The Firsthand Story Of The Grand Prix Of Endurance At Le Mans Which Brought Auto Racing's Greatest Tragedy

Along the shallow "W" formed by the road between the tricky White House turn and the pits of the sunlit Le Mans race course, four dots detached themselves from the landscape and breasted the gentle rise at incredible speed. One instant they were indistinguishable even through a pair of binoculars; the next they could be discerned with the naked eye. It was almost 6:15 p.m. on the 32nd lap of the 23rd Le Mans International Grand Prix of Endurance, and at that instant 87 people had only a few seconds—or at most a few hours—left to live. They were about to be killed in the most shocking disaster ever to darken the history of the sport of motor racing.

The foremost car was the green D-type Jaguar driven by young, tow-headed Mike Hawthorn, leading the race—and Juan Fangio's silver Mercedes—by a few seconds. Hawthorn had just lapped Lance Maeklin in the Austin-Healey for the fourth time and teammate Pierre Levegh in Mercedes No. 20 for the first time. A hundred yards astern, Fangio also was getting ready to take Levegh and Macklin in his relentless pursuit of Hawthorn.

Already, during those opening 32 laps, the two leaders had traded places five times. Fangio had broken the lap record on the fifth, 15th, 17th, 20th and 22nd laps; Hawthorn on the 16th, 24th and 25th laps. It now stood at 4 minutes 6.6 seconds for the 8.38-mile course—a fantastic average of 123 mph—and for the remaining 22 hours no driver was again to come anywhere near that breath-taking speed.

At any time now, the leaders were due in for refueling. Hawthorn had received his signal on the lap before, and as he approached the pit row he appeared to slow suddenly and veer off to the right as though looking for his pit stall. Macklin, a scant 10 feet behind, stood on the powerful disc brakes of his Austin-Healey and swung sharp left to avoid hitting the Jaguar. His sudden swerve combined with violent braking was enough to throw his car into a spin. Twice in as many seconds, the Austin-Healey gyrated like a top. It dived backwards into the pits, struck the wall a glancing blow, ricocheted across the narrow, 35-foot pit road, spinning again as it went; bounced off the earth and timber bulwarks shielding the dense crowd on the opposite side and limped to a stop broadside across the track. Dazed but miraculously unhurt, Maeklin was still nimble enough to hop out of his car and sprint to safety into the nearest pit—which happened to be his own.

"THESE CARS GO TOO FAST"

Veteran Pierre Levegh's Mercedes, traveling at 140 mph, was less than a hundred yards behind Maeklin and Hawthorn. In those desperate, penultimate instants of his life he perhaps recalled a prerace concern expressed to a friend: "We have to get some sort of a signal system working. These cars go too fast." He was able to raise his arm in a despairing warning gesture to Fangio, behind him. To stop was utterly impossible. Levegh took the only remaining course. He swung left, apparently in an effort to squeeze through the narrow gap between Macklin's derelict machine and the earthen bulwarks. The Mercedes grazed the Austin-Healey, struck the five-foot bulwark, vaulted it end over end, then rolled three times. The engine, ripped from its mountings by the almost instantaneous deceleration, shot out of the car like a shell from a gun, mowing a lethal path through the crowd which stood five deep at that point, and through a mass of unwary spectators milling around in the grandstand paddock (see page 42).

Levegh, also projected out of the wreckage, was dead before the flames reached him. Fangio, warned by Levegh, somehow managed to weave his way through the dense smoke, but came so close to the disaster that his windshield cracked from the intense heat of the wreck. Alfred Neubauer, the brusque, portly, authoritarian Mercedes team manager, showed great courage and presence of mind by dashing out to the middle of the track and, at the risk of his life, flagging down oncoming cars.

Not even this appalling disaster had any appreciable effect on the iron discipline of the Mercedes team. On the following lap, the remaining two cars came in for refueling, according to plan. Stirling Moss, obsessively purposeful as ever, took over from Fangio who was pale and almost speechless. "What luck," he stammered, over and over. "I was lucky. I was going to pass Levegh but he signalled to me to stop. Why was I so lucky?"

Voluble, high-strung Andre Simon relieved veteran Karl Kling. Neither Moss nor Simon had any idea of the magnitude of the tragedy, and that was just as well. The race went on. As starter Charles Faroux phrased it: "La bataille continue—the battle continues."

After the taut, merciless battle of the opening laps between Eugenio Castellotti ( Ferrari), Fangio and Hawthorn, climaxed by Levegh's blazing crash, the rest of the race was a dreary affair that gradually fizzled out until, with the official retirement of the Mercedes team at 1:40 a.m. Sunday, it became a procession. The record crowd of 300,000, however, at least got its fill of excitement during the first two hours. When the starter's flag dropped at 4 p.m. Saturday, sending the 60 drivers (27 British, 12 French, 11 Italian, nine German, one American) scuttling to their cars, Castellotti's red Ferrari No. 4 was first away, according to a tactical plan worked out by Signor Ugolini, Ferrari's team manager. This plan climaxed a war of nerves during practice, in which on Thursday Castellotti broke the record set up by Gonzalez ( Ferrari) last year, covering a lap in 4 minutes 16 seconds—118.56 mph. On Friday, Moss got his Mercedes around in 4 minutes 15.1 seconds (119 mph), scooping a 500,000-franc jackpot for the fastest practice lap, but also implementing the Mercedes principle that if you show enough strength you may not have to use it when the time comes. But dapper Ugolini was unimpressed. "We'll win as we did last year," he said.