1955 Le Mans

1955 — No automobile race has suffered such passionate and sensational attention as the 1955 24 Hours of Le Mans. That the Jaguar D-Type won its first 24 Hours – beginning a string of victories against far more powerful cars and teams – has been all but ignored in the wake of Pierre Levegh’s horrific accident in the mythic Mercedes-Benz W196S.

The summer of '55 was an ugly turning point for all motorsport, and no major league discipline went untouched. On May 26, two-time World Driving Champion Alberto Ascari died at Monza. Just four days earlier his F1 Lancia D-50 plunged into the harbor during the Grand Prix of Monaco. He was shaken, but seemed unhurt. On Thursday he joined Lancia teammate Eugenio Castellotti at Monza. Castellotti offered a casual hair-of-the-dog ride in the Ferrari he would race in the Supercortemaggiore Grand Prix. Ascari accepted.

He wasn’t expecting to drive and didn’t have his helmet, and was somewhat superstitious about using another driver’s casque but he accepted politely. When he failed to reappear at the pits, they drove around to look for the World Champion and Mille Miglia winner. He had crashed mysteriously on the back of the course in a corner usually taken flat out and was dead when they reached him.

A week later, two-time Indy 500 winner Bill Vukovich perished while leading the Memorial Day classic. Levegh’s crash came two weeks later and shoved motorsport into the foreground of the world’s attention.

Levegh’s 3.0-liter Mercedes-Benz W196S (commonly called a 300SLR: and a close cousin to the all-conquering W196 Formula 1 car) slammed into the tail of Lance Macklin’s Austin-Healey. The Mercedes vaulted the crippled Healey production roadster and plunged into the spectator area opposite the pits. The wreckage scythed through the tightly packed crowd like shrapnel. The final tally was 82 dead.

There are no detailed accident photos from which to reconstruct the moment. It came at the end of the first fuel load, after a relentless and unusually clean duel for the lead between Mike Hawthorn’s D-Type and the Mercedes that reigning World Champion Juan Fangio shared with Stirling Moss.

Mercedes-Benz manager Alfred Neubauer had his three silver-gray 3.0-liter roadsters arrayed at the top of the field. The Fangio/Moss No. 19 car (pictured above with the radical air-brake deployed) featured the strongest driver pairing in the best car ever seen at the Sarthe. Behind them Karl Kling and Andre Simon plus American Le Mans veteran John Fitch sharing the No. 20 with "the bishop", the nickname of sober Levegh.

At the end of the first lap, Levegh was seventh, leading his Mercedes teammates. It was good politics and fine theater, but on Lap 2 Fangio had to go. His scrap with Hawthorn became so intense that Mike missed several calls to the pits. Finally responding late, he braked hard and sliced into the pits the moment he passed Lance Macklin who was obliged to brake hard lest he hit the Jaguar.

Then Levegh arrived. He was nearly a lap behind the leaders now. Fangio was coming, bearing down to lap Levegh’s 300SLR, at the worst time, in the worst possible place: in front of the pits and tribune under the eyes of 100,000 Frenchmen.

Some suggest that Levegh’s attention was diverted by the events in his mirror when Macklin took action to avoid the Jaguar. The accident investigation suggested that measurements from Levegh’s skid marks had allowed, barely, enough room for a car to pass between the Healey and the embankment at the 13km marker. Levegh’s Mercedes hit the Healey at nearly 140mph.

Race director Charles Faroux, who had embraced a stunned Levegh after his solo drive of nearly 23 hours in '52, allowed the race to continue. He said later that to stop the event would have created a traffic jam making the rescue of the injured almost impossible.

Alfred Neubauer strode into the debris-filled front straight and began to direct traffic through the grisly scene. Fangio arrived in the No. 19 and drove carefully through the debris field. Kling had just pitted the No. 21 300SLR and sat quietly in stunned silence.

Mercedes’ brilliant and respected engineer Rudolph Uhlenhaut called the Board in Stuttgart to tell them what he knew. Levegh’s teammate John Fitch found Madame Levegh who already seemed to know her husband’s fate. Across the road a gendarme had found Levegh’s body and covered it with the remains of an advertising banner. The carnage at the foot of the tribune eclipsed the horror of the ancient early century town-to-town races that had been banned over five decades before. But no one knew the extent of the deaths and injuries. It just looked like war.

Fitch found a telephone and called his wife Elizabeth in Switzerland. American Armed Forces radio would later report that Fitch, the only American to race for the Mercedes-Benz factory, had been in the No. 20 at 6:26 p.m. He told her the facts as he knew them and told her not to worry, he was fine. Then returned to the pits to do what he could.

Macklin’s Healey struck some photographers and other members of the press plus several gendarmes. Fitch tried to help them. Phil Hill was poised to take over the No. 3 Ferrari from co-driver Umberto Maglioli but was restrained by his team manager when he approached the pit counter to see what had happened.

Ten minutes later, the No. 42 MG of Joe Flynn and Richard Jacobs crashed near White House, turned over in the swale and began to burn. Jacobs survived but was badly injured.

Neubauer took refuge in the conduct of the race. By midnight his cars were first, by two laps from the Hawthorn/Ivor Bueb D-Type, and third. Just after 2:00 a.m., Uhlenhaut got the call from Stuttgart. Neubauer again stepped into the road and called his cars to the pits.

On the huge electronic scoreboard, red crosses covered the numbers 18 and 20. The public address made a brief and dignified announcement regarding the retirement of the Mercedes team. Polite applause escaped from the tribunes. All the Ferraris had retired and Mercedes had been ordered home.

Just before 1:00 a.m., the leading D-Type pitted briefly and Bueb took over for Hawthorn. By the halfway hour, the No. 6 Jaguar was still out front and leading the Index of Performance.

Dawn erupted gray and flat and by 6:00 o’clock the rain that had threatened all morning finally began and with it the long weary slog toward 4:00 o’clock. When the hour neared Bueb, in his first works drive for Coventry, surrendered the leading D-Type to Hawthorn for the final few laps.

English cars finished first (Jaguar), second (Aston-Martin) and third – Johnny Claes and Jacques Swaters in the Belgian yellow D-Type. The remarkable Porsche trio of 550 Spyders was fourth through sixth and winners of the 1.5-liter class. The three-car Bristol team finished in formation seventh, eighth and ninth at the top of the 2.0-liter class.

A week later, Fangio won the Dutch GP at Zandvoort for Mercedes. Five weeks after Le Mans Stirling Moss won the first World Championship F1 race of his career, again for Mercedes-Benz. It was finally good news and good press for Mercedes-Benz. A Briton winning at home, at Aintree, in England.

There was no French GP that summer: cancelled in the black wake of Le Mans. Switzerland went a full step farther and banned racing altogether. Italy was the final GP of the '55 championship season, and Fangio won it and the world title. His third.

The tragedy at Le Mans touched the World Sports Car Championship. The Nurburgring was canceled and the Carrera Panamericana was abandoned.

Moss and Fitch were at the front of a three-car Mercedes sweep of a somber Tourist Trophy at Dundrod. The 1000km Irish race claimed the lives of three drivers. But Mercedes had to wait until the Targa Florio in October to achieve its pre-stated corporate objective of winning both the grand prix and sports car championships. The German team was three points behind Ferrari at the start of the 10-hour Sicilian marathon. Moss was magical in his final stint. Fangio and Kling provided the necessary insulation from the third place Ferrari of Castellotti and Manzon The world title went to Stuttgart by one point.

This meant nothing to Jaguar, which ignored Sicily and were listed third in the world championship table. Coventry got what it needed in France. Mercedes-Benz had what they wanted. It had been announced in February that the Germans would leave racing by '56. Good to their word, the company retired from motorsports. In a brief ceremony at the Mercedes factory Neubauer, Moss, Kling and Fangio symbolically covered a W196 with a sheet, and it was over.