June 3, 2026 • 12 mins
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.
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
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 nineteen fifty five in France.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
That's right, the disaster at Lamon's very dark time for
motorsports history. Something I've never been into, although I did
see the f one movie on a plane recently.
Speaker 1 (00:30):
Yeah, you were telling me about it. You were telling
me that as one of the better movies you've ever
seen in your life, if I remember correctly.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
No, I did not. I think I spoke to it,
spoke about it on the show even But this all
occurred on June eleventh, nineteen fifty five. We should probably
tell you a little bit about Lamon's as a race,
because it is different than you know, if you're just
sort of a casual race person and you're like, yeah,
they they drive around a track a certain amount of
times and then somebody wins. Once you've completed the two
(00:58):
hundred laps.
Speaker 1 (01:00):
They just turn left a lot.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
Yeah, that is not what happens at Lamon's. I think
they're going to hold a ninety fourth 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 twenty four hours and whoever completes
the most laps in that twenty four hours is the winter.
Speaker 1 (01:22):
Yes. And in Lamon's in particular, the track is called
the Circuit de la Sarth and it's a d shape
about eight and a half miles or thirteen point seven
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. It's made of racetrack, it's made
(01:43):
of racetrack and public roads. I think that's fascinating. Oh
it is.
Speaker 2 (01:49):
There's other races like this, there's public road like fully
public road races.
Speaker 1 (01:52):
I know, and I find those fascinating too.
Speaker 2 (01:55):
Yeah. Look, man, weirdly defensive about this.
Speaker 1 (02:00):
So for Lemon's in particular, in this it's a twenty
four hour endurance race. Like you said, like really famous
car makers, especially by this time in the fifties, 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 twenty four hours on this
eight and a half mile track are akin to driving
(02:23):
in twenty four 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 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
(02:44):
track in twenty four hours.
Speaker 2 (02:45):
Yeah, for sure. And they were even back then driving
really fast. I think the all time track record speed
like the tip top on a straightaway would be two
hundred and fifty three miles an hour, which was nineteen
eighty eight. But even the nineteen fifties, you know this
crash occurred, I saw one hundred and twenty up to
one hundred and fifty miles an hour. So they were
(03:06):
driving these cars really really fast even back then. And
I don't know, I almost feel like we should take
an early break there.
Speaker 1 (03:14):
I need too.
Speaker 2 (03:15):
Okay, let's do it and we'll come back. We're in agreement.
I love it, all right. So the tragedy that unfolded
(03:42):
that day in nineteen fifty five was pretty much due
to a very poor track design along with a bad
maneuver by a driver. The poor design meaning, you know,
when you're 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 change and get your windows clean and whatever else
(04:02):
the car needs at the time.
Speaker 1 (04:03):
Sure. Uh.
Speaker 2 (04:04):
I actually watched NASCAR for like a season in thely
to mid two thousands. For some reason I got into it.
Speaker 1 (04:12):
Did you have a favorite driver?
Speaker 2 (04:14):
I did, and I can't remember his name now I
could picture him in my head. He drove the UPS car,
whatever his name was.
Speaker 1 (04:20):
He drove a UPS car that be pretty impressive.
Speaker 2 (04:24):
He was sponsored by UPS.
Speaker 1 (04:25):
He was known for doing like wheelings in his UPS
car and going into donuts in the middle because he
knew he was never going And here comes a box
truck on the outside lane. He's wearing those shorts legs.
Speaker 2 (04:38):
Oh man, this is crazy. Uh yeah it was. It
was a short flirtation birtation excuse me, so.
Speaker 1 (04:45):
Heavy heavy bairtation, heavy heavy ritation.
Speaker 2 (04:49):
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 the 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 break really really severely, because
(05:10):
if you overshot and didn't do that, then you know
you can't go backwards, so you have to drive another
lap around. Sometimes you might not be able to right,
and so you know you have every incentive to like
make that tough move and quick stop to get in there.
Speaker 1 (05:23):
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.
Paint a picture, thank you. Here I go. I'm just
dabbing my paintbrush to my tongue and interceding. I got
(05:44):
to beat the devil out of the brush first.
Speaker 2 (05:46):
Okay, that's what they say.
Speaker 1 (05:48):
That's what Bob Ross always said. Oh that's right. So
this driver's name is 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 in Austin Heely. His name
was Lance Macklin, and Lance Macklin saw that a pack
of faster drivers, including Mike Hawthorne, were coming up behind him,
(06:12):
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.
(06:32):
That caused Lance Macklin to have to veer to the
left severely, and when he did ve to the left,
he veered right into the path of another driver named
Pierre Levegg, who was driving a Mercedes, and it went
really badly from that moment on.
Speaker 2 (06:50):
So, like I said earlier, he was I heard a
contemporaneous call of this whole thing as one hundred and
twenty miles an hour, but maybe up to one hundred
and fifty either way. Super fast. He hit that Austin Healy,
the sort of sloped back of that car acted like
a ramp and it launched Levegg and that Mercedes obviously
into the air. Apparently, Macklin said later he could feel
(07:12):
the heat from the exhaust as it flew over him,
which is crazy to think about. The Mercedes ran up
afore foot embankment and earthen embankment that was supposed to
protect spectators, hit a concrete staircase, burst into flames and exploded,
and I mean you could look this up on YouTube.
You can't see the actual crash, but you see the
(07:33):
explosion and very disturbingly you see very large car parts
just being hurled at, you know, one hundred miles an
hour plus into people.
Speaker 1 (07:44):
Yeah, this is Yeah, it's bad enough that peer Leveg
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
act soul, the hood, the radiator, and the engine just
(08:04):
went flying at like over one hundred 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 grand stands and were in the path of those
car parts.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
Yeah, because it was randomized, because there were individual car parts,
So you could be standing in one case this really happened.
You could be standing and ended up just fine next
to someone who was decapitated. Yeah, and nothing happened to you.
Very sadly, there was one little girl who was trampled,
still holding onto her ice cream cone. Leveg died, like
(08:47):
you said, but it was an instant thing. I think
fifty people died instantly, and eighty three spectators ended up
dying and close to two hundred ended up injured, like
including Leveg. Eighty four people killed at this race.
Speaker 1 (09:02):
Yeah. So there was a really controversial decision that was
made by the race director, and that was to allow
twenty four hours of Lamon's to continue. This happened at
like hour two and a half.
Speaker 2 (09:14):
It sounds crazy, yeah.
Speaker 1 (09:15):
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 the ha
had He said, you know, the race needs to end
right now. All those spectators who needed aid in whose
lives would have probably ended had they not received aid
(09:36):
pretty quickly. 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.
Speaker 2 (09:47):
Yeah, I wonder if that was the reason, though, do
we know that or if it's just like in retrospect
it worked out better.
Speaker 1 (09:55):
I don't know. I want to just believe in humanity.
So I'm going to say that that guy had that
level of foresight.
Speaker 2 (10:02):
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 twenty one hours earlier, eighty people or
eighty four people had died, it's a tough bill to swallow,
(10:23):
you know.
Speaker 1 (10:23):
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. Yeah, he never claimed responsibility
for it. He would he would never take accountability. In
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.
(10:45):
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 one am, and they stopped racing all
the way until the nineteen eighties because of that incident.
Speaker 2 (11:08):
Yeah, I mean, it really shook up the industry. Obviously
in the sport. There were official inquiries. Obviously everyone was absolved.
No one 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.
Speaker 1 (11:28):
I didn't either.
Speaker 2 (11:29):
It may have been at a time where that kind
of thing just didn't routinely happen like.
Speaker 1 (11:33):
It would today.
Speaker 2 (11:34):
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 and made it much safer to
get into.
Speaker 1 (11:54):
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, thanks right back at you.
Well and then short stuff is that.
Speaker 2 (12:17):
Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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 nineteen fifty five in France.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
That's right, the disaster at Lamon's very dark time for
motorsports history. Something I've never been into, although I did
see the f one movie on a plane recently.
Speaker 1 (00:30):
Yeah, you were telling me about it. You were telling
me that as one of the better movies you've ever
seen in your life, if I remember correctly.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
No, I did not. I think I spoke to it,
spoke about it on the show even But this all
occurred on June eleventh, nineteen fifty five. We should probably
tell you a little bit about Lamon's as a race,
because it is different than you know, if you're just
sort of a casual race person and you're like, yeah,
they they drive around a track a certain amount of
times and then somebody wins. Once you've completed the two
(00:58):
hundred laps.
Speaker 1 (01:00):
They just turn left a lot.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
Yeah, that is not what happens at Lamon's. I think
they're going to hold a ninety fourth 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 twenty four hours and whoever completes
the most laps in that twenty four hours is the winter.
Speaker 1 (01:22):
Yes. And in Lamon's in particular, the track is called
the Circuit de la Sarth and it's a d shape
about eight and a half miles or thirteen point seven
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. It's made of racetrack, it's made
(01:43):
of racetrack and public roads. I think that's fascinating. Oh
it is.
Speaker 2 (01:49):
There's other races like this, there's public road like fully
public road races.
Speaker 1 (01:52):
I know, and I find those fascinating too.
Speaker 2 (01:55):
Yeah. Look, man, weirdly defensive about this.
Speaker 1 (02:00):
So for Lemon's in particular, in this it's a twenty
four hour endurance race. Like you said, like really famous
car makers, especially by this time in the fifties, 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 twenty four hours on this
eight and a half mile track are akin to driving
(02:23):
in twenty four 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 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
(02:44):
track in twenty four hours.
Speaker 2 (02:45):
Yeah, for sure. And they were even back then driving
really fast. I think the all time track record speed
like the tip top on a straightaway would be two
hundred and fifty three miles an hour, which was nineteen
eighty eight. But even the nineteen fifties, you know this
crash occurred, I saw one hundred and twenty up to
one hundred and fifty miles an hour. So they were
(03:06):
driving these cars really really fast even back then. And
I don't know, I almost feel like we should take
an early break there.
Speaker 1 (03:14):
I need too.
Speaker 2 (03:15):
Okay, let's do it and we'll come back. We're in agreement.
I love it, all right. So the tragedy that unfolded
(03:42):
that day in nineteen fifty five was pretty much due
to a very poor track design along with a bad
maneuver by a driver. The poor design meaning, you know,
when you're 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 change and get your windows clean and whatever else
(04:02):
the car needs at the time.
Speaker 1 (04:03):
Sure. Uh.
Speaker 2 (04:04):
I actually watched NASCAR for like a season in thely
to mid two thousands. For some reason I got into it.
Speaker 1 (04:12):
Did you have a favorite driver?
Speaker 2 (04:14):
I did, and I can't remember his name now I
could picture him in my head. He drove the UPS car,
whatever his name was.
Speaker 1 (04:20):
He drove a UPS car that be pretty impressive.
Speaker 2 (04:24):
He was sponsored by UPS.
Speaker 1 (04:25):
He was known for doing like wheelings in his UPS
car and going into donuts in the middle because he
knew he was never going And here comes a box
truck on the outside lane. He's wearing those shorts legs.
Speaker 2 (04:38):
Oh man, this is crazy. Uh yeah it was. It
was a short flirtation birtation excuse me, so.
Speaker 1 (04:45):
Heavy heavy bairtation, heavy heavy ritation.
Speaker 2 (04:49):
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 the 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 break really really severely, because
(05:10):
if you overshot and didn't do that, then you know
you can't go backwards, so you have to drive another
lap around. Sometimes you might not be able to right,
and so you know you have every incentive to like
make that tough move and quick stop to get in there.
Speaker 1 (05:23):
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.
Paint a picture, thank you. Here I go. I'm just
dabbing my paintbrush to my tongue and interceding. I got
(05:44):
to beat the devil out of the brush first.
Speaker 2 (05:46):
Okay, that's what they say.
Speaker 1 (05:48):
That's what Bob Ross always said. Oh that's right. So
this driver's name is 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 in Austin Heely. His name
was Lance Macklin, and Lance Macklin saw that a pack
of faster drivers, including Mike Hawthorne, were coming up behind him,
(06:12):
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.
(06:32):
That caused Lance Macklin to have to veer to the
left severely, and when he did ve to the left,
he veered right into the path of another driver named
Pierre Levegg, who was driving a Mercedes, and it went
really badly from that moment on.
Speaker 2 (06:50):
So, like I said earlier, he was I heard a
contemporaneous call of this whole thing as one hundred and
twenty miles an hour, but maybe up to one hundred
and fifty either way. Super fast. He hit that Austin Healy,
the sort of sloped back of that car acted like
a ramp and it launched Levegg and that Mercedes obviously
into the air. Apparently, Macklin said later he could feel
(07:12):
the heat from the exhaust as it flew over him,
which is crazy to think about. The Mercedes ran up
afore foot embankment and earthen embankment that was supposed to
protect spectators, hit a concrete staircase, burst into flames and exploded,
and I mean you could look this up on YouTube.
You can't see the actual crash, but you see the
(07:33):
explosion and very disturbingly you see very large car parts
just being hurled at, you know, one hundred miles an
hour plus into people.
Speaker 1 (07:44):
Yeah, this is Yeah, it's bad enough that peer Leveg
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
act soul, the hood, the radiator, and the engine just
(08:04):
went flying at like over one hundred 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 grand stands and were in the path of those
car parts.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
Yeah, because it was randomized, because there were individual car parts,
So you could be standing in one case this really happened.
You could be standing and ended up just fine next
to someone who was decapitated. Yeah, and nothing happened to you.
Very sadly, there was one little girl who was trampled,
still holding onto her ice cream cone. Leveg died, like
(08:47):
you said, but it was an instant thing. I think
fifty people died instantly, and eighty three spectators ended up
dying and close to two hundred ended up injured, like
including Leveg. Eighty four people killed at this race.
Speaker 1 (09:02):
Yeah. So there was a really controversial decision that was
made by the race director, and that was to allow
twenty four hours of Lamon's to continue. This happened at
like hour two and a half.
Speaker 2 (09:14):
It sounds crazy, yeah.
Speaker 1 (09:15):
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 the ha
had He said, you know, the race needs to end
right now. All those spectators who needed aid in whose
lives would have probably ended had they not received aid
(09:36):
pretty quickly. 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.
Speaker 2 (09:47):
Yeah, I wonder if that was the reason, though, do
we know that or if it's just like in retrospect
it worked out better.
Speaker 1 (09:55):
I don't know. I want to just believe in humanity.
So I'm going to say that that guy had that
level of foresight.
Speaker 2 (10:02):
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 twenty one hours earlier, eighty people or
eighty four people had died, it's a tough bill to swallow,
(10:23):
you know.
Speaker 1 (10:23):
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. Yeah, he never claimed responsibility
for it. He would he would never take accountability. In
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.
(10:45):
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 one am, and they stopped racing all
the way until the nineteen eighties because of that incident.
Speaker 2 (11:08):
Yeah, I mean, it really shook up the industry. Obviously
in the sport. There were official inquiries. Obviously everyone was absolved.
No one 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.
Speaker 1 (11:28):
I didn't either.
Speaker 2 (11:29):
It may have been at a time where that kind
of thing just didn't routinely happen like.
Speaker 1 (11:33):
It would today.
Speaker 2 (11:34):
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 and made it much safer to
get into.
Speaker 1 (11:54):
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, thanks right back at you.
Well and then short stuff is that.
Speaker 2 (12:17):
Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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