Short Stuff: 1955 Le Mans Disaster

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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. That's right, the disaster at Laman's very dark time

for motor sports history, something I've never been into,

although I did see the F1 movie on a plane recently. Yeah, you were telling me about it. Yeah, you were telling me there's one of the better movies you've ever seen in your life. I remember correctly.

No, I did not.

“I think it's spoke about it on the show even,”

but this all occurred on June 11th, 1955. We should probably tell you a little bit about Laman's as a race, because it is different than, you know, if you're just sort of a casual race person or like, yeah, they just, they drive around

and track a certain amount of times, and then somebody wins once you've completed the 200 laps. Yeah, they just turn left a lot. Yeah, that is not what happens at Laman's. I think they're gonna hold a 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.

Yes, and the, in Laman's in particular, the track is called the circuit deli-sarth, and it's a D-shape about eight and a half miles or 13.7 kilometers around, and it's not only made of race track,

but they also incorporate some actual public roads that get shut down for the race. It's made of race track. It's made of race track and public roads. I don't know.

I just think that's fascinating. Oh, it is. There's other races like this. There's public road like fully public road races. I know, and I find those fascinating, too.

Yeah, well, look, man, we really defensive about this. So for Laman's in particular, in this 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, higher 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, so I'm not even sure you can do, because Athens is in Greece, which is in Ireland, 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 track in 24 hours. 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 253 miles an hour, which was 1988, but even the 1950s, this crash occurred. I saw 120 up to 150 miles an hour, so they were driving these cars really, really fast even back then.

And I don't know, almost feel like we should take an early break there. I need to. OK, let's do it, and we'll come back. We're in agreement.

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Alright, 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, you know, when you're, if you don't know anything about auto racing, there's something called a pit in a pit crew, and you pull in and get like gas and get your tires change and get your windows clean, and whatever else the car needs at the time,

actually watch NASCAR for like a season in the early to mid 2000s for some reason I got into it. Did you have a favorite driver?

“I did, and I can't remember his name now.”

I could picture him in my head, he drove for the UPS car, whatever his name was. He drove a UPS car? Oh, that's pretty impressive, he was sponsored by UPS. He was known for doing like wheelies, and his UPS car, and going into donut in the middle

of the race, because he knew he was never going in.

And here comes a box truck on the outside lane, he's wearing those shorts, his legs are very big. Oh, man. This is crazy. Yeah, it was a short flirtation.

Burtation. Excuse me. So, have you had a bear-tation? Have you had a 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 break 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.”

Right. And so, you know, you have every incentive to like make that tough move and quick stop to get in there. And so, the land 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. Pain a picture. Thank you. Here I go. Yeah, I'm just dabbing my paintbrush to my tongue, and it's receding.

I've got to beat the devil out of the brush first. Okay. That's what they say.

That's what Bob Ross always said.

Oh, that's right. So the, the 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 Healy. 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 courageously got over, so they could get around immediately. But right as he got over, Mike Hawthorne wanted to go into the pit. So rather than just tailgate Lance Macklin for three, four seconds, maybe, and then

veer into the pit after Lance Macklin cleared it. Mike Hawthorne over took Lance Macklin and then slammed on his brakes. Yeah. 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 Leveg, who was driving him Mercedes. And it, it went really badly from that moment on. So like I said earlier, he was, 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 Healy, the sort of slope to back of that car, acted like a ramp.

And it launched Leveg and that Mercedes, obviously, into the air, apparently Macklin said later he could feel the heat from the exhaust as it flew over him, which is crazy to think about. The Mercedes ran up a four foot embankment and earthen embankment that was supposed to protect spectators, hit a concrete staircase, burst into flames and exploded.

You can't see the actual crash, but you see the explosion and very disturbingly, you see

a very large car parts just being hurled at in, you know, 100 miles an hour plus into people. Yeah. It's bad enough that Pierre 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 axle, the hood, the radiator and the engine just went flying at over a hundred miles an hour each through the crowd and just cut through the crowd like a sight. 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.

Yeah, because it was randomized because they 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 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 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, including Leveg, 84 people killed at this race. Yeah. So there was a really controversial decision that was made by the race director and that was to allow 24 hours of Leveg to continue.

This happened at like hour two and a half. It sounds crazy. Yeah, and you're like, what a disgusting psychopath, but history is actually vindicated the race director. I don't know his name, but that he made the right move because the 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 emergency crews trying to reach them would have been swamped by all the spectators leaving all at the same time, so it seems quite heartless, but it actually was the right move to make.

“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. I don't know. I want to just believe in humanity, so I'm going to say the fact that I had that level of force. 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 build to swallow, you know. Yeah, not just died, died because of him and he's like just celebrating like it's the end of whatever race. It's any other race, you know?

He never claimed responsibility for it, 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, 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 1 a.m., and they stopped racing all the way until the 1980s because of that incident. 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. I didn't do there. 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 move the pit road and made it much safer to get into. Yeah, they moved it like a quarter mile back from the track rather than write up on the

track, which I can't believe they ever did then 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.

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