Le Mans 55: The Deadliest Race
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Only Fangio is going nowhere fast. His car's gear stick has somehow got trapped up his trouser leg. And as the other racers roar away, Fangio is left struggling to untangle himself. The Le Mans 24-hour always begins in unorthodox fashion. Drivers line up on foot on one side of the track.

Then, at the starting signal, the dropping of the French tricolour flag, they dash to their cars, waiting on the other side. It makes a great spectacle for the fans looking down from the grandstand, but it's hardly the simplest nor safest way to start a 60-car race. It is chaos.

Engines won't start, doors won't close and, as in Fangio's case, gear sticks get stuck where they shouldn't. As his rivals take off weaving to dodge one another in the melee, Fangio, the reigning world champion, is left in their dust. When finally his Mercedes roars into life, the Argentine is in 14th place.

Accustomed to leading from the front, Fangio now faces the arduous grind of catching and overtaking car after car after car on the punishing Le Mans circuit. Only then can his real task begin, battling it out with the other elite drivers in their Ferraris and Jaguars to build up a lead and win the race.

By its very nature, the Le Mans 24-hour is a marathon rather than a sprint. But the man known as El Maestro is now sprinting through the heavy traffic. Within two laps, he's in sixth place and fourth by lap three. On lap 10, Fangio continues this blistering pace and sets a new course record across the entire circuit.

With its tight hairpin bends, he averages over 120 miles an hour. And on the long straights, he's pushing his Mercedes in excess of 180. Spectators crowd the grandstand, straining on tiptoe to see such a tense and unexpected battle.

This clearly isn't the usual Le Mans. That test of stamina, where doggedness and determination serves drivers better than dash and daring. Fangio is tearing up the rulebook, driving flat out as if he were competing in a normal three-hour race, rather than an event stretching out into the June night and on into the next day. El Maestro is pushing his rivals hard.

They too press the pedal to the metal, jockeying for the lead and smashing lap records time and again. Soon, only one rival remains in contention. The star of the Jaguar team, Britain's Mike Hawthorpe.

The pair swap the lead repeatedly. Fangio pulling away on the straights, only for Hawthorne to overtake at the corners. This dogfight can't go on forever. Both cars are running low on fuel and are due a stop at the pits. The pits at Le Mans aren't separated from the racing as we're used to today. They were merely the furthest right-hand side of the track, opposite the grandstand.

As they thunder towards the home straight, Hawthorne moves to the right, committing to his pit stop, while Fangio seems intent on completing a few more laps, laps without the Englishman breathing down his neck, a chance to commune with his beautiful and spirited car and extend his lead without distraction. But what followed in the next few seconds would change motor racing forever.

caused many countries to ban the sport and see Mercedes walk away from competing altogether. The hot favourite to win, El Maestro, would never see the finishing line. For this was about to become history's deadliest car race. I'm Tim Harford, and you're listening to another Cautionary Tale. MUSIC

No one died in the inaugural Le Mans 24-hour in 1923, which was something of a miracle. One driver, crossing the finishing line, jubilantly stepped out of his car to greet a friend and was promptly run down.

Another racer, whose leaky gas tank had run dry, ferried fuel cans back to his vehicle on a borrowed bicycle, foolishly pedalling into the oncoming traffic. The circuit comprised 10 miles of public roads, on a mixture of highways, cobbled lanes and country tracks, which became rutted and muddy when the Norman rains invariably fell.

The Grand Prix d'Endurance was open to any car, provided it was on sale to the general public. Any automobile you might see on the streets of New York, London or Paris qualified. And since it was a test of durability rather than raw speed, competitors pitted dinky two-seaters against great snarling machines with engines five times larger.

After all, vast horsepower wasn't any use if your engine blew up on the punishing Moulin Saint-Strait, nor if your brakes, suspension or steering failed at the poignard hairpin, sending you skidding off into a ditch. A full 24 hours of racing was the ultimate test for the cars and drivers. It was also something of a test for the paying spectators,

So the organisers laid on an open-air cinema, a jazz band, fireworks and lots and lots of alcohol. The Le Mans formula was thus established. Each summer, Sleepy Le Mans would welcome a noisy influx of sports cars and boisterous fans.

Every year, the cars would lap a little faster. And every year, the crowds would party a little harder. By 1955, Le Mans was as much a carnival and a beer festival as it was a car race. Some 300,000 people flocked to the site to eat, drink, dance, ride the ferris wheel and gawk at the fairground sideshows.

Some visitors would go home well pleased with their weekend, having never seen the racing. But of course, many eyes were glued to the track and more was at stake than mere glory. The car manufacturers knew that a win would drive up sales in dealerships across the world.

In 1955, Prince Cao Sai Long, ruler of Kentung, was trackside as the guest of Jaguar. If one of Jaguar's lightning-fast D-type cars triumphed, the prince had promised to buy ten for his garage. Standing in the way of that lucrative order was Mercedes and its state-of-the-art 300 SLR.

This silver dart of a car boasted revolutionary fuel injection, fancy desmodromic valve gear and super-light bodywork made of magnesium alloy. This wonder material was more often used in the construction of aircraft and, because of its flammability, incendiary bombs.

The Jaguar D-Type lacked some of these advantages, but it had raw speed and the best brakes in the world. And with the right man at the wheel, this small advantage could be turned into victory. And so, in those opening hours of Le Mans 1955, it came down to Jaguar versus Mercedes.

The Second World War was still painfully fresh in the memory. And in many minds, this race was a rerun of those hostilities. The Allies versus the Germans. One spectator arriving in his Mercedes at the circuit was greeted by a fellow fan, a Frenchman, who took one look at the German automobile and promptly spat on the paintwork.

The Mercedes team, perhaps sensitive to this rawness of emotions, made some diplomatic hires. Although their lead car would be driven by El Maestro, Juan Manuel Fangio, alternating shifts with a rising star, Britain's Stirling Moss, Frenchmen would crew the two other 300 SLRs in competition.

One was Pierre Leveille, a 49-year-old with a less than stellar record, having scored precisely zero championship points. His inclusion might have won some goodwill with the crowd, but serious observers doubted he truly had the skill to drive a 300 SLR.

And this appraisal seemed fair given how the race was developing. Within a couple of hours of the start, Leveille was already a full lap behind the frontrunners. Fangio was showing exactly what the Mercedes was capable of in the hands of a master. And Jaguar's Mike Hawthorne was having to wring every millisecond of advantage from his better braking to stay in contention.

but the effort was draining Hawthorne's resolve. When Fangio opened up a 100-yard lead, the British racer began to despair. I was momentarily mesmerised by the legend of Mercedes' superiority, he said, about to surrender to the inevitability of a Fangio win. Then I came to my senses and thought, damn it, why should a German car beat a British car?

If Fangio was going to race like a man possessed, then so too was Hawthorne, and woe betide anyone who got in his way. Cautionary Tales will be back in a moment.

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Upfront payment of $45 for three-month plan, equivalent to $15 per month required. New customer offer for first three months only. Speed slow after 35 gigabytes if network's busy. Taxes and fees extra. See mintmobile.com. Only one driver has ever completed the 24-hour race single-handed. In 1950, a somewhat eccentric English millionaire, Edward Ramsden Hall, drove for a full day without leaving his seat for so much as a bathroom break.

When asked his advice, the 50-year-old replied: "Wear green overalls, old boy." But for serious contenders, sharing the driving duties was the only sensible option. The choice of co-driver was of vital importance. And the pairing of Juan Manuel Fangio with Stirling Moss was greeted as a masterstroke from Mercedes.

El Maestro was gifted with a precision and consistency that allowed him to hit the optimal path on the track, the so-called racing line, lap after lap. At 25, Stirling Moss was mercurial and brilliant, and quick to anger. Markedly different in temperament, Fangio and Moss nonetheless had huge respect for one another and spoke warmly of each other's skills.

Jaguar's Mike Hawthorne wasn't so sure of his co-driver. The man had never raced at Le Mans before and confided that the speeds his D-Type reached on the Mulsanne straight unnerved him. Hawthorne feared that once he swapped with his co-driver, any lead he'd built up would quickly be lost. His only hope of winning was to push his opponents relentlessly.

forcing them into a mistake that would either break the car or see it spin off the track. Fangio and Moss were certainly formidable opponents that day, but secretly, neither was relishing the upcoming fight. It's a heartless race, said Moss, who demanded extra pay to compete. I wanted a lot to go to Le Mans because I didn't enjoy it. For racers like Moss, there was much to hate about Le Mans.

The mix of fast and slow cars, elite drivers and eager amateurs, and the monotony of driving through the night. But what annoyed Moss most was that a 24-hour event wasn't a fair test of his Grand Prix champion skills.

Men like Moss, Fangio and Hawthorne were explosive talents. The fiery passion they brought to three-hour races, the fire that made them winners, was a deadly liability at Le Mans. As Moss wisely observed, fire and Le Mans don't mix.

It's lap 35, two and a half hours into the race, and the spectators around the grandstand are straining to see who will leave the corner at Maison Blanc first. Who's leading, Mercedes or Jaguar? The green Jaguar D-type of Mike Hawthorne is ahead, just. But there's traffic ahead. Hawthorne and Fangio are bearing down fast on two slower competitors.

In the middle of the track is Pierre Leveille's Mercedes. And on the far right is the Austin Healey of Lance Macklin. Macklin was following custom, pulling his slower car to the side to allow the likes of Jaguars and Mercedes to overtake on his left. Macklin glanced at his speedometer, 135 miles per hour. The Jaguar coming up in his mirror must have been doing 150 at least.

"Old Mike's doing a great job," thought Macklin, pleased that a fellow Briton was leading the race. Then admiration turned to puzzlement. Mike Hawthorne was steering right, cutting in front of Macklin's car. Why? Hawthorne was preparing to pull in at the upcoming pits to refuel and allow his co-driver to take the wheel. He was fast running out of road.

Safer and saner would have been to slow down and settle in behind Macklin's car for the short run to the pits. It would have cost him a few extra seconds, but what's that? In a race of 24 hours, Hawthorne instead took the fiery option. And fire and Le Mans don't mix.

Barrelling towards the pits, the Jaguar driver applied his powerful brakes to prevent him overshooting his waiting teammate. Suddenly, rather than seeing Hawthorne disappearing off into the distance, Macklin was about to run into the back of him. He slammed on his own, less impressive brakes and drifted into the middle of the track to avoid Hawthorne.

But that meant he was right in the path of the two speeding Mercedes of Pierre Leveille and Fangio. Fangio had seen such catastrophes unfold before and knew how they ended. These beautiful machines were death traps. In fact, racers such as Fangio opted not to wear seatbelts, feeling that they had a better chance being flung out of their cars across the tarmac than being strapped in a burning wreck.

There was nothing I could do, and I knew it, said El Maestro. I could not stop, and there was no room to maneuver. From the corner of his eye, Fangio saw his Mercedes stablemate, Pierre Leveille, throw up a hand. Fangio took this as a warning. Leveille signaled that he would try to avoid Macklin by going left, and that Fangio should tack right.

Others saw in this hand gesture the 49-year-old's resignation to the inevitable, a final wave goodbye. LeVay's Mercedes closed on Macklin's swerving car, but rather than crashing squarely into it, the light and elegant silver machine lifted off as if driving up a ramp. Fangio watched in horror as LeVay's automobile soared into the air,

And then, even over the whine of his own engine, the Argentine heard an explosion. A wall of fire and smoke erupted. Macklin was still skidding across the track, so Fangio pulled to the right, only to be greeted by Mike Hawthorne's now stationary Jaguar. How I passed him is a mystery, recalled El Maestro.

In fact, it'd come so close to smashing into Hawthorne that his silver Mercedes now carried a streak of British racing green paint as he scraped by. My stomach weaving, I shouted with relief as I picked up speed on the unobstructed circuit, said Fangio. As far as he knew, Macklin was alive and so was Hawthorne. Poor Pierre was likely dead. That was racing.

Fangio was both alive and his car undamaged. The race was still his for the winning, right? In the minutes before the crash, Francois Jardel had arranged to meet his girlfriend in the flat paddock beside the grandstand. He'd spotted her in the crowd, but stopping to talk to a friend had again lost sight of her.

The enclosure offered great views down to the Maison Blanc turn, over to the pits and across to the all-important start/finish line. It was… Some spectators brought stepladders for an unobstructed view and great camera angles. Shutters snapped all around Francois as he hunted for his partner. Leading cars must be coming into sight.

To make himself more visible, Francois had cleverly donned a bright red sweater and cap. His trousers were white. The roar of the mighty engines drew nearer. Then unexpected sounds. First a bang, and then a deep, resounding explosion. A scream, coming in unison from scores, perhaps hundreds of mouths, rose from the enclosure. And then silence.

save for tinny accordion music coming from the public address system. Francois' snow-white pants were blood-red. A woman standing beside him had been obliterated. Shouts, screams and groans filled the air, coming from the burned, the wounded and the traumatised, but there were stretches of the enclosure where there were no cries, no agonised writhing.

Just stillness and silence. Pierre Lévesque's Mercedes had been launched into the air by the collision. It then vaulted the earth barrier protecting the crowd and struck a concrete stairway, disintegrating and spewing shards of metal and burning fuel into the mass of spectators.

The hood of the car scythed through the crowd like a guillotine, severing heads as it went. A flying hubcap lifted one woman off her feet and flung her onto the track. This murderous fusillade of debris, much of it combustible magnesium alloy, then burned furiously, defying all efforts to put it out. Miraculously untouched,

Francois Jardel looked around and was flooded with memories from the war. Corpses lay everywhere. While it was carnage in the enclosure, order was quickly being restored on the track. As race marshals waved yellow warning flags to slow the approaching cars, two Mercedes mechanics hurried bravely over to remove Lance Macklin's damaged vehicle to allow racing to continue.

His car had spun crazily after the impact with Pierre Levesque's Mercedes and had mown down a gendarme, a photographer and two race officials standing in the pit lane. They were gravely injured. Macklin was untouched but furious. He marched over to Mike Hawthorne. "That was your fault!" he bellowed at the Jaguar driver. But the conversation was cut short.

Though Hawthorne seemed distraught, his team boss instructed him to get back into his D-type and drive one more lap before stopping again to swap with his co-driver. So Hawthorne roared off once more to chase down Fangio. Donald Healy, the designer of Lance Macklin's car, went to comfort the driver. You must be a bit shaken. Let's go and have a drink to celebrate your survival.

It was over that bottle of champagne that a friend approached Macklin. "'It's like a butcher's shop out there,' he said. "'There are bodies everywhere. There must be a hundred people killed.' Macklin, like most of those on the pit side of the track, didn't have a clear view of the crash site. His friend was clearly exaggerating. "'For God's sake,' he said, "'don't be so ridiculous.'

So amid the cacophony of the continuing race, Macklin turned back to his champagne. Cautionary Tales will be right back.

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What are you doing? said François Jardel to a Ferrari driver in the pits. Going on with your race? Are you mad? The driver just smirked at the Frenchman and told him, with a wink, not to make such a fuss. François, still covered in blood, departed to resume the search for his missing girlfriend, who he would eventually find unconscious but alive amidst a scene of chaos at a local hospital.

But still, the drivers, mechanics and VIPs in the pit area had little inkling of the horror that was unfolding just a hundred or so feet away. So the socialising and glad-handing continued. More champagne glasses were drained and the race went on. The thousands of fans flocking the fairground, the restaurants and beer tents were equally oblivious and the ferris wheel kept turning.

But in homes across Europe and beyond, the scale of the tragedy was all too apparent. It was the first time Le Mans had been televised and hundreds of thousands of flickering television screens were filled with the smoke, the flames and the dead. Amongst that horrified legion of viewers were the bosses of Mercedes-Benz back in Germany.

Le Mans was supposed to be a shop window for their company, a glamorous PR opportunity to sell more cars. That commercial hope was now dead. The blazing wreck and the mass slaughter on TV screens now would be splashed across newspaper front pages tomorrow. So as Fangio and Moss extended their lead over Jaguar, telephones across Stuttgart began to ring.

Of all the syndromes, Stockholm syndrome, say, or imposter syndrome, the most vividly titled is undoubtedly boiling frog syndrome. The theory is that if you drop a frog into a pan of boiling water, the animal will immediately leap to safety. If you place it in cold water, which you slowly heat, the frog won't notice the gradual change until it's too late.

You will be glad to hear that frogs are actually smarter than this. They'll hop out of the water when it starts to feel uncomfortable. Humans aren't always so clever, and boiling frog syndrome is a useful metaphor to explain much otherwise odd human behaviour. It helps explain, for instance, what happened at Le Mans on June 11th, 1955.

That year's race was the 23rd Grand Prix d'Endurance held at the circuit. And yes, there had been improvements to the track. But were the race officials, in many respects, just slowly boiling frogs? In 1923, the fastest car on the uneven track averaged 60 mph.

At that speed, Le Mans' traditional foot race start, its lack of a separate pit area, as well as its broad mixture of vehicles and driving abilities, were risky but not insane.

But then the water started to simmer. By 1939, the average speed had crept up to 90. When Le Mans returned after the war, complete with Eddie Hall and his soiled overalls, the average was 100 miles an hour.

And automotive engineering was advancing fast. Vying for supremacy, the prestige marks were bending the rules by entering not production cars, but prototypes using jet age materials and manufacturing. The 300 SLR and Jaguar's D-Type were never going to come pouring off the production lines. They easily touched speeds of 180 miles per hour.

Should they ever have shared a track with cars going barely half that speed? The organisers of Le Mans had been sitting in slowly heating water for years, yet hadn't noticed that boiling point was very nearly upon them. Francois Jardel had found it impossible to convey the magnitude of the disaster to that Ferrari driver, but word of the carnage on the other side of the track slowly seeped into the pit area.

The head of Mercedes' press operation went in search of Pierre Leveille's body, crossing to the blood-soaked enclosure to begin hunting among the scores of bodies. He'd watched Leveille don tennis shoes to help him keep up with younger drivers for the starting sprint, so the press officer now checked the feet of each corpse, but to no avail. Finally, someone presented him with the remnants of Leveille's crash helmet.

Its contents turned the German's stomach. Heading back to the pits, he got on the phone to his bosses at Mercedes in Stuttgart. Hours ticked by, but as darkness fell, Fangio and the rest raced. Le Mans officials argued that halting the event would send spectators heading to the exits, impeding the evacuation of casualties. But as time passed, this reasoning looked increasingly shaky.

The drivers could have walked away, regardless of what the organisers said. But they didn't. Stirling Moss hated Le Mans, but he didn't see the point of stopping. It wouldn't bring back the dead, he argued. If this response strikes you as callous, put yourself for a moment in the driving seat. Motor racing in the 1950s was a bloody gladiatorial business.

Many of those competing at Le Mans had seen friends and rivals torn apart in crashes, or incinerated in their seats, or had had accidents themselves. Indeed, several men racing that day would soon lose their lives. If one driver or spectator died, that was absolutely no surprise. What if two people died? Or three? Was that a surprise?

Lance Macklin suspected that many spectators rather relished seeing a fatal crash. I hated the crowd, he admitted. When he heard fans now expressing horror at the carnage in the paddock, his sympathy was limited. That's what you came for, isn't it? Acclimated to death, sudden and violent, drivers and their racing teams were like boiling frogs too.

Was the accident by the grandstand really so awful that it warranted calling off the race? The executives at Mercedes-Benz finally made that call. One or two deaths might be a typical day at the races, but 83 spectators had died. After a Mercedes car had killed so many fans, how exactly would Fangio and Moss celebrate a victory?

Mercedes instructed all of its drivers to retire from the race. So the mechanics gathered up as much of Pierre Leveille's wreck as possible, loaded the other 300 SLRs onto trucks and quietly left the circuit. The Mercedes team boss stopped to talk to his opposite number at Jaguar. Would he withdraw from the race too? The reply was curt.

The D-types, now with an unassailable lead, would thunder on. Unlike Jaguar, Mercedes executives had realized that in the television age, they couldn't shrug off so much death and suffering. The company quit the race that day, and at the end of the season, withdrew from racing for 40 long years.

With the Mercedes packed and gone, Hawthorne's co-driver pulled into a rain-damped pit lane 23 hours and 45 minutes into the race. Mike Hawthorne would take the wheel, the chequered flag and victory. The pair set a new record, competing 306 laps in total. It was, of course, a tainted victory.

While some blamed the crash on the slow reactions of Lance Macklin, and others said Pierre Lévesque was too old to be there at all, the weight of blame has fallen on Mike Hawthorne. His desire to win, to overtake the slower car, to save a few seconds, that desire came at far too high a cost.

Given the death toll, action came quickly. France suspended all races and several nations banned the sport altogether, with Switzerland only lifting its restriction in 2018. Some of the most notorious racing circuits were made safer or closed down entirely. And Le Mans was forced to make some long overdue changes to the track, the pits and the barriers protecting the crowd.

An inquiry into the crash, however, was frustrated by the drivers' unwillingness to point fingers at one another. Both Fangio and Macklin gave neutral witness statements, hoping, perhaps, to calm public anger and save the sport they loved. But Mike Hawthorne remained a focus for fury. Recall how the bosses at Mercedes had fretted over what a PR disaster a win by Fangio would have been,

Well, the thought clearly hadn't occurred to Mike Hawthorne and Jaguar. When Hawthorne's D-type crossed the finish line, not yards from the blood-stained enclosure, the driver was beaming. He gleefully popped a champagne cork and embraced his co-driver. A photograph of this scene made the newspapers. « À votre santé, Monsieur Hawthorne », read the bitter headline.

Cheers to you, Mr Hawthorne. The primary sources for this episode were 24 Hours, 100 Years of Le Mans by Richard Williams, Juan Manuel Fangio's My 20 Years of Racing, and Mark Kahn's classic text, Death Race, Le Mans 1955, which included an exclusive and candid interview with Lance Macklin and the eyewitness testimony of Francois Jardel.

For a full list of our sources, see the show notes at timharford.com. Cautionary Tales is written by me, Tim Harford, with Andrew Wright, Alice Fiennes and Ryan Dilley. It's produced by Georgia Mills and Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original music are the work of Pascal Wise. Additional sound design is by Carlos San Juan at Brain Audio. Ben-Nadaf Hafri edited the scripts.

The show features the voice talents of Melanie Guttridge, Stella Harford, Oliver Hembrough, Sarah Jupp, Masaya Munro, Jamal Westman and Rufus Wright. The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Greta Cohn, Sarah Nix, Eric Sandler, Carrie Brody, Christina Sullivan, Keira Posey and Owen Miller. Portionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. It's recorded at Wardour Studios in London by Tom Berry.

If you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review. It really makes a difference to us. And if you want to hear the show ad-free, sign up to Pushkin Plus on the show page on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm slash plus.

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