Short Stuff: 1955 Le Mans Disaster

In 1955, the 24 Hours of Le Mans endurance motor race took a very dark turn when a terrible accident on the track continued into the crowd. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:04Josh Clark?

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• 1:07Josh Clark?

  Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here for Dave. So let's get it going about a really terrible disaster that happened back in 1955 in France.

• 1:19Speaker 02

  That's right. The disaster at Le Mans, a very dark time for motorsports history, something I've never been into, although I did see the F1 movie on a plane recently.

• 1:33Josh Clark?

  Yeah, you were telling me about it. You were telling me that is one of the better movies you've ever seen in your life. If I remember correctly.

• 1:40Speaker 02

  No, I did not. I think I spoke to it, spoke about it on the show even, but this all occurred in, on June 11th, 1955. We should probably tell you a little bit about Le Mans as a race because it is different than, you know, if you're just sort of a casual race person, you're like, yeah, they just, they drive around a track a certain amount of times and then somebody wins once you've completed the 200 laps.

• 2:03Josh Clark?

  Yeah, they just turn left a lot.

• 2:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, that is not what happens at Le Mans. I think they're going to hold the 94th one this June. It is an endurance race where you. Drive along with two racing partners. There's three drivers and they take turns, but you drive for 24 hours and whoever completes the most laps in that 24 hours is the winner.

• 2:25Josh Clark?

  Yes, and the, in Le Mans in particular, the, the track is called the Circuit de la Sarthe and it's a D shape about eight and a half miles or 13.7 kilometers around. And it's not only made of racetrack, but they also incorporate some actual public roads that get shut down for the race.

• 2:44Speaker 02

  It's made of racetrack?

• 2:45Josh Clark?

  It's made of racetrack and public roads.

• 2:48Speaker 02

  I know.

• 2:49Josh Clark?

  I just, I think that's fascinating.

• 2:52Speaker 02

  Oh, it is. There's other races like this. There's public road, like fully public road races.

• 2:56Josh Clark?

  I know, and I find those fascinating too.

• 2:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:00Josh Clark?

  Look, man.

• 3:01Speaker 02

  Weirdly defensive about this.

• 3:03Josh Clark?

  So for Le Mans in particular, in this, it's a 24 hour endurance race, like you said, like really famous car makers, especially by this time in the 50s, like the top car makers would enter a car, hire an elite driver and say, get to it. And the distances that they're covering in this 24 hours on this eight and a half mile track are akin to driving in 24 hours from New York to LA or Berlin to Athens, which I'm not even sure you can do because Athens is in Greece, which is an island, but you get the, the gist. Or from Perth to Sydney. So no matter where you are in the world, you now realize that this is a really long amount of miles or kilometers that they're driving on this D shaped track in 24 hours.

• 3:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure. Uh, and they were even back then driving really fast. I think the, the all time track record speed, like the, the tip top on a straightaway would be 253 miles an hour, which was 1988, but even the 1950s, you know, this crash occurred, I saw 120 up to 150 miles an hour. So they were driving these cars really, really fast even back then.

• 4:14Speaker 02

  And I don't know, almost feel like we should take an early break there.

• 4:17Josh Clark?

  I do too.

• 4:18Speaker 02

  Okay, let's do it and we'll come back. We're in agreement. I love it.

• 4:32Speaker 03

  First thought is like, wow, how are we going to do all this?

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• 6:41Speaker 02

  All right, so the tragedy that unfolded that day in 1955 was pretty much due to a very poor track design, along with a bad maneuver by a driver. The poor design, meaning, if you don't know anything about auto racing, there's something called a pit and a pit crew, and you pull in and get like gas and get your tires changed and get your windows cleaned and whatever else the car needs at the time.

• 7:04Josh Clark?

  Sure.

• 7:05Speaker 02

  I actually watched NASCAR for like, a season in the early to mid 2000s. For some reason, I got into it.

• 7:13Josh Clark?

  Did you have a favorite driver?

• 7:14Speaker 02

  I did, and I can't remember his name now. I can picture him in my head. He drove for the UPS car, whatever his name was.

• 7:21Josh Clark?

  He drove a UPS car?

• 7:22Speaker 02

  No.

• 7:23Josh Clark?

  That'd be pretty impressive.

• 7:25Speaker 02

  He was sponsored by UPS.

• 7:27Josh Clark?

  He was known for doing like wheelies in his UPS car and going into donuts in the middle of the race because he knew he was never gonna win.

• 7:34Speaker 02

  And here comes a box truck on the outside lane.

• 7:36Josh Clark?

  He's wearing those shorts. His legs are amazing.

• 7:40Speaker 02

  Oh man, this is crazy. Yeah, it was a short flirtation, vertation, excuse me. So-

• 7:46Josh Clark?

  Happy bear-tation?

• 7:48Speaker 02

  Happy bear-tation. So it was a quarter mile long stretch, this pit road was in this case. Everyone was really tightly packed together, so there wasn't enough space to begin with. And it was right there on top of the track. It was right along the edge. So if you wanted to complete a pit stop, you had to cut to the right really, really quickly, and then brake really, really severely, because if you overshot and didn't do that, then you can't go backwards, so you have to drive another lap around. Sometimes you might not be able to.

• 8:18Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 8:19Speaker 02

  And so, you know, you have every incentive to like, make that tough move and quick stop to get in there.

• 8:24Josh Clark?

  Yes. And so the layout of the pit was bad enough. Like, it was the thing that set the stage for this disaster. But it was actually a terrible, terrible decision by one of the drivers that actually triggered the disaster.

• 8:38Speaker 02

  Paint a picture.

• 8:39Josh Clark?

  Thank you. Here I go. I'm just dabbing my paintbrush to my tongue and proceeding. I've got to beat the devil out of the brush first.

• 8:47Speaker 02

  Okay, is that what they say?

• 8:49Josh Clark?

  That's what Bob Ross always said.

• 8:51Speaker 02

  Oh, that's right.

• 8:52Josh Clark?

  So, this driver's name was Mike Hawthorne. He was driving a Jaguar for the Jaguar team, and he was going in for a pit stop. And as he was coming in, there was another driver driving an Austin Healey. His name was Lance Macklin. And Lance Macklin saw that a pack of faster drivers, including Mike Hawthorne, were coming up behind him. So Lance Macklin very courteously got over so they could get around him easily. But right as he got over, Mike Hawthorne wanted to go into the pit. Well, rather than just tailgate Lance Macklin for three, four seconds, maybe, and then veer into the pit after Lance Macklin cleared it, Mike Hawthorne overtook Lance Macklin and then slammed on his brakes.

• 9:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:33Josh Clark?

  That caused Lance Macklin to have to veer to the left severely. And when he did veer to the left, he veered right into the path of another driver named Pierre Laveg, who was driving a Mercedes. And it went really badly from that moment on.

• 9:51Speaker 02

  So, like I said earlier, I heard a contemporaneous call of this whole thing as 120 miles an hour, but maybe up to 150. Either way, super fast. He hit that Austin Healey, the sort of sloped back of that car acted like a ramp, and it launched Laveg and that Mercedes, obviously, into the air. Apparently, Macklin said later he could feel the heat from the exhaust as it flew over him.

• 10:17Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 10:17Speaker 02

  Which is crazy to think about. The Mercedes ran up a four-foot embankment, an earthen embankment that was supposed to protect spectators, hit a concrete staircase, burst into flames, and exploded. And, I mean, you can look this up on YouTube. You can't see the actual crash, but you see the explosion. And very disturbingly, you see very large car parts just being hurled at, you know, 100 miles an hour plus into people.

• 10:45Josh Clark?

  Yeah. This is, yeah, it's bad enough that Pierre Laveg, his car burst into flames and he died. But this is where it gets particularly catastrophic because the front axle to the car, wheels that had come loose from the axle, the hood, the radiator and the engine just went flying at like over 100 miles an hour each through the crowd and just cut through the crowd like a scythe. And the path of destruction was just staggering. What happened to the poor people who were standing in the grandstands and were in the path of those car parts?

• 11:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, because it was randomized because there are individual car parts. So you could be standing, and in one case, this really happened, you could be standing and ended up just fine next to someone who was decapitated.

• 11:37Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 11:38Speaker 02

  And nothing happened to you. Very sadly, there was one little girl who was trampled, still holding on to her ice cream cone. Laveg died, like you said, but it was an instant thing. I think 50 people died instantly and 83 spectators ended up dying and close to 200 ended up injured, like, including Laveg. 84 people killed at this race.

• 12:03Josh Clark?

  Yeah. So there was a really controversial decision that was made by the race director, and that was to allow 24 hours of Le Mans to continue. This happened at like hour two and a half.

• 12:15Speaker 02

  It sounds crazy.

• 12:16Josh Clark?

  Yeah. And you're like, what a disgusting psychopath. But history has actually vindicated the race director, I don't know his name, but that he made the right move because had, had he said, you know, the race needs to end right now, all those spectators who needed aid and whose lives would have probably ended had they not received aid pretty quickly, the, the emergency crews trying to reach them would have been swamped by all those spectators leaving all at the same time. So it seems quite heartless, but it actually was the right move to make.

• 12:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, I wonder if that was the reason, though. Do we know that?

• 12:53Speaker 02

  Or if it's just like in retrospect, it worked out better.

• 12:56Josh Clark?

  I don't know. I want to just believe in humanity. So I'm going to say that that guy had that that level of foresight.

• 13:03Speaker 02

  I hope so. Regardless, Mike Hawthorne, the guy who caused the crash, won the race. And no matter how history looks at that decision, like him popping the champagne at the end, when 21 hours earlier, 80 people or 84 people had died, it's a tough pill to swallow, you know?

• 13:24Josh Clark?

  Yeah, not just died, died because of him. And he's like, just celebrating like it's the end of whatever race, any other race, you know?

• 13:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:33Josh Clark?

  He never claimed responsibility for it. He would never, he would never take accountability. And two years after that, he died in a car wreck when he was racing a friend. And when he overtook the friend, that was when he spun out and died. He was also driving a Jaguar. So his death was quite ironic. I say hats off to the Mercedes team, because even though the race continued, they withdrew and they waited until the emergency crews had done their thing and cleared out. And they packed up and they withdrew from the race at 1am. And they stopped racing all the way until the 1980s because of that incident.

• 14:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it really shook up the industry, obviously, in the sport. There were official inquiries, obviously. Everyone was absolved. No one like, had to take the fall or anything like that. They said, you know, we didn't have the right safety measures. We didn't have the right layout. I didn't see if there was any kind of like financial compensation to victims or anything like that.

• 14:29Josh Clark?

  I didn't either.

• 14:30Speaker 02

  It may have been at a time where that kind of thing just didn't routinely happen like it would today. But there was obviously a huge public outcry and that track obviously went under all kinds of changes, including, you know, more safety for the spectators, more barriers put in place, and then a much safer pit situation. Like they fully moved the pit road.

• 14:52Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 14:52Speaker 02

  And, and made it much safer to get into.

• 14:55Josh Clark?

  Yeah, they moved it like a quarter mile back from the track rather than right up on the track, which I can't believe they ever did that in the first place, you know, even in retrospect. Well, way to go Chuck. This is a car one and we don't normally do car stuff. So great. Congrats.

• 15:11Speaker 02

  Thanks. Right back at you.

• 15:13Josh Clark?

  Well, and then short stuff is out.

• 15:18Speaker 06

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