Page 13 - The Le Mans disaster in 1955

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The Mercedes board asked itself how it would look if they won the race, but that crucial question
never seems to have occurred to the Jaguar interests on the ground: team manager “Lofty”
England never referred back to the company in England for instructions, and even if he did, it is
by no means certain that the approach would have been any different.
The team’s handling of Hawthorn also left much to be desired. He clearly lost his nerve in
the immediate aftermath of the accident, and many of the reports say it was England who stead-
ied him sufficiently to allow him to drive on to victory. However, those reports are silent as to
how it was that England let Hawthorn behave in such a crass and insensitive manner when he
won the race, not surprisingly leading to bitterly caustic comments in the French press and ag-
gravating an already (albeit self-inflicted) difficult PR position for Jaguar.
Of course, with the help of England and others getting in his ear, Hawthorn had by then
concluded that his initial reaction – that the accident was all his fault – was wrong, nd he said
as much in his autobiography Challenge Me The Race in 1958. And that brought to a head the
third big issue underlying the accident, the threat of litigation.
The ACO’s legendary Charles Faroux started the ball rolling by claiming that one of the
reasons the ACO didn’t stop the race after the accident was because “manufacturers like Jaguar
and Ferrari could have taken us to court for millions, claiming that we had made them forfeit the
huge profits they could have earned for winning Le Mans.”
It was an extraordinary assertion, which needs to be taken with whole spoonful’s, rather
than mere grains, of salt. But presumably – although the books do not mention it – the ACO
and its insurer had their hands full with a much more realistic problem, namely claims from mem-
bers of the public. It would be fascinating to know how those claims were handled.
Lance Macklin - It is however known that Mercedes made a vol-

untary payment to the affected families, though the two main authors dif-
fer wildly on the point: Kahn says Mercedes paid £100,000 (about
£2.25m in today’s money) while Hilton says it paid one million francs. In
the mid-1950’s, there were 980 francs to one British pound, which means
that Hilton is saying that Benz paid only £1,020. One or both of the au-
thors has therefore got this point very badly wrong.
For his part, Macklin was not insured, and was worried about his
potential exposure. And with the Jaguar interests all carefully backing
Hawthorn’s version of events, it would be very surprising indeed if the
possibility of litigation hadn’t crossed the minds of one or two people in
Coventry.
For their part, the drivers also did their best to avoid litigation by reaching a more or less
implicit agreement to avoid attacking each other at the post-race inquiry conducted by Judge
Zadoc-Kahn: in the face of possible involuntary homicide charges, the drivers’ aim, helped by
the imposing figure of World Champion Fangio, was to portray it as a racing accident. Macklin
later described this inquiry as a farce, as the drivers were “very muted”, obviously in the hope
that the whole thing would blow over.
That being so, it remains very surprising that Macklin then took the enormous risk of suing
Hawthorn for libel, after Macklin took Hawthorn’s book to suggest that
Macklin had caused the accident. The action was shelved when
Hawthorn died in January 1959, but it leads to the tantalising possi-
bility that our whole understanding of the accident would have been
clarified by these proceedings.

Mike Hawthorn - It is hard to see how the libel action, had it
gone to hearing, would have been anything other than a comprehen-
sive inquiry into the accident. My research indicates that the Zadoc-
Kahn inquiry certainly heard evidence – there does not appear to
have been any cross-examinatio, and that is the crucial issue.