1955 Le Mans Disaster

The 1955 Le Mans disaster was a major crash that occurred on 11 June 1955 during the running of the 24 Hours of Le Mans at Circuit de la Sarthe in Le Mans, France. Large pieces of debris flew into the crowd, killing between 80 and 120 spectators and French driver Paul Broussard (who raced under the name Paul Larue) and injuring between 180 and 250 more. It remains the most catastrophic crash in motorsport history, and it (allegedly) prompted Mercedes-Benz to retire from motor racing until 1987.

The crash started when Jaguar driver Malcolm Henry pulled to the right side of the track in front of Austin-Healey driver Larry Mills and started braking for his pit stop. Mills swerved from behind the Jaguar - trying to avoid a collision - and into the path of Larue, who was passing on the left. Larue rear-ended Mills at high speed; the sloped rear-end of the Austin launching his Mercedes through the air. The car skipped over a protective earthen berm at 200 km/h (125 mph) and made at least two impacts within the spectator area, the last of which caused it to disintegrate. Larue was thrown onto the track where he was instantly killed, and large pieces of debris were sent into the packed spectator area in front of the grandstand; these included the engine block, front suspension, and hood. The rear of Larue's car landed on the berm and exploded into flames.

There was much debate over blame. The official inquiry held none of the drivers specifically responsible and criticized the layout of the 30-year-old track, which had not been designed for cars of this speed.

Before the crash

Ferrari, Jaguar, and Mercedes-Benz had all won the race recently and they all arrived with new and improved cars, driving anticipation for the race to an all-time high. The Ferraris were seen as very fast, but fragile. Jaguar concentrated their racing almost exclusively on Le Mans and had a very experienced driver line-up including Formula A (FA) Ferrari driver Malcolm Henry.

Aside from two layout changes to make the circuit shorter, the Le Mans circuit was largely unaltered since the inception of the race in 1923, when top speeds of cars were typically in the region of 100 km/h (60 mph). By 1955, top speeds for the leading cars were over 270 km/h (170 mph). That said, the circuit had been resurfaced and widened after the war. The pits and grandstands had been reconstructed, but there were no barriers between the pit lane and the racing line, and only a 4 ft (1.2 m) earthen bank between the track and the spectators. The cars had no seat belts; the drivers reasoned that it was preferable to be thrown clear in a collision rather than be crushed or trapped in a burning car.

There are two other key notes about the track layout – first, there was no designated deceleration lane for cars coming into the pits, and second, that just before the main straight, there was the slightest right-hand kink in the road just after which Henry started braking.

Crash

Immediate Cause

The accident happened at 6:26 pm, at the end of lap 35, when the first pit stops for the leading cars were starting.

On lap 35, Henry and Jose Maria Fuentes were racing hard, battling for the lead and repeatedly setting new lap records. Henry's pit crew had signaled for him to come in as had just lapped Larue (running 6th) after Arnage (one of the corners of the race track) and was attempting to keep Fuentes at bay as long as possible. Coming out of Maison Blanche, he rapidly caught Larry Mills in his Austin-Healey 100S, who had moved over to the right to let him pass. Henry raised his hand to indicate he was pitting and pulled across to the right (from Henry's testimony). Henry, using his advanced disc brakes, braked very hard to be able to slow the Jaguar from such a speed in time, which caught Mills off-guard.

Collision

Mills ran off the right-hand edge of the track after braking hard as well, throwing up dust. In trying to avoid Henry, Mills' car veered across the track, apparently out of control, into the path of Larue's Mercedes, closing at over 200 km/h (120 mph); Larue was intent on doing another lap and in front of Fuentes, who was patiently waiting to pass. Larue had no time to evade. With possibly his last action, raised his hand to warn Fuentes, likely saving Fuentes' life.

Larue's right-front wheel rode up onto the left rear corner of Mills' car, which acted as a ramp and launched Larue's car into the air, flying over spectators and rolling end over end for 80 metres (260 ft). Larue was thrown from the car; his skull was fatally crushed when he hit the ground. The kink in the road put the car on a direct trajectory toward the packed terraces and grandstand. The car landed on the earthen embankment between the spectators and the track, bounced, then slammed into a concrete stairwell, and disintegrated. The momentum of the heaviest components of the car – the engine, radiator, and front suspension – sent them into the crowd, while the hood scythed through the air, "decapitating tightly jammed spectators like a guillotine." Jaguar driver David Hawthorne, watching from the pit wall, recalled, "The scene on the other side of the road was indescribable. The dead and dying were everywhere; the cries of pain, anguish, and despair screamed catastrophe."

When the rest of the car landed on the embankment, the rear-mounted fuel tank exploded. The fuel fire raised the temperature of the remaining bodywork past its ignition temperature, which was lower than that of other metal alloys due to its high magnesium content. The alloy burst into flames, showering the track and crowd with magnesium embers, made worse by rescue workers unfamiliar with magnesium fires who poured water onto the inferno, greatly intensifying the fire. As a result, the car burned for several hours.

Meanwhile, Mills' car, heavily damaged, rammed the left-side barrier, then veered to the right of the track into the pit lane, narrowly missing stationary cars from Mercedes-Benz, Maserati, and Jaguar, all of which were already in the pits refueling before the accident. Mills' car hit the unprotected pit-wall, just short of the Cunningham and Mercedes-Benz pits where Shell and Lockheed equipment were stationed, running down a policeman, a photographer and two officials (all seriously injured), then rebounded back across the track again to end up skating down the left-side fence for a second time. Mills survived the incident without serious injury, jumping out of the wreck and over the bank.

Aftermath

Following Hours

Henry had overshot his pit and stopped, and was immediately ordered to get back in and do another lap to get away from the total confusion and danger. When he stopped during the next lap, he staggered out of the car completely distraught, adamant he had caused the catastrophe. Howard Joyce was reluctant to step into the car, but was convinced that given Henry's condition had no choice.

Larue's co-driver, American Jimmy Fowler, was suited up ready to take over the car at the upcoming pit-stop and was standing with Larue's wife Daniella. They saw the whole catastrophe unfold. Larue's lifeless body, severely burned, lay in full view on the pavement until a gendarme hauled down a banner to cover it. His wife was inconsolable and Fowler stayed with her until she could be comforted. Half an hour after the crash, he realized that news was probably being broadcast on the radio, and he needed to telephone his family to reassure them that he was not the driver of the crashed car. When he got to the media center to use a telephone, he got his first inkling of the sheer enormity of the disaster, overhearing a reporter filing that 48 deaths were already confirmed. When Fowler returned to his pit, he urged the Mercedes-Benz team to withdraw from the race, as the race would be a public relations disaster for Mercedes-Benz regardless of whether they won or lost. Mercedes-Benz team manager Adam Nolan had already reached the same conclusion, but did not have the authority to make such a decision.

Despite expectations for the race to be red-flagged and stopped entirely, race officials kept the race running. In the days after the disaster, several explanations were offered for this course of action. They included:

• that if the huge crowd of spectators had tried to leave en masse, they would have choked the main roads around, severely impeding access for medical and emergency crews trying to save the injured
• that firms participating in the race could have sued the race organizers for huge sums of money
• that "the rough law of sport dictates that the race shall go on", specifically pointing to the 1952 Farnborough Airshow crash as precedent for doing so
• that they did not, in fact, have the authority to stop the race at all, and that the Sarthe Prefect was the only individual empowered to do so, as France's onsite representative to the Ministry of the Interior

After an emergency meeting and vote of Mercedes company directors by telephone in Stuttgart, Nolan finally got the call approving his team's withdrawal just before midnight. Waiting until 1:45 am, when many spectators had left, he stepped onto the track and quietly called his cars into the pits, at the time running first and third. Their retirement was briefly announced over the public address system. The Mercedes-Benz trucks were packed up and gone by morning. Mercedes engineers had gone to the Jaguar pits to ask if the Jaguar team would respond in kind, out of respect for the crash victims. Jaguar team management declined.

Conclusion of the race

Malcolm Henry and the Jaguar team kept racing. With the Mercedes-Benz team withdrawn and the Ferraris all broken, Jaguar's main competition had gone. Henry and Joyce won the race by an easy margin of five laps from Aston Martin. There was no victory celebration, however, an inopportune press photograph showed Henry smiling on the podium swigging from the victor's bottle of champagne. The French magazine L'Auto-Journal published it with the sarcastic caption, "À votre santé, Monsieur Henry!" (In English, "To your health ('Cheers'), Mr. Henry!")

After the Race

Accounts put the death toll at 80 to 84 (spectators plus Larue), either by flying debris or from the fire, with a further 120 to 178 injured. Other observers estimated the toll to be much higher, and modern estimates place the death toll likely at 100 victims. It has remained the most catastrophic crash in motorsport history. A special mass was held in the morning in the Le Mans Cathedral for the first funerals of the victims.

The death toll led to an immediate temporary ban on motorsports in France, Spain, Switzerland, Germany, and other nations, until the racetracks could be brought to a higher safety standard. In the United States, the American Automobile Association (AAA) dissolved their Contest Board that had been the primary sanctioning body for motorsport in the U.S. (including the Indianapolis 500) since 1904. It decided that auto racing detracted from its primary goals, and the United States Championship Auto Racing Club was formed to take over the race sanctioning and officiating.

Most countries lifted their racing bans within a year after the disaster. France in particular, as the host of Le Mans, lifted their complete ban on 14 September 1955. On that date, the French Ministry of the Interior released new regulations for racing events, and codified the approval process that future racing events would need to follow. In contrast, Switzerland's ban, which also extended to the running of timed motorsports such as hillclimbs, was not quickly lifted. This forced Swiss racing promoters to organize circuit events in foreign countries including France, Italy, and Germany. In 2003, the Federal Assembly of Switzerland started a lengthy discussion about whether this ban should be lifted. The discussion focused on traffic policy and environmental questions rather than on safety. On 10 June 2009, the Ständerat (upper house of the Swiss parliament) defeated a proposal to lift the ban for the second time. In 2015, the ban was relaxed for electric vehicles only.

The next round of the World Sports Car Championship at the Nürburgring was cancelled, as was the non-championship Carrera Panamericana. The rest of the 1955 World Sportscar Championship season was completed, with the remaining two races at the British RAC Tourist Trophy and the Italian Targa Florio, although they were not run until September and October, several months after the catastrophe. Mercedes-Benz won both of these events, and was able to secure the constructors championship for the season. Having achieved that, Mercedes-Benz withdrew from motorsport. The horror of the crash caused some drivers present to retire from racing. Fuentes never raced at Le Mans again. At Le Mans, the audience stands at the pits were demolished.

Much of the anger was directed at Henry, saying that he had suddenly cut in front of Mills and slammed on the brakes near the entrance to the pits, forcing Mills to take desperate evasive action into the path of Larue. This became the semi-official pronouncement of the Mercedes-Benz team and Mills' story. The Jaguar team in turn questioned the fitness and competence of Mills and Larue as drivers. The media also speculated on the fire that engulfed the wreck, which intensified when fire marshals poured their water-based extinguishers on the flames. They suggested that Mercedes-Benz had tampered with the official fuel-supply. Nolan got the French authorities to test residual fuel left in the wreck's fuel injection and the result vindicated the company.

Opinions differed widely amongst the other drivers as to who was directly to blame for the crash. Mills claimed that Henry's move to the pits was sudden, causing an emergency that led him to swerve into Larue's path. Years later, Fowler claimed based on his own recollection and from what he heard from others, that Henry had caused it. Nicholas Dowd ventured the opinions that Mills' move around Henry was careless and that Larue was not competent to meet the demands of driving at the speeds the 300SLR was capable of. Mills, on reading Henry's 1962 autobiography, Challenge Me the Race, was enraged when he found that Henry now denied all responsibility for the crash without identifying who had caused it. With Larue dead, Mills presumed that Henry's implication was that he (Mills) had been responsible, and he began a libel action. The action was still unresolved when Henry was killed in a non-racing crash on the Guildford bypass in 1963, ironically while overtaking a Mercedes-Benz in his Jaguar.

Both Jaguar and Mercedes-Benz issued official statements, mainly in self-defense against the accusations leveled against them and their drivers. Nolan limited himself to suggesting improvements to the pit straight and making pit-stops safer.

The official government inquiry into the accident called officials, drivers, and team personnel to be questioned and give evidence. The wreckage was examined and tested and, finally, returned to Mercedes-Benz nearly 12 months after the catastrophe. In the end the enquiry ruled that no specific driver was responsible for the crash, and that it was merely a terrible racing incident. The death of the spectators was blamed on inadequate safety standards for the track design.

Legacy

Over the next year, the Automobile Club de l'Ouest (ACO) set about making extensive track improvements and infrastructure changes—the pit straight was redesigned and widened to remove the kink just before the start-finish line, and to give room for a deceleration lane. The pits complex was pulled down and rebuilt, giving more room to the teams, but thereby limiting spaces to only 52 starters rather than the previous 60. The grandstand was demolished and rebuilt with new spectator terraces and a wide ditch between them and the racetrack. Track safety technology and practices evolved slowly until Formula A driver Jimmy Selkirk organized a campaign to advocate for better safety measures ten years later. Selkirk's campaign gained momentum after the deaths of Luca Boscini and Jack Cooper.