“I believe he wanted to turn the car over at his stop, still in the lead. But by overtaking me and braking sharply he forced me to overtake him again, which meant I had to pull out in front of Levegh and Fangio.
“My instant reaction when he did it was, ‘Bloody Mike Hawthorn, he must be out of his mind!’ ”
In that instant, Levegh’s 300 SLR, running at around 150mph directly behind Macklin with no time to react, struck the Austin-Healey’s rear.
The Mercedes became a projectile. It launched over the Austin-Healey, jumped over a low dirt embankment, and disintegrated as it was hurled towards a crowd of spectators.
Macklin’s car after being hit by Levegh
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Levegh was thrown from the wreckage and killed instantly. The 300 SLR body was made of Elektron, a lighweight magnesium-alloy that made the car formidable, but that did not burn so much as combust.
When fire marshals trained their water extinguishers on the blaze, the flames intensified instead of dying.
The engine block, ripped from its mountings by the deceleration, travelled through the crowd like a projectile.
Debris, including the bonnet, cut through the densely packed spectators.
Fangio, warned by Levegh’s raised hand an instant before the impact, somehow threaded through the smoke. His windscreen cracked from the heat of the wreck as he passed.
At least 82 people died. More than 120 were injured. It remains the deadliest accident in the history of motor sport.
Why the race went on
Despite the tragedy, the race did not stop.
The ACO’s reasoning – that halting proceedings would unleash a panicked exodus that would block the roads and prevent emergency vehicles from reaching the injured – was arguably coherent in the immediate moment.
Fitch urged Mercedes to withdraw from the race
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It was also, by any later reckoning, the decision that defined the era: a motor race continuing with tens of bodies still on the circuit’s verges, because the machinery of the event could not be stopped.
Inside the Mercedes pit, Fitch was already urging withdrawal. His argument was not just moral but also tactical: with the war only a decade past, a German manufacturer continuing to race while French spectators lay dead around its wreckage created a political situation that was highly charged.
Team manager Alfred Neubauer needed no persuading on the ethics — he had already reached the same conclusion — but the decision required the approval of directors in Stuttgart. Telephone calls were placed. An emergency meeting was convened. Approval came shortly before midnight.
Neubauer waited until 1.45am, when much of the crowd had gone. He walked onto the circuit and quietly summoned his cars. The Fangio-Moss machine came in first; it had been leading the race by two laps. André Simon followed. The brief PA announcement prompted little reaction from the few thousand remaining spectators.
By morning, the Mercedes trucks were packed and gone.
Rudolf Uhlenhaut, Mercedes’ chief engineer, had visited the Jaguar pits before the withdrawal to ask if the British team would respond in kind. Team manager “Lofty” England declined. Jaguar kept racing.
Hawthorn crosses the finish line to win the race
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Hawthorn and Ivor Bueb won by five laps from Aston Martin, crossing the line in the grey Sunday morning drizzle.
The photographs of Hawthorn smiling on the podium would follow him for the rest of his life.
Consequences
The official inquiry examined the wreckage, questioned drivers and team personnel, and tested residual fuel from the Mercedes’ injection system. This last probe was necessitated by media speculation that the German manufacturer had added an explosive additive to the fuel, speculation that proved entirely false.
The fire had been the magnesium alloy, not sabotage.
Hawthorn gave a formal statement asserting he had signalled correctly and left sufficient time for following drivers to react; Jaguar’s personnel backed him. The inquiry accepted the account, and no driver was sanctioned.
Macklin never accepted it. Years later, after reading Hawthorn’s 1958 autobiography in which the world champion disclaimed all responsibility without naming a culpable party, Macklin filed for libel, concluding, reasonably, that the unnamed driver was him.
The action was still unresolved when Hawthorn was killed on the Guildford bypass in January 1959, ironically while overtaking a Mercedes in his Jaguar. He was 29.
As a result of the accident, motor sport was banned in several countries
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The broader consequences reshaped the sport’s relationship with its host nations. France, Germany, Switzerland and Spain all banned motor racing in the immediate wake of the disaster.
Switzerland’s was the most enduring: its prohibition on circuit racing lasted until 2022, 67 years later.
The AAA withdrew from motor sport sanctioning in the United States. Several drivers, including Fitch and Phil Walters, retired.
“I had gotten used to drivers killing each other, but I could not adjust to drivers killing spectators,” Walters, a 12 Hours of Sebring winner, said.
Mercedes withdrew from competition at the end of the season, a decision the company framed as a planned technical sabbatical, though the Le Mans catastrophe cast an indelible shadow over it.
The circuit was shortened and the pitlane reconfigured before the 1956 race. Barriers were improved. Gradually, over years, not months, the sport began to build a language around safety that had not previously existed.
It would take more deaths, many more, before that language became a structural part of motor sport.
The 1955 race was not an event after which the sport reformed itself, but it was the event after which it could no longer pretend change was unnecessary.
What remains
Le Mans still runs, of course.
The circuit bears almost no resemblance to the one that existed on 11 June 1955: pit walls, gravel traps, tyre barriers, SAFER barriers, a medical infrastructure that would have been unrecognisable to anyone present that evening.
Le Mans has become, in its modern form, almost as safe as it could possibly be.
Plaque and flowers honouring the victims of the tragedy
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The 1955 race was not exceptional for its danger but for the scale of its consequences. Drivers and spectators had been dying at Le Mans and everywhere else for years.
The crowd of 300,000 that June had not come expecting safety. They had come, as crowds always came, because the speed and the noise and the nearness of it were intoxicating — and because the danger, at the distance they stood from it, felt like someone else’s.
Carrying the weight of 83 deaths that were not his fault, Fitch spent the decades after Le Mans inventing safety barriers, campaigning for circuit reform, and trying to make something constructive out of what he had witnessed.
The Fitch Barrier, a water- or sand-filled plastic drum designed to absorb impact energy, now lines motorways around the world. It has saved thousands of lives.