Short Stuff: 1955 Le Mans Disaster

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0:37Josh Clark:Catch the red eye or take the 6 a.m.

0:39Chuck Bryant:Make a new hire or promote internally.

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1:08Chuck Bryant: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.

1:21Josh Clark:That's right. The disaster at Le Mans. Very dark time for motorsports history, something I've never been into, although I did see the F1 movie on a plane recently.

1:34Chuck Bryant:Yeah, you were telling me about it. You were telling me that is one of the better movies you've ever seen in your life, if I remember correctly.

1:41Josh Clark:No, I did not. I think I spoke about it on the show even. But this all occurred on June 11, 1955. we should probably tell you a little bit about Le Mans as a race because it is different than, you know, if you're just sort of a casual race person and you're like, yeah, they just, they drive around a track a certain amount of times and then somebody wins once you've completed the 200 laps.

2:04Chuck Bryant:Yeah, they just turn left a lot.

2:06Josh Clark:Yeah, that is not what happens at Le Mans. I think they're going to hold the 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.

2:26Chuck Bryant:Yes. And in Le Mans in particular, the track is called the Circuit de la Sarthe and it's a D-shape about eight and a half miles or 13.7 kilometers around. And it's not only made of racetrack, but they also incorporate some actual public roads that get shut down for the race. It's made of racetrack. It's made of racetrack and public roads. I know. I just think that's fascinating.

2:53Josh Clark:Oh, it is. There's other races like this. There's public road, like fully public road races.

2:57Chuck Bryant:I know. And I find those fascinating too. Yeah. Look, man. Weirdly defensive about this. So for Le Mans in particular, it's a 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, hire 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 L.A. or Berlin to Athens. Which I'm not even sure you can do because Athens is in Greece, which is an island. But you get the gist. Or from Perth to Sydney.

3:41Chuck Bryant: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.

3:50Josh Clark: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 in the 1950s, you know, 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. I almost feel like we should take an early break there. I need to. Okay. Let's do it and we'll come back. We're in agreement. I love it.

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5:58Chuck Bryant:Apple Vacations, where your story starts.

6:15Josh Clark:All right, 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, 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 changed and get your windows clean and whatever else the car needs at the time. I actually watched NASCAR for, like, a season in the early to mid-2000s. For some reason, I got into it.

6:47Chuck Bryant:Did you have a favorite driver?

6:49Josh Clark:I did, and I can't remember his name now. I can picture him in my head. He drove the UPS car, whatever his name was.

6:54Chuck Bryant:He drove a UPS car? No. That'd be pretty impressive. He was sponsored by UPS. He was known for doing wheelies in his UPS car and going into donuts in the middle of the race because he knew he was never going to win. And here comes a box truck on the outside lane. He's wearing those shorts. His legs are amazing. Oh, man.

7:14Josh Clark:This is crazy. Yeah, it was a short flirtation. Bertation, excuse me. A heavy, heavy bear-tation? Heavy, heavy 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.

7:50Josh Clark:Sometimes you might not be able to. And so you have every incentive to make that tough move and quick stop to get in there.

7:58Chuck Bryant:Yes. And so the layout 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. Paint a picture. Thank you. Here I go. I'm just dabbing my paintbrush to my tongue and proceeding. I've got to beat the devil out of the brush first. Okay. Is that what they say? That's what Bob Ross always said. Oh, that's right. So this 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 Healey.

8:38Chuck Bryant: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 him easily. But right as he got over, Mike Hawthorne wanted to go into the pit. Well, rather than just tailgate Lance Macklin for three, four seconds maybe, and then veer into the pit after Lance Macklin cleared it, Mike Hawthorne overtook 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 Levegue, who was driving a Mercedes.

9:20Chuck Bryant:And it went really badly from that moment on.

9:25Josh Clark:So, like I said earlier, 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 Healey. The sort of sloped back of that car acted like a ramp. And it launched Levegue 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, an earthen embankment that was supposed to protect spectators, hit a concrete staircase, burst into flames and exploded. And, I mean, you can look this up on YouTube.

10:06Josh Clark:You can't see the actual crash, but you see the explosion. And very disturbingly, you see very large car parts just being hurled at, you know, 100 miles an hour plus into people.

10:19Chuck Bryant:Yeah. Yeah, this is, yeah, it's bad enough that Pierre Levesque, 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 like over 100 miles an hour each through the crowd and just cut through the crowd like a scythe. 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.

10:57Josh Clark:Yeah, because it was randomized because there 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.

11:11Chuck Bryant:Yeah.

11:12Josh Clark:And nothing happened to you. Very sadly, there was one little girl who was trampled. still holding onto her ice cream cone. Levegue 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 Levegue, 84 people killed at this race.

11:38Chuck Bryant:So there was a really controversial decision that was made by the race director, And that was to allow 24 hours of Le Mans 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 has actually vindicated the race director. I don't know his name, but that he made the right move because 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.

12:18Chuck Bryant:So it seems quite heartless, but it actually was the right move to make.

12:22Josh Clark: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.

12:30Chuck Bryant:I want to just believe in humanity. So I'm going to say that that guy had that level of foresight.

12:36Josh Clark: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 pill to swallow, you know?

12:58Chuck Bryant:Yeah. And not just died, died because of him. And he's like, just celebrating like it's the end of whatever race, any other race, you know? He never claimed responsibility for it. He would never take accountability. And 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.

13:38Chuck Bryant:And they stopped racing all the way until the 1980s because of that incident.