The Le Mans Racing Disaster of 1955 | Episode 78 - Doomsday: History's Most Dangerous Podcast

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Don't say I don't take you anywhere, because today we're
going to be attending the most prestigious auto race in
the world. And you say, hey, that sounds really exciting,
Well just wait for the off roading portion. Hello, and

(00:29):
welcome to Doomsday Histories Most Dangerous Podcast. Together, we are
going to rediscover some of the most traumatic, bizarre, and
on inspiring but largely unheard of or forgotten disasters from
throughout human history and around the world. On today's episode,
we'll take a look at the only car the public
ever compared to a barbecue. We're visiting the only sporting

(00:52):
event in history that was later compared by the press
to the Holocaust. And you'll hear about the first accidental
public use of an unintentional horizontal guillotine. And if you
were listening on Patreon, you will learn about the upper
limits of human reaction. Time. You'd get to meet America's
most physically damaged stuntman. You'd also be treated to more

(01:12):
dodge caravan math than you could fly a rocket bike over.
You would learn about a non sexual, full body invisible
burning phenomenon, and on topic, we would look at the
history of strange ways that people have died at today's events,
just in different years. This is not the show you
play around kids, or while eating, or even in mixed company.
But as long as you find yourself a little more

(01:35):
historically engaged and learn something that could potentially save your life,
our work is done. So all that said, shoot the
kids out of the room, put on your headphones and
safety glasses and lights big in. My first super vague
memory of being in a car was actually being in

(01:56):
an accident. It was Christmas Eve. We were on our
way home from Grandma's house and a pilot broke out
on Highway four, a one Hearth's deadliest highway. I was
really young at the time, and I was thrown from
my seat, which panicked my mom. But thankfully we all survived,
which was an unexpected treat. I'll tell you why. See,

(02:17):
when my parents first met, they had it all. They
were young and in love. They had horses together, and
my mom drove a canary yellow Ford Mustang. But once
you have kids, well they had to eat the horses,
and the Mustang got traded in for something more practical.
That's right. My parents purchased a kind of a beige

(02:40):
orange Ford Pinto hatchback you know the model with the
wood paneling on the sides. If you don't know about
the Pinto. It was introduced in nineteen seventy with the
tagline the Little Carefree Car, but the public nicknamed it
the barbecue that could seat four see in an accident.
It was unintentionally designed to act as a self sealing

(03:01):
pyrotechnic euthanasia device, even in a slow speed collision. From behind,
the frame of the car would kind of shift and
block all the doors, turning them into walls so you
couldn't open them, which is a problem because the other
thing that it does was pushed the bumper forward, and
the bumper was designed in a way that simultaneously punctured
the gas tank and set up an explosion. It also

(03:24):
created a kind of booby trap for the car behind them,
loosely titled your car is on Fire. You know how
they used to paint flame jobs on the front of
muscle cars. Picture that but pointing forward from the trunk.
And Ford knew about the design flaw. Everybody knew about
the design flaw. They knew about it two years before
the car was even released to the public. But because

(03:44):
most companies are run by accountants, rather than the visionaries
that started them. The math said it was cheaper to
pay off the families of the deceased rather than recalling
and fixing all the cars. So that's what they did.
They prioritized cost cutting over safety. It's what car companies do.
It's what a lot of companies do. And to be clear,

(04:05):
the Ford Pinto wasn't actually any deadlier than any other
family car on the roads at the time. By the numbers,
it might have actually been safer than a few of them.
But the big deal wasn't that it killed people. It's
just that when it did kill wow, no thank you.
And during this time, twenty seven people died while trapped

(04:25):
helplessly waiting to explode. And this one time, three young
girls quite famously burned to death in a Pinto and
charges were laid, and not against the people in the accident,
it was against the Ford Motor Company. The Ford Motor
Company holds the distinction of being the first corporation in
America to be prosecuted criminally. We cover a lot of

(04:48):
negligent homicide on this show, but Ford was actually charged
with reckless homicide. Speaking of cars that look like they
want to kill you, the very first automobile looked like
it ran off spilled blood and bone barrow. It looked
like an old fermenting still that people used to cook
up a legal hooch riding around on giant wagon wheels.

(05:10):
It wasn't much to look at, and it was the
handiwork of French inventor Nicholas Joseph Cougnot. All the way
back in seventeen sixty nine, it was basically a steam
powered tricycle, but it still counts as the first self
propelled vehicle. And oddly we don't call them Cougnots today,
but we came kind of close. The etymology of the
term car, from all of its different origins, basically makes

(05:33):
it short for cart, not car, reading to your death
the way you might expect. Back in seventeen sixty nine. Regardless,
it beat propelling a giant stone wagon like a flintstone.
And as the years take by, car enthusiasts and inventors
made improvements. Liquid fuel replaced steam. The four stroke conternal
combustion engine carried us faster than walking speed, and you

(05:55):
fast forward all the way to eighteen eighty six, and
a man named Karl Benz got himself a patent for
a three wheeler with a gas engine, and that's when
things really got moving. It's worth pointing out that the
entire evolution of the automobile was designed around competition. America's
first ever automobile race was November the twenty eighth, eighteen

(06:19):
ninety five. Frank Duryer drove a one cylinder, four horsepower
car called the Duriya motor Wagon. It was basically a
love seat set on four wheels with a kind of
a navigational wand it blew between Chicago and Evanston, Illinois
and back with an average speed of seven miles or
eleven kilometers an hour, and it did the whole trip

(06:41):
in just seven hours and fifty three minutes. Some of
the slower entrants might have taken weeks. And there had
been versions of motoring competitions going all the way back
to eighteen eighty seven. The very very first one was
held on April twenty eighth, eighteen eighty seven, through the
streets of Paris, and a gentleman racer named George Bhutang

(07:02):
one because he was the only competitor to show up.
Racing might be seen as almost glamorous now, but back
then it was an awful, life threatening trek across archaic
roots in fragile machines that love to break down. Early
racers were basically full time mechanics, and as racing grew,
so did it spread around the world. Racers drove on

(07:25):
regular roads that twisted through towns and countrysides, which splattered
a lot of early drivers into the sides of houses
and trees. Eventually it moved and mostly onto tracks which
were much safer. Remember I said that the twenty four
Hours of La mans is considered the oldest and most
prestigious insurance race in the world. In fact, it's considered

(07:49):
part of the triple Crown of motorsports that includes the
Indianapolis five hundred in America, the Monaco Grand Prix, and
the twenty four Hours of La Manze. Here in France,
that's right, I hope you packed a Barrett, your baguette
holder and your phrase book of exaggerated French cliches. We
are spending the weekend in France. We'll be spending our

(08:11):
time in a world famous petit city in the northwest,
about two hours from Paris, called Lamns. Every year since
nineteen twenty three, just outside the town of Lamns, the
world's greatest drivers gather to compete. Welcome to the twenty
four hours of La Monte la van cancre er dumint
if your fancy. It's a rather demanding thirteen kilometer eight

(08:34):
and a half mile circuit in and around the La
Monte sur CUIs de Sarte grand stands. It is a beautiful,
if not hurried trip down tree lined streets throughout the
French countryside. Racers move too fast to really take in
the picturesque land of historical charm and patchwork of rolling hills,

(08:54):
peaceful vineyards and golden fields stretching as far as you
can see. Picture narrow winding roads, quaint villages with rustic
stone houses and medieval churches. I mean, this is postcard
rural France. The track offers a mix of private and
public roads, which they obviously clear of the cyclists and
cows before the race, and includes pit areas, grand stands

(09:17):
and the high speed Wissant Straight. This is the longest
and fastest racing strait anywhere in the world. Drivers battle exhaustion, darkness,
and unpredictable weather in a grueling test of teamwork and
strategy that pushes drivers and their machines to the limits.
It's an endurance race and it's twenty four hours long.

(09:39):
Instead of racing until you hit a certain number of
laps or distance like an F one, the winner of
la Mon's is the team that covers the most distance
over twenty four hours. Unlike other races where cars are
basically designed to go fast, La Mons challenges companies to
create reliable cars that didn't break down eighteen hours into
a race that needed fewer pit stops, can cram more

(10:02):
lap time into those twenty four hours. They say. Lamon's
is most exciting and dangerous race in the world, and
probably because drivers have been away for more than a day.
The long straightaways followed immediately by sharp turns tested groggy
drivers and those who failed failed. Big Lamanz crams more
racing into a single day than Formula One racks up

(10:26):
in a year. Leading up to today's race, Ferrari, Jaguar,
and Mercedes Benz had all spent time in the winner circle,
with their teams showing up now to offer new and
improved car models. I'm going to tell you the rest
of the car manufacturers that had vehicles racing at Lamon's
this year and you put a finger down for any
that you don't recognize. There was Aston, Martin, Porsche, Maserati,

(10:50):
Talbert Lago, Gordini, Bristol Cunningham, Duche Bonnet, which sounds Dutch
but it's actually French. And off we see specials at
Costruzzioni Automobile. You may not have heard of that last one,
but I've actually got two of them dead in my
driveway right now. This was the twenty third edition of

(11:12):
Lamon's and our story takes place on June the eleventh,
nineteen fifty five. Between two hundred and fifty and three
one hundred thousand people piled through the turnstiles along the
route to bear witness. This is the kind of ridiculously
huge crowds that no other sport could attract. I'd compare
that kind of crowd size to Woodstock or our manager

(11:35):
Devi Temple Apocalypse of two thousand and five episode this race.
The nineteen fifty five race was set, nay faded, to
be a showdown between heated rivals Jaguar and Mercedes. Jaguar
was an exotic British car with a small rural team
just whistling along while Mercedes facilities had been all too

(11:57):
recently turned into craters during Allied bombings. Jaguar had won
Lamans in nineteen fifty one and nineteen fifty three, and
this year they were unveiling the fastest car that they
had ever built, the long nosed D type. It had
a sleek, aerodynamic and elegant minimalist design, with two hundred
and seventy horsepower a three point four liter in line

(12:20):
six engine, and it could hit one hundred and seventy
two miles or two hundred and seventy seven kilometers an hour.
Its most iconic feature is either its elongated, sculpted front
nose that enhanced airflow, or its central fin which rose
from behind the driver's seat, which increased its stability at
high speeds and gave the car a bit of a

(12:41):
shark like appearance. There were only seventy five of these
ever made, so you can pick one up today for
about five hundred and eighty thousand dollars. By contrast, Mercedes
Benz entered a three hundred slr Ulenhaut Koup. It was
a much boxier car, and it was made of an
ultra light magnesium alloy and an era dynamically narrowed towards

(13:02):
the back, just two seats covered by a small windshield
with side mounted air intakes, simple but more aggressive looking,
with a three hundred horse power three liters straight eight
engine and a top speed around one hundred eighty miles
or two hundred and ninety kilometers an hour. An actual
nineteen fifty five model just sold at auction for one

(13:25):
hundred and forty two million. My view, that was one
of only two in existence. Some called this race World
War two because actual World War II only ended a
handful of years earlier, and people were in the mood
to see Germany get its teeth kicked in and people
love an underdog, which in this case was written being

(13:46):
the underdog. The three hundred SLR was produced by a
battalion of engineers backed by one of the world's most
powerful automotive manufacturers in the heart of industrial Germany, while
the dtaied Jaguar was built by fourteen guys in a
barn in Coventry. It was basically the David versus Goliath
plot of Rocky four, only in cars. Taking a look backwards,

(14:11):
those steam powered autogyros of old topped out around seven
miles or eleven kilometers an hour. In nineteen twenty three,
when the Lamon's track was first built, top speeds were
somewhere closer to sixty miles or one hundred kilometers an hour.
But at today's race in nineteen fifty five, top speeds
for leading cars could reach higher than one hundred and
seventy miles or two hundred and seventy kilometers an hour.

(14:34):
And this was one hell of a time to be
a race fan. You know, we live in a world
defined by painted lines and railings that keep us divided
from ever touching or really experiencing anything, but not in
nineteen fifty five, all that separated approaching cars from the
grandstands was a four foot tall earthen bank, and all
that separated of fans from spilling out onto the track

(14:56):
was a white wooden picket fence, and drivers didn't e
wear seat belts. Most modern race cars come with a
five point safety harness system and helmets and a fireproof suit.
By nineteen fifty five, Can you imagine how many horrible
things you would have had to have seen to firmly
believe that it was just better to be thrown from

(15:16):
your car than to be trapped inside one after a crash. Well,
we'll come back to that. When you bought a ticket
to Lamon's it actually said motor racing is dangerous printed
right on it. In fact, there are people who get really,
really disappointed if something doesn't crash during a race. We'll
come back to that too. Pierre Levy would be driving

(15:38):
in one of Mercedes cars this day. He was an
older driver. He completed more miles at Lamans than any
other driver, which made him a kind of a French
folk hero. English car manufacturer Jaguar meanwhile, gave the nod
to British racing star Mike Hawthorne. This guy was so
British that he drank tea and he even wore a

(16:00):
tie during races. He carried anti German beef in his
heart after the war, and he would be damned before
he was going to let some German win the day.
So what made Hawthorne so great at driving? Why his
impending death. Of course, he was dying of kidney failure
and he was well aware of it. The doctors told
him he'd be dead by thirty and so he just

(16:22):
lived and he drove like it. The stands were packed,
Like I said, tickets were only four francs, and spectators
crammed the fences trying to get the best views. A
sea of children, ladies and gentlemen in clean press suits
lined both sides of the track right up to the roadway.
The most prize spots for watching the action were overlooking

(16:43):
the pit areas. So you know, the pit area is
just a spot off the track where racers pull in
for fuel or tea or new tires. Anything and everything
that could possibly go wrong get spider monkeyed by quick
moving pit crews of mechanics. Another thing fans loved but
the race was the Lamans start. You know how a

(17:03):
car race works, They just wave a flag and everyone
goes fast and they keep turning left. But the Laman
start added a foot race into the mix. Drivers lined
up on one side of the track, opposite their vehicles,
and when the officiate waved a flag and yelled those
famous words commence race day, the drivers sprinted to their cars,
jumped in, cramped them up, and took off. It was

(17:24):
a little chaotic and it led to an injury here
or there, and sadly, if you didn't watch races before
nineteen seventy, they stopped doing it. By then, and with
that the thrill of speed of man versus machine, of
striving against human and mechanical fatigue begins and they do
it for twenty four hours. That's about four hundred laps

(17:46):
in total. The crowd and the grand stand strained to
see as the cars came into view. LaVey's Mercedes was
leading Austin Heally's car driven by Lance Macklin, with Juan
Manuel found Gio closely behind driving for fur Rack. Sorry,
Fangio was a crowd favorite, but he got his pant
legs stuck in his gearshift at the beginning of the
race and he had trouble getting going, and although it

(18:08):
took a while, he managed to climb back up to third.
This is a really long race and most drivers respect
the length of the course and they paced themselves accordingly.
But Levey and Hawthorne took off like a shot. See,
there's a lot of strategy that goes into a race
this long, and their strategy said that they could probably
tease Fangio into chasing them, which would strain his car

(18:29):
too hard beyond its mechanical limits and eventually, hopefully it
would just explode. Well, we'll just have to wait and see.
As the cars approached the end of lap thirty five,
Mike Hawthorn started to overtake Lance Macklin's Austin Healey. When
he saw the sign telling him to head into the
pits for fuel. Hawthorne braked sharply and turned in front

(18:50):
of Macklin as he slowed to leave the track. Here's
a different way of saying that, Mike Hawthorn pulled to
the right side of the track and break checked Macklin's
Austin Healey. Macklin was just looking to keep turning left
until they gave mareth and a bottle of champagne to chug.
He hadn't really been expecting any of this. Maclin's Austin
Heely also did not have the kind of lightweight stated

(19:11):
the art brakes as the Jaguar. They couldn't stop as
fast and he had to swerve to avoid him. He
swerved to the left and hit the brakes before pulling
back into the middle of the track, right into the
path of Mercedes bench driver Pierre Levey. Problem was, of course,
LaVey was passing up the left side, going way faster
than any of them. He'd joined this whole mess doing

(19:32):
about one hundred and fifty or two hundred and thirty
kilometers an hour, so he had no time to break
and his front wheels smashed right into the back of Macklin.
And what happened next would redefine automotive racing and change
the sport forever. The time was six twenty six PM.
Macklin swerved left to avoid Hawthorn, who was slowing down,

(19:54):
but lost control and veered across to the center of
the track, which somehow put him directly in front of Hawthorne.
LaVey's front wheel rode up onto the left rear corner
of the Austin Martin. And you remember how sleek and
aerodynamic these things were. The Austin Healy acted just like
a ramp, and Levy took flight and not calmly like
something out of the dukes of Hazard. No, his car

(20:16):
appeared to roll end over end, that's ass over tea
kettle for eighty meters or two hundred and sixty feet.
He unintentionally jumped his car over the length of sixteen
Dodge caravans. I should mention his car was pointed straight
along the length of the pack grand stands running parallel
to the track. Spectators were protected by their hats and

(20:39):
that little wooden fence I told you about. The Mercedes
struck the four foot tall earthen barrier at the foot
of the grand stands. He did this at over two
hundred kilometers or one hundred and twenty five miles an hour.
From there. The car exploded, before continuing and smashing into
one of those large concrete stairwells that line the stand

(21:00):
At this moment, the car became a kind of fragmentation grenade,
showering the stands in sharp, flaming metal. The majority of
the car stayed together for the most part, big mechanical
chunks the engine, the suspension, the tires, all of it
pirouetted through the crowd, carving a three hundred foot path
along the stands at incredible speed. It looked like a

(21:23):
toy car had been ripped apart, set on fire, and
then thrown angrily by God into the stands. The engine
rolled through the crowd like a bouncing ball, crushing and
decapitating as it went. Same with the suspension. It stayed
pretty much intact, but it lost all of its resale
value because of all the blood. The hood or bonnet
ripped free from the car and incredibly flattened out and

(21:45):
flew like Captain America's shield for his being through the
tightly packed crowd. It decapitated everyone it touched like a
horizontal guillotine. Survivor said, after the leaf of the bris
wooshed past, they would turn to the person beside them,
only to realize that they were excitedly emoting into a
neck hole. There were a lot of headless bodies wearing

(22:05):
binoculars for no reasons. In the stands that day. People
grabbed their families and ran madly scrambling, you know that
kind of running where you're using your hands and your
feet to pull you along, that kind of panic, while
fire shot into the air behind them, and they were
forced to leap over the bodies of the injured and
the dying. So, dear Lord, how could this possibly get worse? Well,

(22:29):
here's the thing about the Mercedes. I told you they
were using a lightweight magnesium alloy for most of the bodywork.
And you know that little bear who taught you about
fire when you were in school, He taught us how
to stop, drop and roll, but he didn't spend any
time on magnesium and magnesium burns. Actually, it doesn't just burn,
It burns easier than most materials, and hotter too. Paper

(22:52):
burns at two hundred and thirty three celsius or four
hundred and fifty one degrees fahrenheit. Ray Bradbury wrote a
book about that stopian story about the dangers of censorship
and governmental overreach, and it actually came out the same
year as our story. But we're not burning books, we're
burning cars. Magnesium burns around thirty one hundred celsius or

(23:14):
fifty six hundred fahrenheit or freedom units. As a listener
recently explained to me, I figured I could cook a
frozen PiZZ in fifteen seconds in a flaming magnesium oven.
When the car first hit the embankment, the fuel tank
separated and exploded with flaming liguid was thrown hard and
fast everywhere over the stands, over the crowds. So you're

(23:36):
taking in the greatest automotive race of all time. When
the leads race by and the guy beside you now
has a flaming hubcap sticking out of his chest, would
you know what to do? It's worth mentioning the main
reason we don't use magnesium for birthday candles is they're
really hard to blow out. Race fans can get very
excited when they see cars whiz by, but you can

(23:58):
only imagine how excited to get when the car disassembles
and throws itself into the stands. All that debris, once
touched by fire, immediately ignited into white hot, flaming shards
and showered the crowd with magnesia. Members. And the human
instinct when we see fire is to smother it. At
least it was for hundreds of thousands of years until

(24:19):
we learned how to farm. Check this out. I explain
this to my wife. Here is my theory of the
evolution of human firefighting. See, once we knew how to
grow food instead of chasing it around all the time,
people began to gather into communities, and when communities grew enough,
they became municipalities. And the whole point of municipality is
to take care of all the things that you need

(24:41):
in a community. They get electricity into your house, get
water into your house, pave your streets, just all that
kind of stuff. However, pretty much since we all moved
indoors and were given running water, we've all been trained
to throw water onto fire. Where for most of history
you'd just use dirt. So here is why the introduction
of agriculture to human development really eft the people at

(25:04):
le Mans that day. If you went to the races
and a flaming piece of car hood whacked itself into
the guy beside you, your instinct would be to pour
your drink on it, just extinguish it. But pouring water
onto burning magnesium has the opposite effect. You plash the
spear sticking out of the guy beside you, and now
he goes up like the human torch. And why is that?
Because magnesium actually rips the oxygen out of the water molecules.

(25:29):
The hydrogen just sort of blows away and the fire
goes crazy. So when you pour water on it, you're
actually feeding it oxygen. So how do you extinguish something
that doesn't want to be extinguished? You got to figure
a better way to remove its oxygen source. And you
wouldn't just throw a towel over something like this, like
it's a cooking fire. I'm sure that towel would vaporize

(25:49):
before it even landed. But sand, as an example, sand
can beary a magnesium flame, just rob it of all
that oxygen. At graves, no muss, no fuss, And just
so you know, all kinds of metals will burst into flames. Sodium, potassium, titanium, lithium,
they all do it. And because of that, fire departments

(26:10):
are now requesting that you take a serious thought towards
no longer charging your cell phones while you're asleep. They
get really hot, they burst into flames, and there's not
much you're gonna do to put them out. But here's
what I would say. Theoretically, you could upend a plant
pot onto a burning phone like a hat and just
see what happens. But I have to tell you that
you are better off with a Class D fire extinguisher.

(26:32):
It's a dry chemical fire extinguisher. You've probably never seen
one in your life outside of home depot. It fires
out a blend of powdered graphite, sodium chloride, and copper
to smother and crust over whatever was combusting. Most people
would never own a classic fire extinguisher, but with lithium
replacing all the batteries in our lives, it might not

(26:53):
be a bad idea in the future. If you found
yourself earned in one of these situations, I'm gonna tell
you what to do in two phase This is phase one.
Get that burn under cool water, not cold, and not
spring out of a hose, just a nice cool flow
of water to help draw heat away from the wound
and remove any traces of chemicals. You got to remember,

(27:13):
when you actually get a burn, you are still cooking.
You're cooking, and you want to stop yourself from cooking.
Hold it underwater until it's cool enough for you to
be able to cover it up super loosely with the
cleanest arius thing that you can find, the closest thing
you've got to gauze. And you don't want to wrap
very tight because just remember how much you are not

(27:34):
going to look forward to unwrapping it if the cover
sticks into your wound. And here's the thing about burns
that you generally don't read on safety posters and factories.
If your burn is hurting, cool it, and if it
starts hurting again, just keep cooling it, keep rinsing. The
last thing you need to do is panic, So take
your time, which leads me to phase two. You definitely

(27:57):
want to go to the hospital. It's one thing if
you burn yourself touching the pan, but it's quite another
if you get a chemical or a metal burn. If
you weren't alone when you got the burn, it's entirely
likely your screams would have already prompted others to call
for a ride ahead of you. But just make sure
you get a ride. Metal and other chemical fires burn
a hell of a lot faster than regular household stuff,

(28:19):
so it can inflict more harm, more faster, and this
is also important for your peace of mind. The reason
that you probably don't have a type the extinguisher is
because these fires are more often than not found in
industrial settings. And if you found yourself in an industrial
setting and you catch a flame off a burning stack
of magnesium, what you want to do is screen, get

(28:41):
me my lawyer, and the management of whatever company or
factory that is will bend over backwards to make sure
that you get the absolute best and quickest care humanly possible.
The track was on fire, the stands were on fire,
people were injured and dying, and the race continued even

(29:02):
as the car burst and sparked with flaming projectiles, as
people tried in vain to extinguish it, even as the
dead and injured were dragged off and taken away, while
others frantically search for loved ones, and two priests were
performing last rites on victims where they lay. The race
did not stop, not here, not today. Drivers didn't even

(29:23):
know what had happened. When you think of race cars
and you think of crashes, you think, well, they're going
to wave a red flag indicating it's too dangerous to continue,
and a pole car will probably come out and purposefully
slow everyone down, and if someone died, the race would
just be over and everyone would go home early. But
not here. And the funniest observation I found was because
there was no real in car radio communication, They just

(29:46):
make these little signs that say oil or tires and
wave drivers into the pits. No one had been putting
up a sign saying dead people ahead. More than two
hundred people were injured by the white hot debris and
fuel spray, and about one hundred and twenty many of
them required serious medical attention. Those that got more intimate
with car parts fared way worse. Eighty three spectators had

(30:09):
been killed. Then rescue workers poured water onto the inferno,
which reacted more like gasolene, and the car burned for
several hours, which only made things more chaotic and frightening,
and this wasn't even the only crash of the day.
The Austin Healy, which the Mercedes hit, went on to
smash into a barrier before swerving into the pit lane.

(30:31):
The Austin Martin narrowly missed ramming into cars that were refueling,
which would have created its own inferno, but instead it
crashed through a retaining wall and plowed through a policeman,
a photographer and two race officials, and despite the overwhelming
panic and chaos, the race continued. Jaguar driver Mike Hawthorne

(30:51):
returned to the pits completely distraught. He knew that he
had caused what the press was later going to go
on to describe as a holocaust. Worth noting this is
less than ten years after the actual Holocaust of Jews
across Europe. The press saw what happened this day and said, yep,
pretty much the same thing. And he had no idea

(31:11):
how many people had died, just that it was a lot,
and he blamed himself. His team ordered him back onto
the track to keep racing, but after one lap he stopped.
When he emerged from his car, his sadness and grief
had been turned up to eleven. He was emotionally destroyed.
It's one thing to lose a loved one, it's another

(31:32):
to actually take a life unintentionally. He was trying to
wrap his head and his heart around the fact that he,
meaning to or not, probably just killed dozens of people.
And he had been so despondent that it is fair
to say that if you could have been inside that
car during that last lap, that would have been the
saddest and most awkward single lap of automotive racing in history.

(31:56):
So what happened, well, so many things, and we're not
even done here. Case in point, Imagine that you're Levey's
teammate John Fitch. You're standing on the sides of the
pit with Lvey's wife when the race turns into a
horror movie. Now imagine how she reacts as her husband's
smoking corpse skids to a halt on the pavement directly

(32:19):
in front of them, severely burnt and in full view
of everyone. He'd been thrown out of the car while
it tumbled through the air and crushed his skull on impact.
My wife, when she saw the video of this incident,
and yes, there is video to see, she pointed out
that this man did all this in his underwear, with
his pants dragged down to his ankles. A police officer

(32:42):
tore a banner off the stands to cover his body.
Imagine running to a payphone to assure your family that
you're okay when you overhear people saying that so far
they've counted forty eight dead. Now imagine that all this
is going on and you're still listening to the sound
of engines screaming in the background. Yep, that's right. Remember

(33:02):
officials did not stop the race, so they let it
keep going. Why Stupidly? At first they offered up the
show must go on, which was really just shorthand for
they didn't want to end up losing money in sponsored lawsuits.
They even pointed to the recent Farnborough Air Show crash
of nineteen fifty two, which happened just three years earlier,

(33:23):
as a precedent for keeping it going. Long story short,
a Dhavalin DH one to ten jet fighter was performing
a high speed pass over the air show when it
disintegrated in mid air, sent de free into the crowds
below and killed thirty one spectators and both pilots. But
that show had to go on too. The more reasonable
or maybe believable excuse was that if the huge crowd

(33:47):
of spectators tried to leave all at once, they would
have choked the roads and prevented access for medical and
emergency vehicles. The more practical excuse was if they sent
everyone home two hours into a twenty four hour race,
they were going to lose a lot of money. The
whole Mercedes team knew they had to pull out of
this race for the dignity of those who were dying

(34:09):
all around them, if nothing else. It wasn't an easy decision,
but it was the right one, and they knew full
well this was going to be a pr nightmare if
they finished. The chief engineer for Mercedes went over to
the Jaguar pits to let them know that they were
pulling out and asked if they would pull out two
out of respect for the disaster. The Jaguar team manager

(34:29):
met his gaze, put his hand on his shoulder, and
gave him a look of understanding before telling him to
keV where he reaches out to shake your hand and
then quickly pulls it back and runs it through his
own hair, laughing. Mercedes didn't just withdraw from the race.
They withdrew from competitive racing altogether. One of the amazing

(34:52):
things about this disaster was that the track was very long,
and because no announcements were being made, most people had
no idea that anything was even wrong unless they picked
up on that one car that was now missing or
Hawthorne's screaming sobs as he whiz passed on his last lap.
They wouldn't find out until the next day. With Mercedes

(35:14):
out and Ferrari facing technical problems, the Jaguar team won
by five laps over Austin Martin, who came in second.
The man whose breaking started the chain reaction of events
went on to win the race, and this was twenty
two hours after the accident. Hawthorne drank from the ceremonial
jug of winner Champagne, but only to a smattering of applause.

(35:38):
No one was in the mood to celebrate their accomplishment,
except for one excited photographer who snapped a picture of
him victory burping into a microphone, and the press had
a field day with it. Following the disaster, the various
teams involved went back and forth throwing around blame, so
an inquiry was held, which ultimately came to the conclusion

(36:01):
that none of the drivers had been to blame. Instead,
they blamed the track. When I said how all these
manufacturers bring their newest machines every year, what I meant
is you have vehicles of vastly different speeds and abilities
all sharing the same space. And the investigators concluded that
after thirty years of development, the track was simply no

(36:23):
longer suitable for cars that now drove three times as
fast as it was designed to handle. Cars just fresh
off a last minute turn before the straightaway either wanted
to slow down to enter the pits or blast off
on the straightaway, and they all had to do it
kind of together because there was no deceleration lane for
cars coming into the pits. They also went on to

(36:45):
make a very open and shutcase about the closeness of
the stands. They were parallel to the course, and they
were so tight to the track you could practically smell
the tires. The disaster led to an immediate temporary ban
on auto racing across Europe until race tracks could be
brought to a higher safety standard. Even overseas in America,

(37:06):
the US dissolved their existing racing association to form a
proper sanctioning and officiating body responsible for anything like this
that could happen in the future. Lance Macklin was a
guy they described as jovial and relaxed, but after Lamance
he became bitter. He sued My Hawthorn for libel. Why

(37:27):
we talked about how immediately after the incident, Hawthorne had
been weeping and admitting that he had caused the accident,
but after the race he kind of did a one
eighty and vehemently denied any responsibility. He even went on
to write a biography that covered the accident in detail
and spread the blame a little more liberally. After Lamanz,

(37:49):
My Hawthorn went on to win the World Championship in
nineteen fifty eight, and he retired shortly afterwards, and three
months after that he was dead. He died in a
traffic accident, of all things. He'd been trying to pass
the Mercedes in his Jaguar at the time and plowed
headlong into a truck. But believe it or not, there

(38:11):
was some good that came out of all of this.
The death of LaVey left a huge impression on the
American driver John Fitch. He continued racing, but he became
obsessed with improving road safety. In fact, you might not
know him from racing, but you know those yellow plastic
barrels on the highway. They're usually filled with sand or water,

(38:32):
and they're there for cars to crash into rather than
crashing into poles or concrete. Well. They are called Fitch
inertial safety barriers and they were invented by John Fitch
as a direct result of the nineteen fifty five La
Monts disaster, and since they first went into use in
the nineteen sixties, they have saved thousands of lives over

(38:55):
the years. Fanngio in the Ferrari he had a better
view of the disaster than anyone. He never raced a
LeMans again, and three years later he retired from racing altogether.
The French government and event organizers provided medical costs and
burial expenses to the families affected, and they spent nine

(39:17):
hundred thousand dollars moving the stands to a safer location,
as well as other improvements like oh picket fence replacement.
If you're a modern racing enthusiast, you might not like
having to watch races through a fence, but now you
know the reason they're there. The Laman's pit areas and
grand stands were bulldozed and rebuilt. The pit area was

(39:39):
designed and widened to remove that kink just before them,
and room was created for a dedicated deceleration lane. Even
the pits complex were pulled down and rebuilt, giving more
room to the teams. The grand stands were rebuilt with
spectator terraces and a wide ditch was placed between them
and the racetrack. It may have made racing duller, but

(40:03):
safer for drivers and the fans that love them. Despite
the safety improvements, the following year, when Laman started up again,
French driver Louis Hare was killed when his car flipped
on the second lap. The nineteen fifty five Lahman's racing
disaster remains, and hopefully will forever remain, the most catastrophic,

(40:28):
most costly, single greatest loss of life in motorsport history.
Let there be no rush to beat that record. People
said I should make this episode because it would be awesome,

(40:51):
and they said I should make it to honor the
memory of the not one, not two, but three cars
that I have had towed to Asgard in the last
nine months. And how safe did I feel sitting on
the highway in a passenger car with an air bag
and a flimsy shoulder belt. Well not at all. I
sat about fifty feet up the road, straddling the impact barrier,

(41:12):
never taking my eye off the road, because people have
a strange habit of unconsciously steering into the backs of
broken down cars and it happens all the time. So
compared to a professional racetrack, highways are a million times
more dangerous. Do you know the name Tim Horton, Well,
tim Horton's is the name of a global coffee powerhouse

(41:35):
that started right here in Canada, and it was named
after a hockey player who spent the majority of his
career playing for the Toronto Maple Leafs, but also played
with the New York Rangers, the Pittsburgh Penguins, and the
Buffalo Sabers. And really long story short, Tim Horton died
in Saint Catharine's, Ontario, a city that my dad lived in.

(41:57):
One time, while visiting there, he asked me if I
knew how Tim Horton died. He said, you won't hear
about it on the Tim Horton's website, but he died
flying down the QW Highway blasted on coke and amphetamines
and barbituates behind the wheel of a D Tomaso Pantera.
I asked what a D Tamaso Pantera looked like and

(42:17):
he said it didn't matter. Just draw a car on
a piece of paper, crumple it into a ball, light
it on fire, and throw it away. Tim Horton was
racing down the QWW when he hit a pothole and exploded.
You have any idea how fast you need to be
driving for witnesses to not be able to identify the
color of your car. Well, if you're completely loaded on

(42:39):
uppers and downers and thinking of going for a drive,
why not throw your keys into a sewer and consider
becoming a supporter of the show. It really helped fulfill
my dream of doing this full time. And if you
and a few thousand of your friends could spare a
buck or two, you'd really help keep the show and
frankly me alive. Before I tell you about Patreon, if

(43:00):
you are into it but aren't looking for a whole relationship,
you can visit, buy me a coffee, dot com slash
doomsday and just make a one time donation. And for
those of you who do, I appreciate you from a
deep place. I myself think getting episodes a little early,
with no sponsor interruptions and with additional ridiculously interesting material

(43:21):
in each new episode is worth it, and if you agree,
you can find out more at patreon dot com slash
funeral Kazoo. A quick and heartfelt shout out again to
Jenis Panell, Mary Lassiter, Jacob Meyer Scott, and Laney Tolly
for helping support me on Patreon. You can reach out
to me on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook at doomsday Podcast,

(43:43):
or fire an email to Doomsdaypod at gmail dot com.
I love hearing from you, but I'm a little behind now.
I know I was doing really good for a long
time there, but I'm only a little behind. So barfags, stickers, hugs,
and return letters are coming soon. Older episodes can be
found wherever you found this one, and while you're there,

(44:05):
please leave us a review and tell your friends. I
always thank all my Patreon listeners, new and old, for
their support and encouragement, but I also say, if you
can spare the money and had to choose, I ask
you to consider making a donation to Global Medic. Global
Medic is a rapid response agency of Canadian volunteers offering
assistants around the world to aid in the aftermath of

(44:26):
disasters and crises. They're often the first and sometimes the
only team to get critical interventions to people in life
threatening situations, and to date they have helped over three
zero point six million people across seventy seven different countries.
You can learn more and donate at globalmedic dot CAA.
On the next episode. You know how you see people

(44:47):
leaving a sporting event early and you think, ah, look
at those jerks just trying to get out to avoid traffic. Well,
let me tell you the best apologies are often offered
while holding your hat in your hands, crumpling it in
front of your chest. It's the Acra Stadium disaster of
two thousand and one. We'll talk soon. Safety goggles off

(45:08):
and thanks for listening.

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The Le Mans Racing Disaster of 1955 | Episode 78

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}The Le Mans Racing Disaster of 1955 | Episode 78