Page 11 - The Le Mans disaster in 1955

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Le Mans 1955, A Lawyer’s View - 27 April 2013
Le Mans 1955, A Lawyer’s View - 27 April 2013
David Greenhalgh is a professional lawyer, and has written in his native Australia about the Le
Mans disaster of 1955. In the following article, he examines what happened, looks at how things
have changed and gives us his insight into the way such events might be investigated more
than fifty years later. Anybody with an interest in the history of sports car racing will have a basic
knowledge of the disaster at Le Mans in 1955.
Most of those people will also have (probably very strong) views on who, if anyone, out of
Mike Hawthorn, Lance Macklin, Pierre Levegh and the ACO were to blame for the accident. But
there are aspects of the disaster which have received very little consideration over the years –
and which would almost certainly have changed our perception of the accident. Before we turn
to them, the facts and the main arguments for and against the key players will be briefly set out.
The Accident

At 6.26pm, Mike Hawthorn (Jaguar D Type),
who had been engaged in a titanic duel with
Juan Manuel Fangio (Mercedes 300SLR),
was making his first pit stop. After leaving
White House, he pulled to the right of the
track to slow down. In doing so, he drove in
front of Lance Macklin (Austin Healey), who
then swerved to his left to avoid the Jaguar.
This put Macklin into the path of Pierre Lev-
egh (Mercedes 300SLR), who launched off
the back of Macklin’s car and into the crowd
with appalling consequences.
The Impact (Dennis Chisholm)
Levegh was killed, and it is usually said that around 82 spectators were also killed as the car
disintegrated. The police files have never been released, and there is a suspicion that the true
death figure was much higher: for instance, in The Certain Sound, John Wyer put it at 130. By
any standards it was a major disaster, the effects of which are still felt today (see for instance
my interview with Bernd Schneider last December).
The ACO decided to let the race run to completion. In the small hours of Sunday morning,
the remaining two Mercedes were withdrawn while the Fangio/Moss car was well in the lead.
Hawthorn and co-driver Ivor Bueb went on to win. The two main English-language books dealing
solely with the disaster are Mark Kahn’s Death Race: Le Mans 1955 and Christopher Hilton’s
Le Mans 1955, although the accident has also been analysed in numerous magazines, biogra-
phies and marque histories. The various points of view can be summarised as follows:
Mike Hawthorn

The critics of Hawthorn say that it was up to him to
safely lap Macklin; that he must have had sufficient
time to properly consider the position as he left White
House; and that he simply didn’t leave Macklin (with
much poorer brakes than the Jaguar) room to easily
avoid him.
He also had the most time of the three to make
his decision, and was under the least pressure when
he did so – yet that decision bequeathed Macklin and
Levegh a situation where they had very little time to make their own choices, and had to do so
in a state of emergency. The defenders of Hawthorn, however, say that he signalled his intention
by raising his arm; that Macklin could and should have got around him safely; and that he gen-
erally didn’t do anything out of the ordinary from general racing practice.