During practice, Pierre Bouillin, a twenty-year veteran who raced under the name Pierre Levegh, coasted into the pits in his Mercedes after a close brush with a little 2-liter Gordini. “We have to get some sort of signal system working,” Levegh said. “Our cars go too fast.”
Levegh was a short, solemn man. Friends called him “the bishop” behind his back. He was hell-bent on winning Le Mans as a matter of national pride, for la gloire. Still downtrodden from the war, France clamored for a hero to stand up against the foreigners—particularly the Germans. Levegh was consumed by a dark, bullheaded determination that it would be him.
Levegh did not compete at Le Mans until 1951 when, at the advanced age of forty-five, he finished fourth in a Talbot Lago, a car made in the suburbs of Paris. Talbot offered Levegh a team car for the next Le Mans, but he felt that mechanical failure had prevented him from winning in 1951. So he turned them down and spent an enormous sum—nearly three times the first-place prize money—preparing his own Talbot.
At first it looked as if his plan might work. He stayed with the lead pack into the night hours of the 1952 race. By 3 a.m. many of the top contenders had broken down. Levegh took the lead. The two drivers who shared a car normally switched places every two and a half hours, but Levegh was so obsessed with winning, and winning alone, that he waved off his co-driver every time he pulled in for refueling. By dawn he hardly knew whom he was talking to. He looked ashen and his head teetered with sleeplessness and road fatigue. He sucked on an orange and refused to relinquish the wheel.
With every stop he appeared more dazed, but the tingling possibility of winning sustained him. By dawn he suffered stomach cramps and struggled to focus his eyes. His lap times were slowing, but he nursed a three-lap lead on the more powerful Mercedes. The public address announcer’s voice cracked with emotion. Spectators streamed over from the dance halls and shooting booths. Could this one man hold back the hated Germans single-handedly?
With an hour and a half to go, exhaustion caught up to him. He fumbled a gearshift, causing the crankshaft to whirl and blow the engine. His car clanked to a halt. Two Mercedes passed him to claim the top two finishes, a result so repulsive to French spectators that race officials chose not to play the German anthem for fear it would incite a riot. The French press blamed Levegh for the German win, accusing him of vanity and foolishness.
Levegh was inconsolable. He had trouble breathing after he was pulled from the car. He vomited and gagged for an hour, then wept in his wife’s arms. If his car had lasted another hour or so he would have become a French folk hero and the only man to win Le Mans alone. It was bad enough to lose, but to lose to the Germans, occupiers of France, was more than he could bear.
For its part, Mercedes was in the delicate position of trying to win, and win with overwhelming force, without raising the specter of German machinery crushing its neighbors. If nothing else, the company wanted to engender goodwill so it could sell plenty of cars in France. Neubauer saw a public relations opportunity in Levegh’s defeat. After the race he told Levegh that he would hold a place for him at Le Mans if he wanted to join them.
By the time Hill arrived in Le Mans three years later, levegh had agreed to race a Mercedes. In doing so he had placed himself in the middle of what the press called “World War II on the track,” a confrontation between the British and Germans on ground once occupied by German soldiers. The Luftwaffe had used Le Mans as an airstrip, and two miles away the Nazis set up an internment camp for captured members of the French Resistance. Many of Levegh’s countrymen disapproved of his alliance with the German company, but Levegh knew that it offered the best chance of winning. The new Mercedes 300 SLR was so advanced it bordered on science fiction: it had a space-frame chassis and hydraulic flip-up air brakes, similar to those used in airplanes, designed to take pressure off the disc brakes. With an engine capable of 185 mph, the drivers would need all the brakes they could get as they slowed at sharp corners, most crucially the hairpin turn at the end of the long Mulsanne Straight.
At age forty-nine, Levegh knew that this was likely his last chance for redemption. He was a somber presence at the otherwise lighthearted meals the Mercedes team shared at their hotel. “He was torn between his fear and his ambition,” said Artur Keser, the company’s public relations director.
A few minutes after 3 p.m. on a hot and windless afternoon, gendarmes began herding people from the start area. One of the unique aspects of Le Mans was that it began with a short footrace. In keeping with this custom, sixty cars were lined up at a 6o-degree angle to the track, their hoods pointed to the runway. The drivers waited directly across the road beside a flimsy white fence where a crush of spectators stood thirty deep.
As the starting clock ticked down to 4 p.m. all chatting and rustling hushed. For a moment it was so quiet the drivers could hear birds singing. The grandstand crowd stood on their chairs for a better view. The Italian count Aymo Maggi, one of racing’s elder statesmen, stepped from a cluster of race officials and swung the French tricolor. The drivers sprinted across the road, jumped into their cockpits, and hit the start buttons. Fangio was among the last to pull away, having caught his pant leg on the gearshift. Eugenio Castellotti shot to a quick lead in a big 4.4-liter Ferrari, followed by a Jaguar D-Type driven by Mike Hawthorn, a British driver with whitish-blond hair and the generous cheeks of a well-fed English schoolboy. The French called him Papillon because he always wore a bow tie in the car. In third place was Maglioli in the Ferrari he would share with Hill.
The pack whipped under a pedestrian bridge shaped like a Dunlop tire and into the sharp Tertre Rouge turn, flooded down a four-mile tree-lined straightaway to the 300-degree Mulsanne turn, and on around past a swerve called Maison Blanche before the long straight back to the grandstands.
Castellotti was clocked at 181 mph, but he fell off the pace after the first hour, leaving Hawthorn to fight it out with Fangio, the five-time world champion driving a Mercedes. In his memoir Hawthorn admitted that he was “momentarily mesmerized by the legend of the Mercedes superiority. . . Then I came to my senses and thought, ‘Damn it, why should a German car beat a British car?’ ”
Hawthorn and Fangio passed and repassed each other a dozen times, setting lap records ten times in the first two hours. They drove side by side much of the time, stealing looks at each other. Fangio drove in a relaxed posture, as he always did. Hawthorn slouched forward with his mouth agape, as if urging his car on. The public address announcer shrieked les voilàl—here they come!—as the pair passed in streaks of silver and green. “At this stage I was driving flat out all the way and had absolutely nothing in reserve,” Hawthorn later wrote.
Hill watched from the half-covered Ferrari pits, one of more than a dozen lined up directly across from the grandstand. The Ferrari 121 was the most powerful machine he had ever driven. “I was pumped,” he said, “ready to take on just about anything.” Beside him the team manager barked orders and the mechanics carefully arranged their gear—wrench sets, cases of oil, air canisters, and jackstands—in preparation for their own long struggle. As drivers began pulling in at the end of the first two-and-a-half-hour shift, the pit crews jacked up cars, knocked off hub nuts, yanked away worn tires, and shoved gas nozzles into empty tanks. The incoming drivers shared a few words with their substitutes. Don’t let her overheat. Watch for the oil spill just beyond the hairpin. Then the car was gone with a shattering bellow.
By 6:20 p.m., with the early summer sun still high, Hill was preparing to spell Maglioli, then in fifth place. He was standing on a counter behind the pits with his helmet and goggles under his arm when a mechanic tugged on his pant leg and pointed across the track. Somebody in the grandstand was trying to get his attention. It was Tom McGeachen, a neighbor from Santa Monica. He was holding a 16mm movie camera and waving. The track was so narrow that the two could shout across to each other in the lulls between passing cars.
As they talked Mike Hawthorn neared the pits in his long-nosed Jaguar.
With its rounded flanks and single tailfin, it looked like a sea creature moving at 160 mph. He had gone twenty-eight laps in less than 120 minutes. His pit crew signaled him to pull in for refueling. They may have been late holding the sign up, or perhaps Hawthorn was slow to respond. Either way, he abruptly braked his Jaguar and swerved to the right toward the pits. In doing so he cut off Lance Macklin, a British driver in an Austin-Healey who was running four laps behind Hawthorn. In his split-second desperation to avoid hitting Hawthorn, Macklin jammed on the brakes and swung left into the path of Levegh, who was coming up behind at 150 mph—too fast to steer clear. Levegh’s Mercedes hit the rear of Macklin’s Austin-Healey and bounded end-over-end for eighty-five yards. It flew over spectators, its white underbelly flashing overhead, and landed on a dirt barrier. The Mercedes bounced and rammed hard against a concrete stanchion, spraying its parts into the tightly packed grandstand. “The crushing sound of its landing is unforgettable,” said J. D. R. McDonnell, a reporter sitting at the start line.
The hood spun loose and sliced through the crowd like a giant scythe, decapitating a row of spectators. The engine, suspension, and brakes followed in a hundred parts. A fireball of burning gasoline sprayed through the scene. Entire families died in a second. A woman awoke from unconsciousness to find herself lying under a pile of bodies. Fifty yards from the grandstand a girl screamed when a severed foot hit her.
Meanwhile, Macklin’s Austin-Healey spun along the pit wall to the right and rebounded across the track, where it came to rest on the embankment. Macklin was barely hurt, and he ran back across the road to the pits.
There was a moment of silence, followed by police whistles and the insistent two-note siren of French ambulances. Black smoke hung over the scene. Body parts and pieces of cars lay scattered. Many of the uninjured spectators surged forward for a closer look, pushing through the recoiling throng. The loudspeaker called for doctors and blood donors. Priests in long black robes administered last rites to the gravely wounded. They pulled back sheets covering the dead and whispered prayers as they made the sign of the cross. Neubauer stepped out from the pits and waved cars through the smoke and debris. Through it all the French carnival music droned in the background.
“The scene on other side of the road was indescribable,” recalled Duncan Hamilton, a British driver. “The dead and dying were everywhere; the cries of pain, anguish, and despair screamed catastrophe. I stood as if in a dream, too horrified to even think.”
Eighty-three people died and more than a hundred were seriously injured. Hill’s friend Tom McGeachen was not hurt, though blood splattered his camera case. The hulk of Levegh’s car was crumpled against the stanchion, its magnesium alloy frame burning like a white-hot furnace. Levegh’s body, singed to a black crisp, lay on the pavement in full view of his wife. “He is dead,” she said over and over. “Pierre is dead.” A gendarme ripped down a banner and laid it across the body. Levegh’s helmet was later found with bits of his brain in it.
The moment before hitting Macklin, Levegh had raised his arm in warning to his teammate Fangio, who was a hundred yards behind him. It was the last gesture Levegh would ever make, and it likely saved Fangio’s life. With that tiny bit of notice, he veered to the right and slipped untouched through the smoke and wreckage. “It was by pure chance, by destiny if you like,” Fangio said, “and after I had passed through the crashing cars, without touching anything or anyone, I started to tremble and shake, for at that moment I had been holding strongly to the steering wheel, to wait for the blow. Instead the way had opened and I passed through.”
Hill had a front-row view of it all. “I could see a body up on the burning hay bales,” he said, “and there was smoke and lots of commotion.” He moved forward for a closer look, but the Ferrari pit manager held him back. Better for a young driver not to see the carnage up close, particularly one as sensitive as Hill.
The Ferrari team always locked the door at the back of their pit area to prevent curious passersby from entering. “Now the lock meant we couldn’t get out,” Hill said, “and everyone scrambled over each other.” In their panic they knocked over Joan Cahier, wife of Bernard Cahier, Hill’s friend from International Motors, who was now working as a correspondent for Road & Track and other publications.
As ambulances carted off the casualties, Maglioli pulled into the pits. The last thing Hill saw before taking his first laps was a gendarme with his leg neatly severed. On his first lap he encountered wreckage all along the track from unrelated crashes. As Hill rounded the Maison Blanche turn he saw a plume of smoke where an MG had overturned and caught fire.
“At this point I was numbed by it all, shocked that all this could be happening at once and on my first-ever Ferrari racing lap of Le Mans,” Hill said. “But then Stirling Moss went by me like a streak in his Mercedes 300 SLR, and that woke me up. That was a lesson I never forgot, which was that when something happens, get on the gas.”
By several accounts Hawthorn stumbled around behind the pits weeping and hysterically declaring that he would never race again. (He would absolve himself of blame in a memoir published three years later.)
On every lap Hill passed a yellow flag, the warning signal waved after crashes. He passed the amusement park and dance hall and the endless flash of headlights as the sun set and the race bore on into the night. Officials decided against canceling the race because they didn’t want departing crowds to block the ambulances and other rescue vehicles. “Et la course continue,” said Charles Faroux, a veteran journalist who served as race director. So the race went on with a persistent rain adding to the gloom. Hill and Maglioli moved up as high as third place before a rock pierced their radiator, forcing them to withdraw.
That night John Fitch, who had been Levegh’s co-driver, urged his Mercedes handlers to quit the race out of respect for the dead. They might win the race, he said, but they would surely lose the public relations battle. The headlines in European newspapers, he predicted, would be “Germans Trample 80 Frenchmen on Their Way to Victory,” or some such.
Stirling Moss, who shared a Mercedes with Fangio, argued against pulling out, saying it was a “theatrical gesture” that appeared to accept blame.
After some debate the company directors in Stuttgart sent orders to withdraw the two remaining cars, one of which was in first place. They were flagged in a few minutes after 2 a.m. “It’s finished,” Neubauer told the press. “There are too many dead.” The Mercedes team was already gone when the church bells rang from the Catholic chapel early the next morning, summoning the faithful to mass. Four months later Mercedes stopped racing altogether. Its factory team would not compete again for more than fifty years.
Mercedes invited Jaguar to withdraw from Le Mans with them, but Lofty England, the Jaguar team manager, refused. There was a smattering of applause when Mike Hawthorn crossed the finish line the next afternoon to win in record-breaking time. He smiled on the podium and swigged from a bottle of champagne. A French newspaper ran a photograph of him with the sarcastic headline, “Here’s to You, Mr. Hawthorn!”
Hill had planned to barnstorm Europe in Guiberson’s Ferrari, but so many races were canceled after Le Mans—Spain, Mexico, and Switzerland banned racing altogether—that he returned home instead. Away from the endless rehashing and recriminations he could more “easily build a case inside my head for racing,” he said. “It’s pretty amazing what the mind can do for us. It allows a young race driver faced with death and his own mortality to write his own story reconciling racing with his continuing existence.”
Hill was stunned when Phil Walters, one of the drivers he most admired, decided to quit racing after Le Mans. Walters was an aggressive, sharp-elbowed New Yorker who grew up racing hot rods and midgets under the pseudonym Ted Tappett so his family would not know. He flew gliders during the war, until he was shot down and severely wounded during the invasion of Holland. By coincidence the German surgeon who saved his life by removing a lung and kidney had seen Walters win a midget race
in Philadelphia five years earlier.
After the war, Walters thrived on the European sports car circuit with a smooth, nuanced driving style. He was so respected that Ferrari waived the customary test drive when he came to Maranello to discuss a job. “Why test? I’m sure he can do it,” said Nello Ugolini, the Ferrari team manager.
After witnessing the full horror of Le Mans, Walters called up the Maranello office and, using a secretary as a translator, told Ferrari that he could no longer race. “So many women and children were killed there,” he later said. “I just couldn’t justify having anything to do with even the possibility of something like that happening.” He never raced again.
Walters’ retirement should not have shocked Hill, given his own ulcerous history. But Hill had by now learned to protect his enthusiasm for the sport by hardening his mind to its harsher realities. He could no longer imagine abandoning his quest for a life on the European circuit. “I spent a great deal of time pondering why this driver for whom I had so much respect walked away from the sport I held in such esteem,” he said.
In the months after Le Mans, Hill raced in Beverly, Massachusetts; Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin; Torrey Pines, California; and the Bahamas. It must have seemed as if he were one step ahead of a curse. On September 30 the actor James Dean was driving his Porsche 550 Spyder to a sports car race in Salinas, California—the kind of regional race Hill might easily have entered—when he collided with an oncoming Ford coupe at the intersection of Highways 46 and 41, about a mile from the town of Cholame. Dean was taken to a local hospital where he was pronounced dead on arrival.
In January 1956, Hill returned to Buenos Aires, where he had seen Eric Forrest-Greene burn to death two years earlier. This time he shared a Ferrari with Olivier Gendebien, an aristocratic Belgian who had distinguished himself as a Resistance fighter during the war and now lived in a grand manor house in the Fontainebleau Forest. In a field that included the biggest names of the day—Juan Manuel Fangio, Eugenio Castellotti, Stirling Moss, and Jean Behra—they came in second.
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