The 23rd running of the 24 Hours of Le Mans arrived with great fanfare. For the 1st time, the race would be televised on French television, with a feed to the rest of Continental Europe.   Mercedes-Benz, only a decade removed from the end of the war, had returned with an international team, managed by the legendary Alfred Neubauer and starring Juan Manuel Fangio, and their spectacular new car, the W196 300 SLR.   Against the German juggernaut stood the Jaguar factory team, managed by Lofty England with their rising English star, Mike Hawthorn, and their new car, the D-Type.  Scuderia Ferrari, led by Enzo Ferrari and his star driver, Eugenio Castellotti, countered with it’s most powerful car yet, the 121 LM Scaglietti.  Each of these cars were capable of achieving speeds in excess of 180 mph on the Mulsanne Straight.

Based on the early season performance of the Mercedes-Benz factory team, the racing punditry and most of the competition declared the 300SLR driven by the reigning World Champion, Fangio, and his highly talented protege, Stirling Moss, to be the favorite.  In light of this, and the fact that only Hawthorn had the driving skill to match Fangio and Moss, Lofty England ordered his mercurial star to go flat out from the start of the race, in the hope that he could bait Fangio into pursuing Hawthorn, thereby stressing the Mercedes until it broke.

Castellotti’s Ferrari quickly shot into the lead with Hawthorn’s Jaguar in hot pursuit; Fangio was delayed in the pit area, as his pant leg was caught on the gear shift, leaving him unable to start the car.  By the end of the second lap, Fangio had sliced through the field to 3rd place behind Castellotti and Hawthorn.  At this point, a pitched battle was joined between Hawthorn and Fangio, exactly according to Jaguar team strategy.  Over the next 2 hours, the lap record fell again and again as Hawthorn and Fangio traded the lead a dozen times in a spell binding duel that left the 300,000 spectators watching in awe.

On the 35th lap at 6:26 PM, in a space of 200 yards and just 4 seconds, it all came undone.  As the leaders approached the pit area, Hawthorn first overtook Pierre Levegh’s Mercedes-Benz and then, in rapid succession, passed the much slower Austin Healey 100S piloted by Lance Macklin.  As he passed the second car, Hawthorn noticed his team’s pit board calling him in for refueling, and he suddenly steered hard to the right toward the pit lane.  Macklin, braking hard to avoid colliding with Hawthorn, locked his brakes and lost control of his car; first bouncing left to the inside of the turn, then suddenly to right, directly into the path of Levegh’s car which was then traveling in excess of 150 mph.  Levegh’s car went up the back of Macklin’s Austin Healey like a ramp, launching his car into the air, where it skipped once off the top of the earthworks separating fans from the track, then smashing into a concrete base of a light post at the track’s edge, killing Levegh instantly.  At this point, Levegh’s car disintegrated and exploded (the 300SLR’s sheet metal was made of a highly flammable, ultra-lightweight magnesium alloy called Elektron), transforming it into an anti-personnel weapon as the flaming debris sprayed into the crowded grand stand.  The car’s air brake panel, engine and rear suspension separately tore into the spectators at chest level at over 90 miles per hour, decapitating dozens of spectators each.  While no official figures have ever been released (the official French police investigation records remain sealed), it is estimated that 80 to 100 spectators perished with as many as 140 more injured.
Faced with a disaster that escalated in scope with each passing moment, the race organizers, the Automobile Club de l’Ouest, had to decide whether to cancel the race.  With the mounting dead and injured, stopping the race and releasing more than a quarter of a million spectators onto the local roads would have eliminated any chance of medical assistance from nearby hospitals.  In addition, cancellation would have forced the race organizers to refund ticket fees to fans, return all trackside advertising revenue, and invoke costly contract penalties with all of the teams participating in the race.  Such action would have surely bankrupted the A.C.O.  So, the race went on, with the drivers being told as little as possible about the scope of the calamity.
Alfred Neubauer, well aware of the breadth of the tragedy, contacted Mercedes-Benz’s board of directors in Stuttgart for further instructions as to whether the team should continue racing.  At 2 AM, with Stirling Moss leading the race, Neubauer received his reply from the board, and withdrew the remaining Mercedes factory entrants from the race.  Neubauer contacted Lofty England at that point to see if Jaguar would also withdraw, as a gesture of solidarity and respect for the fans who had perished.  England flatly refused.   With the Mercedes-Benz factory out of the picture, Hawthorn, with co-driver Ivor Bueb, consolidated their hold on the race lead, as the remaining challenge from Ferrari withered, one by one, as their cars broke down during the night.  Ultimately, Jaguar, with Hawthorn and Bueb at the helm, would claim victory, traveling just over 2,569 miles at an average speed of 107 mph.

The ramifications of the Le Mans disaster would be far reaching.  At season’s end, the Mercedes-Benz and Jaguar works teams were disbanded, and both manufacturers would stay out of the sport in an official capacity for much of the next four decades.  Parliaments in France, Spain, Portugal, Austria, Germany, Italy and Switzerland would immediately enact bans on auto racing; The Swiss racing ban still remains in effect today.  Mexico’s president, Adolfo Cortines, cancelled the Carrera Panamericana, which had it’s own deadly reputation, stating that the race’s purpose of publicizing the Pan American highway was ‘complete’.  An official inquiry was held investigating the accident, with both Hawthorn and Macklin cleared of any wrong doing;  Ultimately, blame was assigned to the Le Mans circuit itself, which had remained in the same configuration for more than 3 decades while the cars that raced there grew ever more powerful.  After the race, a multi-million franc renovation of the La Sarthe circuit was undertaken which moved the grandstands away from track side, widened the track in the area leading up to and through the home straight; a wall was added between the pits and the track itself, and the track’s medical facilities were greatly upgraded.   For the first time in the history of motorsport, safety became a consideration.  The education process that followed would be long, painful and, for some time, frequently tragic.  Auto racing survives today as a viable commercial enterprise, in part, because of the disaster that struck on June 11, 1955.
With the 1955 race being, in period, the most hyped race of the day, and the Le Mans disaster casting a shadow long into the future, there is much in the way of documentaries and interviews about the race available on the net.
First, we have this period documentary, produced by Standard-Triumph and narrated by Raymond Baxter, on the 1955 race.
Next, there is British Pathe’s newsreel coverage of the race, once again narrated by Raymond Baxter (part1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5).  In addition, British Pathe shot the race using color film in Cinemascope; this silent footage is also available on the British Pathe Archive site.
Also, we found this short interview with Stanley Karnow, who covered the 1955 race for Time magazine.
Lastly, we have two modern documentaries on the disaster.  The first is an excellent half-hour film, with English narration, from History Channel Europe, “1955:  La Tragedia Di Le Mans“.  And, finally, this brand new, one hour documentary produced by BBC4, entitled “The Deadliest Crash: the 1955 Le Mans Disaster“, which features spectator eyewitness accounts and never before seen film footage and photographs of the tragedy and it’s immediate aftermath.