The Deadliest Crash: the Le Mans 1955 Disaster

June 11th, 1955.

The most prestigious event in motor racing is under way.

For an entire day, the world's greatest drivers

are pitted against each other in the Vingt Quatre Heures du Mans,

known the world over simply as Le Mans.

Hundreds of thousands of spectators, many British,

are packed around the narrow track,

eager to witness 120 daredevil drivers battle it out

in the fastest cars the world has ever seen.

The 1955 race promised to be a dazzling chapter in the history of this glamorous event.

Instead, it was destined to be remembered

as the most catastrophic event in motor racing history.

A sporting tragedy on an unprecedented scale,

leaving scores dead and many more fighting for their lives.

Next to me the guy's shoulder was decapitated.

Using never seen before home movies,

amateur photos and firsthand accounts of those involved.

-He was out of control.

-"Bloody hell," he said, "this is suicide."

This is the inside story of how what should have been Le Mans'

most exhilarating race came to be remembered as The Deadliest Crash.

The 1950s.

After periods of economic depression and wartime austerity,

a new wave of optimism was sweeping across Europe.

And with it came a renewed appetite for sporting spectacle.

Tailor-made to satisfy this hunger,

were the thrills and spills of motor racing.

This was to be the golden decade -

an era when motor racing truly came of age.

I love speed.

The faster they are, they better.

I could do it all day, beautiful.

It's a challenge and it's tough and it's difficult.

It's trying and it's stressful and demanding.

It's everything.

It's life, you know, condensed.

To say I passed a Mercedes at 192 miles per hour.

Beautiful, excellent.

For any rising star of the era

there was one victory that could not be equalled.

To be on the podium at Le Mans, the biggest race in the world,

was every driver's dream.

For American driver John Fitch,

now 92, 1955 was his year to grab the spotlight.

Did we want to win in Le Mans?

Everyone who goes to Le Mans wants to win, of course, yes.

Norman Dewis, now 89, was also there challenging for the title.

Since its origin in 1923,

the 24-hour event had become one of the toughest

and most dangerous events in the season.

Consequently it had become the most respected meeting in the sport.

And in 1955 all the elements were in place for a monumental race.

The 24-hour endurance race at Le Mans in northern France

was designed as a harsher, more demanding race than Grand Prix.

It set out to cram more racing into one day

than a whole season of Formula One.

It challenged manufactures to field cars that were not only fast

but reliable.

The car that has finished the most laps after 24 hours wins the race.

The top teams often entered not one but three cars,

each car with two drivers.

They hope that one of these cars will be strong enough

to survive racing flat out non-stop for an entire day and win the race.

Le Mans is more of a strategy.

It takes a tremendous amount of preparation

and thought to win Le Mans and also it needs a lot of luck.

Le Mans provided a spectacle

that television and cinema were taking to the rest of the world.

Suddenly, the greatest drivers and manufacturers were attracted

to the event that offered a brilliant marketing opportunity.

Win the race on Sunday and you'd sell cars on the Monday.

Very few races capture

that fact that it is such a massive social

gathering and event,

triggered by

the race, which is a great race.

It's THE event,

the event of the year.

The world's most influential manufacturers, Ferrari, Maserati,

Aston Martin, Jaguar, Mercedes,

vied with one another to showcase

their most dazzling technical innovations.

1955 was shaping up to be a special year.

A great head-to-head battle was on the cards.

Two arch rivals stood out.

Jaguar and Mercedes.

It was to be billed as World War II on the track.

I think you could say it was World War II on the track.

It was certainly

Britain versus Germany, in what had been occupied France...

..at a time when the British car industry was very strong...

..with worldwide sales and worldwide reputation

and Jaguar was a very exotic name.

And Mercedes were coming back

after the factory was smashed during the war.

So, in a sense, it was Jaguar trying

to maintain what they had against the Germans,

who were emerging so strongly.

Since the beginning of Le Mans in 1923,

the British had won almost half the races.

Jaguar had recently become the most dominant force,

winning in 1951 and 1953.

Jaguar was a small company with big ambitions to produce the world's

best sports cars, both for the track

and more importantly for consumers.

To stamp their dominance in 1955,

they returned with the fastest car

they had ever made -

the long nose D-type.

It's so tempting to go into stereotypes, but I will do.

The Jaguar looked somehow more feline

and the Mercedes looked much more

somehow squarer, solid, reliable.

In that sense perhaps more Germanic.

So when you look at the two cars,

you are looking at two different styles, two different approaches

to the same problem of making a car go fast.

After the war, Germany and Mercedes Benz returned to motor racing

to win the Grand Prix championship.

They were thought unstoppable and held prestigious prizes

like the world speed record.

Alongside their ambitions to dominate car manufacturing,

Mercedes Benz and its Silver Arrow team

were out to smash the stranglehold the British had on Le Mans.

It was always recognised with the spectators this is going

to be a race and a half, when there is Mercedes with Jaguar.

With this intense, escalating rivalry,

the 1955 Le Mans was set up to be a thrilling race.

300,000 spectators were piling through the turnstiles.

Bernard Chotard is a lifelong fan of Le Mans.

The race colours some of his earliest memories.

Bernard and his wife, Jacqueline,

had married just eight days before the 1955 Le Mans.

Going to the race was a part of their honeymoon celebrations.

For Giselle Pasquier and her husband, Henri,

it was also a special outing.

Jacques Grelley always dreamed of being a racing driver.

He loved the event and went every year.

Just like a show.

Everybody walked with a bottle of wine in their hand

or a bottle of champagne.

People were drinking, happy, watching the race.

Some were not even looking at the race, just talking.

It's mostly the atmosphere of a fair.

Women were very well dressed,

most of the men come dressed with ties. A show.

The Circuit de la Sarthe was and remains

the largest track in the world

and features the legendary four-mile long Mulsanne straight,

the longest and fastest racing

straight of any circuit in the world,

where cars in the 1950s were already approaching 190 miles per hour.

There are fewer corners compared to most circuits.

Le Mans bends are tight after incredibly fast straights.

This stresses the cars and especially, over 24 hours,

the drivers.

An added challenge for the drivers is that Le Mans is not a purpose-built race track.

The Circuit de la Sarthe is made up of country lanes.

The Le Mans surface, unlike most racing tracks

which are smooth and clean, is rough and lethal.

In addition, the course is surrounded by trees

and other hazards,

all threats to racing drivers travelling at full throttle.

Le Mans is also unique

in that different classes of car race at the same time.

Some high speed, like the racing Jaguar, some low speed,

like the road-going Austin Healey.

This means there is a lot of overtaking,

which delights the fans and challenges the drivers.

But when there are cars of vastly different speeds

racing on the same track,

there could be serious consequences.

People go to a race because it's dangerous.

Tertre Rouge was always packed

because they expected at that place that

always one car or more car would lose control and hit the wall.

I think most people that go probably expect to see one.

It's expected of it.

There's was one poor sod carted off dead.

It livens it up if it happens in front of you.

At the end of the Mulsanne straight,

where you turn right, you really have to push the brakes very hard

to make it and if you didn't make it you're on a sand bank

and here you fly over the sand bank.

While these circumstances

might provide endless thrills for the crowd,

they could be a matter of life and death for the drivers.

In the '50s, track and car safety was all but absent,

drivers preferring not to have seat belts,

believing it was better

to be thrown from a wreck than remain in it on impact.

Drivers were killed.

Probably used to get at least two or three a year.

We lost friends every season, which is almost unheard of now.

It says on your ticket that motor racing is dangerous, on the back.

I don't take any notice of it.

By 1955, seven drivers had already been killed at Le Mans.

Anybody who measures their desires against their own life

has to be respected,

and in an era where a lot got killed respected even more.

The levels of danger set motor racing apart from all other sports.

The cult of the legendary driver was born.

None were greater than Juan Manuel Fangio, nicknamed El Maestro.

He was on his way to winning the world championship five times,

a record that would remain his for over 45 years.

With his graceful and fluid racing style,

Fangio was soon to become the best driver of all time.

He was an absolute presence,

he was phenomenal

and he was a thoroughly good person.

He was from nowhere, absolutely nowhere.

He was a mechanic for years and years before he got in a decent car.

He began his career almost in middle age because of the war,

a gentlemanly figure, slightly portly...

very dignified looking man.

And he won race after race after race.

However, Fangio had yet to conquer the demands

of the 24 hours of Le Mans,

failing to finish here three times before.

He was out to prove himself.

Fangio was Mercedes' star man.

But each car needed two drivers to take shifts over the 24 hours.

Fangio's co-driver was Stirling Moss.

Stirling Moss was then a rising prospect in Formula One and sports car racing.

He was already one of Britain's best known

and most highly skilled drivers.

This was Mercedes' number one pairing

but because of the uncertainty of cars surviving this harsh contest,

many crashing or breaking down,

top teams often entered more than one car.

In 1955, Mercedes entered three.

American John Fitch

was selected to race that day in the second Mercedes Benz.

I had one opportunity.

Here I was, a member of what was thought to be the most successful

and effective racing team.

And I was on that team.

It was...

the opportunity of a lifetime.

And I had to be very sure that I turned in my best performance.

This was the big one, this was the grand opportunity

which I was very fortunate to get.

The talent in the Mercedes team ran deep,

drawing on names from across the world.

Co-driving with John Fitch in the second Mercedes

was French icon Pierre Levegh.

At 50, he was older than Fangio,

and had driven more miles at Le Mans than any other driver there,

but despite having competed several times, almost winning

single handedly in 1952, he had never won at Le Mans.

He was a folk hero for the French,

a fact not lost on Mercedes team boss Naubauer.

They had Levegh as a great gesture to France.

A heroic French figure who had tried to win it by himself was

now being given a chance in front of a French crowd in France to win it.

He was called the Bishop,

privately among other drivers,

not to his face, because he was rather solemn,

and he was an old guy. He was 50 years old.

He was a good driver. I know that.

Levegh was in hallowed company and completed a formidable line up.

It made Mercedes Benz the team to beat.

The press believing nothing could challenge the combination

of Moss and Fangio.

Yet Jaguar had an ace up their sleeve.

Their very own British rising star.

A driver that had no intention of letting a German company take all the glory.

The British selected Mike Hawthorn as its number one driver,

one of the greatest mavericks the sport has ever known.

Hawthorn, only 26-years-old,

was already on his way to becoming a motor racing hero.

Mike Hawthorn was everybody's idea of a public school boy.

He drove in a bow tie, even Grands Prix he wore a bowtie.

Behind the wheel of the best cars, Hawthorn was the young turk on the international circuit,

achieving podium places at Grand Prix level.

He was a real threat to Fangio.

But it was not just his reputation as a talented driver

which set Hawthorn apart from the crowd.

Mike would go out and have a party night

and then get up and get in the car and race, you know?

Carefree and flamboyant,

Hawthorn seemed the epitome of the light-hearted gentleman amateur,

racing for the pure enjoyment of competition,

and living life to the full.

But there was another side to the man, a side that

did not always endear him to some of his fellow racing drivers.

He did have this sort of low ebb sometimes.

He had a kidney complaint, he'd had one kidney taken away anyway

and the other one wasn't doing too good.

He was on a time scale of about...

They reckoned he'd got about three years to live.

Fully aware of his own mortality,

Hawthorn was living life on the edge.

Like Mercedes, Jaguar also entered three cars,

but this British team only had British drivers.

Hawthorn's co-driver was Le Mans newcomer Ivor Bueb.

Tony Rolt and Duncan Hamilton were in the second Jaguar

and in the third, Don Beauman and Norman Dewis.

All would have to be at their best

if they were to have a chance of beating Mercedes Benz.

Manager Lofty England knew, however, that apart from Hawthorn,

the Jaguar drivers were not in the same league as Fangio and Moss.

And what it meant was that Hawthorn couldn't win

because whenever he handed the over to Bueb,

Fangio would be handing over to Moss

and Ivor Bueb couldn't live with Stirling Moss, not over hours and hours and hours.

Ivor Bueb was very, very concerned about

the speeds he was going to do.

He'd never been up in that speed range before.

Going down that Mulsanne he said, "It's a bit scary," he said,

"Getting up in the 180 mile an hour stuff."

The spectators were all too aware of the tension building between the rival teams.

As the countdown to the starter's flag continued

they scrambled to get the best view.

Overlooking the pit area was the most prized position.

Le Mans really starts at 9am on Saturday.

When the people start to come

and choose their place where they are going to be.

Some people want to be right in front of the protection wall,

just behind the pressing, nobody is going to be in front of us.

I was mostly in front of the grandstand.

To see when the car arrive,

to see how fast the driver get out of his car, get on the wall,

how fast the mechanic was able to change the tyre, refuel,

until the car is speeding, leaving again.

That always fascinated me.

With tickets at only four francs a piece, the main grandstand on the

pit start straight was accessible to everybody.

The low picket fences meant an uninterrupted view of the action

and as the sun shone down it filled to capacity.

Ten minutes to start time,

the moment everyone has been waiting for.

In all, 60 cars take their place to be raced by 120 drivers.

When the cars are wheeled to their starting positions,

the fastest go to the top of the line,

Ferrari, Mercedes and Jaguar.

Behind the scenes, the teams secretly worked on tactics

to outwit the opposition.

For Jaguar, Lofty England came up with a radical

plan to combat Mercedes' ability to take a race dominating lead.

They could not match them driver for driver

but they might be able to turn Mercedes' advantage into a weakness

in order to win a team victory.

The only way Hawthorn could conceivably win,

or Jaguar could win,

was for Hawthorn to go out and try and blow up the Fangio car

by stretching it so far it simply blew up

and this apparently was the tactic they adopted.

It was a strategy fraught with risk.

Right from the race start the pressure was on Mike Hawthorn to

lure and stretch Fangio's car beyond its mechanical limits.

The Le Mans start is one of the most charged in motor racing.

The drivers stood waiting on the tarmac

find it difficult to concentrate and focus.

There's this plateau.

The race takes over, the event.

And it's full, you can't move and all the flags are up.

It just builds up and builds up to this crescendo.

The 1955 crowd is the largest ever seen at Le Mans.

The crowd does get to you a bit.

It's probably one of the biggest spectator races,

you get 300,000 there and that's a lot people.

So you look across to the grandstand

and the grandstand is packed with people.

It's all about how fast the drivers can run to their cars and get away.

Everyone is watching the starter's flag.

It goes quiet, and, you know, with a huge crowd like that

you can just hear the fluttering of the flags.

The tricolour comes down

and 60 drivers sprint across the track and leap into their cars.

From that silence moments earlier

to this sort of sea of

action and sound.

There are no seat belts to don, nothing to slow them down.

Engines roar into life and cars accelerate away.

All except Fangio, who is stranded -

his trousers stuck on his gear stick.

Everyone is expecting their usual jockeying for position

and a settling down as the front runners open up a lead ready for the long haul.

It is clear right from the start, however,

that this race is not going to be like that.

Right away, Hawthorn is in second place, soon chasing the lead.

After a poor start, Fangio has to battle through a mass of cars,

but neither Hawthorn or Fangio are concerned about other cars.

They know that this is a race between the mighty Mercedes

and the unbreakable Jaguar.

The Jaguar plan is put into action.

Mike Hawthorn goes flat out.

Fangio, El Maestro,

is under pressure to respond.

Fangio's instructions were to race,

not to run at an even pace and get to the end, race, race as you want.

So he was a racer, Hawthorn was a racer, so they set off,

they sprinted into the ultimate endurance test.

Fangio and Hawthorn seemed to forget that there was a 24-hour race.

For the first...

nearly two hours it was just an out and out Grand Prix.

Every lap

Fangio was leading or Hawthorn was leading

and they were breaking the lap record consistently lap after lap.

The two were dicing, dicing,

and Hawthorn had so much guts in those days, he really had guts.

A driver of that calibre always intends to win a race,

and he has to go to considerable...

lengths in effort, in willpower,

pressing himself,

risking his life,

everything to win a race.

Just to hear those cars, the noise of the cars when

they were flat on the floor.

When you hear the noise

of the Ferrari passing by, the noise was fantastic

and the Mercedes had a lot of noise also.

It so happened that Hawthorn,

who on that day equalled the driving ability of Fangio,

he was equally...as good as Fangio,

neither one of those two could get ahead and get a good lead.

Fangio was...

what...

three feet behind the Jaguar, not even,

sometimes they were going to touch.

If Hawthorn had put his foot up a little bit

I'm sure Fangio would give him a push.

It generated a self-sustaining atmosphere

of going faster and faster and faster,

with a huge crowd, perhaps 300,000,

getting more and more intoxicated as this duel went on.

Who is going to break first, Fangio or Hawthorn?

One of the two,

at the speed they were going, one of the two has to break down.

It was certainly the notion that we must beat the Germans

and several people have told me that the French, who of course

do remember the occupation, were absolutely thrilled

that the Jaguar was doing this to a German team.

So that added another dimension to it.

This, however, was not just World War II on the track.

It was also a confrontation between David and Goliath.

The Mercedes 300 SLR was produced by a battalion of engineers,

backed by of one of the world's

most powerful manufacturers in the heart of industrial Germany.

The D-type Jaguar was engineered by 14 men in Coventry.

But both companies had produced cars packed with innovation,

utilising the most advanced technology.

The difference between the D-type Jaguar and the 300 SLR Mercedes

was the difference between day and night.

The 300 SLR was a complete revolution in design and in concept.

The 300 SLR's sleek body shape owed its success to a unique chassis.

It was constructed on a revolutionary space frame principal,

a rigid structure made from interlocking struts

in a geometric pattern.

With magnesium body panels,

it was incredibly light and extremely strong.

It was designed by a genius whose name was Rudolph Ulenhaut.

The 300 SLR had a three litre, eight cylinder Formula One engine,

relatively small compared to other top cars at Le Mans.

But its cutting edge technology,

such as desmodromic valves

and a specially developed fuel injection system,

gave the engine 310 horse power - a lot for its size.

This was effectively a Grand Prix car with a sports car body.

The Jaguar D-type had a larger 3.4 litre engine with 295 horse power.

It also had an innovative chassis and body and was available as a road car as well as a racer.

Jaguar may not have had the financial resources of Mercedes,

but, by reputation,

they were able to attract the most creative engineers and designers.

Malcolm Sayer, he brought the aircraft principal into the D type.

They bolted a sub frame onto the bulkhead

and the engine was put into that sub frame.

So he adopted these principals way ahead of everybody else.

The Jaguar also incorporated an aerodynamic tail-plane at the rear

to give it superior stability at high speed.

But the biggest difference was the Jaguar's brakes.

The disc brakes were highly developed by British manufacturers.

They were not so highly developed by the German manufacturers,

so they didn't use them.

They used huge drum brakes, that's the old technology.

Mercedes were getting a bit near the bone, the speeds were going up

but the brakes could not match the performance to stop the car.

Mercedes' old-fashioned heavy drum brakes, prone to overheating,

seemed unlikely to last a 24-hour race.

Their radical solution?

An air-brake!

The driver pressed a button and the whole panel at the back of the car,

like a big boot lid, it came up vertical,

and that acted as an airbrake to slow the car down.

People like Moss realised very quickly

that you could use this air brake

to stabilise the car through corners.

So that in theory would have given it an enormous advantage,

excepting that Le Mans is not about corners,

it's really about naked speed and the Jaguar had that.

The Jaguar was...brutalised,

he didn't beat the car he brutalised the car.

Hawthorn was at the limit.

Hawthorn never accepted that a German car could pass a British car.

That's what he was doing,

dicing with a Mercedes, to be in front of that Mercedes.

It was his aim all the time to be in front.

I mean he did it time and time again,

he passed Fangio time and time again, and Fangio passed him.

They must have changed places well over a dozen times.

Hawthorn with no braking, you could see that he was not braking,

went straight past him

and when he braked for the Dunlop bridge the car snaked unbelievably.

He would be determined to beat that Mercedes at all costs.

The smell of the racing oil.

All the cars had racing oil in the car

and they passed by and it smells good!

Part of the armoury of being a driver

is almost a...

A sense of superiority or aloofness that...

..shows other drivers, don't mess with me

because I am the biggest dog here.

Race drivers don't really care how fast they are going.

We don't even have speedometers in the cars, we don't care.

All we want to know is if we are in control, that's all.

And we keep going faster and faster

until we approach that limit of control

and that's where we balance ourselves and try to stay

and that's how we make good time.

It's lap 35.

The crowd in the grandstand

strain to see as the lead cars roar into view.

Hawthorn is leading Fangio and is about to lap Pierre Levegh.

The slower Lance Macklin, in his Austin Healey, is in the way.

The cars are heavily bunched-up as they round White House,

approaching at 150 miles per hour.

Suddenly someone say, here they come,

so on the tip of our toes just to look a little more.

A Mercedes has left the track.

I remember the car high, high in the air,

as high as the top of an electric pole.

The momentum of the car has taken it into the packed grandstand.

You hear a whistle like a car at speed like a wind.

It scythed through the crowd that was tightly packed.

That's why a lot of people got decapitated.

People were cut in two pieces.

You look down on the ground and see the guy lying down

with the binocular around his head and the head is gone.

The Mercedes is now a raging fireball,

its magnesium body spitting out balls of molten metal.

Drivers are still racing by unaware of what is really happening.

People rushed to help their friends in vain,

whilst others are given the last rights.

The 25 doctors on standby were not prepared for something like this.

The race carries on.

John Fitch is waiting to take over driving from Pierre Levegh

in the second Mercedes.

He is standing with Mrs Levegh in the pit area.

Someone shouted out that it was number 20, our car,

and Madame Levegh repeated several times her conviction

that her Pierre was dead.

She knew without confirmation

by anyone else that he was dead.

I am certain that he died at the wall.

Or if he didn't die at the wall,

seconds after, because if you look at the photographs

of what remained of the car,

what could possibly remain of a human being after that?

Pierre Levegh, the most senior of the Mercedes team, is dead.

The pit area is in disarray. Nobody knows what is happening.

Macklin's car lies wrecked by the side of the track,

though miraculously he has survived.

Hawthorn, having done another lap, finally comes in to pit.

Hawthorn was a broken man, in tears and agony,

and a mistake that he's just made

that has caused the death of innocent people by the scores.

That breaks men

and that broke Mike Hawthorn.

As stretchers rush past, Hawthorn's co-driver Ivor Bueb

is in the unenviable position of taking over at the wheel

He just turns to me and he said, "Bloody hell, this is suicide.

"I'm not going to drive it," he said, "I'm not going to drive in this."

I really pushed Bueb and I said, "Get in the car and drive, come on,

"the race is still on."

On the other side of the track in the grandstand, it is much worse

than anyone could have imagined, the death count rising towards 100.

For three hours I could not say a single word.

If I tried to talk...ugh, ugh, ugh.

It was... I was stuck. I was stuck.

Hours later, Jacques Grelley manages to find his way home.

Unable to telephone ahead, his grandfather is convinced he's dead.

I walked up the stairs,

opened the door, his eyes were huge and he said, "But you are not dead!"

I said, "No" because the rumour was that he was gone.

On the table there was a picture of me, a candle and a crucifix.

You know, when you passed away, the memorial was already right there.

The race still carries on.

Hawthorn is back in the driving seat again,

challenging Fangio for the lead.

One of the most controversial aspects of the crash, of the

aftermath of the crash, is that the race was not stopped.

The officials did not want to stop the race for fear 300,000 spectators

would block the side roads,

preventing the movement of ambulances and the 200 injured.

Giselle Pasquier was one of them.

Soon after, Madam Pasquier's severely burnt hands were bandaged.

Her injuries were so bad she feared she would never

hold her newborn baby again.

Even when the dead and injured were taken away,

the race was still not stopped.

Mercedes continued racing for almost eight hours,

eventually pulling out to avoid a public relations disaster.

They invited Jaguar to do the same, but they abruptly declined.

The Mercedes director's words down the phone

to the press chief came terribly true.

"What are you going to do when you win?"

And the answer to that was that when Hawthorn and Ivor Bueb won it,

they shook up the champagne and smiled

and French newspapers carried that photograph

with really very savage captions.

"Cheers, Mr Hawthorn," they said. "Cheers."

I suspect that in the heat of battle, which is what

it certainly was, nobody at Jaguar was thinking what it would look like

in 50 years further down the line.

Nobody, and you can forgive them for that, you really can.

You can forgive them also in that although that it was apparent that

the accident happened across from the pits, a lot of people saw that

terrible things had happened,

but they weren't totally aware of the scale of it.

'When the world's greatest motor race,

'the Le Man 24 Hours, opens on a perfect summer's day, none of the

'spectators can suspect the utter devastation that lies ahead.'

The events of the 1955 Le Mans shocked the world.

There were no easy ways to explain how such a tragedy occurred.

A picture had to be built from eye witness accounts and hearsay.

No-one could say definitively what happened between the four cars involved in the collision.

Inevitably, blame and accusation soon followed.

Mike Hawthorn, by my evidence, the things that I saw and heard

and knew from this event, caused the accident.

I'd never blame Hawthorn, no.

Never blame Hawthorn.

Hawthorn simply made a miscalculation.

In the intoxication of the moment he made a miscalculation

and it had the most terrible consequences.

I would put most of the blame on Macklin myself, yeah,

because if he'd have looked in his mirror, he couldn't possibly pull out

because the Merc is coming here, he knew he wouldn't have done it.

The main weight of culpability fell on Pierre Levegh.

He was mid-fifties,

if his reactions had been quicker, he'd have reacted quicker but

there was something else about Levegh.

He was dead, and the dead don't sue you whatever you say about them.

My personal feeling is Levegh shouldn't have been in the Mercedes team.

The car was too quick for him, for his age.

That's my personal opinion.

Hawthorn had...

all kinds of problems.

He recognised, as we have discussed,

he told Rob Walker and Donald Healey

and Lance Macklin that he was the cause of this tragedy.

And he said his life as a driver was over.

And he was shattered

and in tears,

and then, a few hours or a day later when he appeared publicly,

he denied it all.

A subsequent public enquiry absolved all the drivers of blame.

Important evidence in this was some amateur cine footage shot

by a spectator, himself injured, hit by the debris of Levegh's car.

This footage had been hidden away for almost 55 years.

But journalist and Mike Hawthorn biographer Paul Skilleter,

who's studied the tragedy for many years,

has decided to share his archive and in particular

a set of still photographs taken from the original film footage.

This series of pictures offers a unique perspective,

looking directly at the oncoming, colliding cars.

When re-constructed as a moving image, this sequence

shows how rapidly events unfolded, and how the disaster was triggered.

As the lead cars approached the end of lap 35,

Mike Hawthorn started to move over.

Overtaking Macklin's slower car,

Hawthorn began to decelerate ready to re-fuel.

He was now in front of Macklin.

Macklin kicks up some dust,

either from locking the brakes or drifting onto the grass verge.

At this point, Levegh was bearing down on Macklin,

aware that Fangio was behind.

He would know this is no time to slow the lead Mercedes.

Macklin then swerved to his left,

crossing the central line, apparently out of control.

Macklin started to correct his course but was hit

immediately by Pierre Levegh, racing at 150 miles per hour.

Levegh has no time to respond,

and drove up the sloped back of Macklin's Austin Healey.

This acted as a ramp

and Levegh's Mercedes was launched towards the crowd.

Using a scale 3D model of the track as it was in 1955,

we can see that the catastrophe

was caused by more than just the actions of the drivers.

Firstly, the pit straight was narrow,

merely three cars across, with the pits not separated from the track.

Secondly, it was a place where some cars

were slowing to go into the pits

while others continued racing full throttle, and so had to overtake.

Both these factors created congestion at high speeds.

Thirdly, there was a slight bend in the track here.

The nature of this is seen clearly in this photo.

At slow speed this bend would be un-noticeable,

but at race speeds this was a serious bend for the drivers,

which may explain why Levegh did not move to his left to avoid Macklin.

Fourthly, the popular main grandstand

was right on the outside of this bend.

Between the speeding cars and the spectators

there was only a chest-high wattle and earth barrier.

Any car out of control at this point

had nowhere to go but into the crowd.

When Le Mans was conceived in 1923,

the cars averaged 55 miles per hour and the track was relatively safe.

30 years later the cars were capable of speeds in excess

of 190 miles per hour, yet the track had remained virtually the same.

The cars had outgrown the track.

A tragedy was perhaps inevitable.

Even today, there is still no confirmed death toll.

Estimates range from 80 to 120 dead.

The 1955 Le Mans disaster went on to shape and scar

the lives of many of those involved.

Mercedes soon stopped racing for over 30 years.

The Jaguar works racing team was closed down a few months later,

not returning to Le Mans as a factory team for over 30 years.

Norman Dewis never drove at Le Mans again.

He spent the rest of his career developing cars for Jaguar.

Fangio never raced at Le Mans again.

Three years later he retired.

John Fitch continued racing, but became obsessed with road safety.

He went on to invent the Fitch Inertial safety barrier

which has saved thousands of motorist's lives.

The once jovial and relaxed Lance Macklin

became embittered and litigious, suing Mike Hawthorn for libel.

Mike Hawthorn went on to win the world championship in 1958.

He retired shortly afterwards,

only to die while overtaking on the rain-drenched Guildford bypass.

The vehicle in his way was a Mercedes.

For many, the accident at Le Mans in 1955 marked a watershed.

The event came to represent motor sports' loss of innocence,

an ugly episode that was quickly swept aside.

An important police report remains buried

under a secrecy law almost 60 years on.

There is no lasting memorial, no remembrance service to attend.

There was an immediate review of all race tracks,

the beginning of a slow revolution

in racing safety that continues to this day.

The Le Mans pit area

and grandstands were bulldozed and re-built soon after.

Found in an archive is this extraordinary series of photographs

taken before and after the crash.

When put together,

this panorama forms a tragic record of the scale of the disaster.

The moment between life and death.

It's a sad day.

Very sad day.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

E-mail [email protected]