürburgring in 1976 led to a redesign of the track.
