The Le Mans Racing Disaster of 1955 | Episode 76

Don't say I don't take you anywhere, because today we're going to be attending the most prestigious auto race in the world. And you say, hey, that sounds really exciting, Well just wait for the off roading portion. Hello, and welcome to Doomsday Histories Most Dangerous Podcast. Together, we are going to rediscover some of the most traumatic, bizarre, and on inspiring but largely unheard of or forgotten disasters from throughout human history and around the world. On today's episode, we'll take a look at the only car the public ever compared to a barbecue. We're visiting the only sporting event in history that was later compared by the press to the Holocaust. And you'll hear about the first accidental public use of an unintentional horizontal guillotine. And if you were listening on Patreon, you will learn about the upper limits of human reaction. Time. You'd get to meet America's most physically damaged stuntman. You'd also be treated to more dodge caravan math than you could fly a rocket bike over. You would learn about a non sexual, full body invisible burning phenomenon, and on topic, we would look at the history of strange ways that people have died at today's events, just in different years. This is not the show you play around kids, or while eating, or even in mixed company. But as long as you find yourself a little more historically engaged and learn something that could potentially save your life, our work is done. So all that said, shoot the kids out of the room, put on your headphones and safety glasses and lights big in. My first super vague memory of being in a car was actually being in an accident. It was Christmas Eve. We were on our way home from Grandma's house and a pilot broke out on Highway four, a one Hearth's deadliest highway. I was really young at the time, and I was thrown from my seat, which panicked my mom. But thankfully we all survived, which was an unexpected treat. I'll tell you why. See, when my parents first met, they had it all. They were young and in love. They had horses together, and my mom drove a canary yellow Ford Mustang. But once you have kids, well they had to eat the horses, and the Mustang got traded in for something more practical. That's right. My parents purchased a kind of a beige orange Ford Pinto hatchback you know the model with the wood paneling on the sides. If you don't know about the Pinto. It was introduced in nineteen seventy with the tagline the Little Carefree Car, but the public nicknamed it the barbecue that could seat four see in an accident. It was unintentionally designed to act as a self sealing pyrotechnic euthanasia device, even in a slow speed collision. From behind, the frame of the car would kind of shift and block all the doors, turning them into walls so you couldn't open them, which is a problem because the other thing that it does was pushed the bumper forward, and the bumper was designed in a way that simultaneously punctured the gas tank and set up an explosion. It also created a kind of booby trap for the car behind them, loosely titled your car is on Fire. You know how they used to paint flame jobs on the front of muscle cars. Picture that but pointing forward from the trunk. And Ford knew about the design flaw. Everybody knew about the design flaw. They knew about it two years before the car was even released to the public. But because most companies are run by accountants, rather than the visionaries that started them. The math said it was cheaper to pay off the families of the deceased rather than recalling and fixing all the cars. So that's what they did. They prioritized cost cutting over safety. It's what car companies do. It's what a lot of companies do. And to be clear, the Ford Pinto wasn't actually any deadlier than any other family car on the roads at the time. By the numbers, it might have actually been safer than a few of them. But the big deal wasn't that it killed people. It's just that when it did kill wow, no thank you. And during this time, twenty seven people died while trapped helplessly waiting to explode. And this one time, three young girls quite famously burned to death in a Pinto and charges were laid, and not against the people in the accident, it was against the Ford Motor Company. The Ford Motor Company holds the distinction of being the first corporation in America to be prosecuted criminally. We cover a lot of negligent homicide on this show, but Ford was actually charged with reckless homicide. Speaking of cars that look like they want to kill you, the very first automobile looked like it ran off spilled blood and bone barrow. It looked like an old fermenting still that people used to cook up a legal hooch riding around on giant wagon wheels. It wasn't much to look at, and it was the handiwork of French inventor Nicholas Joseph Cougnot. All the way back in seventeen sixty nine, it was basically a steam powered tricycle, but it still counts as the first self propelled vehicle. And oddly we don't call them Cougnots today, but we came kind of close. The etymology of the term car, from all of its different origins, basically makes it short for cart, not car, reading to your death the way you might expect. Back in seventeen sixty nine. Regardless, it beat propelling a giant stone wagon like a flintstone. And as the years take by, car enthusiasts and inventors made improvements. Liquid fuel replaced steam. The four stroke conternal combustion engine carried us faster than walking speed, and you fast forward all the way to eighteen eighty six, and a man named Karl Benz got himself a patent for a three wheeler with a gas engine, and that's when things really got moving. It's worth pointing out that the entire evolution of the automobile was designed around competition. America's first ever automobile race was November the twenty eighth, eighteen ninety five. Frank Duryer drove a one cylinder, four horsepower car called the Duriya motor Wagon. It was basically a love seat set on four wheels with a kind of a navigational wand it blew between Chicago and Evanston, Illinois and back with an average speed of seven miles or eleven kilometers an hour, and it did the whole trip in just seven hours and fifty three minutes. Some of the slower entrants might have taken weeks. And there had been versions of motoring competitions going all the way back to eighteen eighty seven. The very very first one was held on April twenty eighth, eighteen eighty seven, through the streets of Paris, and a gentleman racer named George Bhutang one because he was the only competitor to show up. Racing might be seen as almost glamorous now, but back then it was an awful, life threatening trek across archaic roots in fragile machines that love to break down. Early racers were basically full time mechanics, and as racing grew, so did it spread around the world. Racers drove on regular roads that twisted through towns and countrysides, which splattered a lot of early drivers into the sides of houses and trees. Eventually it moved and mostly onto tracks which were much safer. Remember I said that the twenty four Hours of La mans is considered the oldest and most prestigious insurance race in the world. In fact, it's considered part of the triple Crown of motorsports that includes the Indianapolis five hundred in America, the Monaco Grand Prix, and the twenty four Hours of La Manze. Here in France, that's right, I hope you packed a Barrett, your baguette holder and your phrase book of exaggerated French cliches. We are spending the weekend in France. We'll be spending our time in a world famous petit city in the northwest, about two hours from Paris, called Lamns. Every year since nineteen twenty three, just outside the town of Lamns, the world's greatest drivers gather to compete. Welcome to the twenty four hours of La Monte la van cancre er dumint if your fancy. It's a rather demanding thirteen kilometer eight and a half mile circuit in and around the La Monte sur CUIs de Sarte grand stands. It is a beautiful, if not hurried trip down tree lined streets throughout the French countryside. Racers move too fast to really take in the picturesque land of historical charm and patchwork of rolling hills, peaceful vineyards and golden fields stretching as far as you can see. Picture narrow winding roads, quaint villages with rustic stone houses and medieval churches. I mean, this is postcard rural France. The track offers a mix of private and public roads, which they obviously clear of the cyclists and cows before the race, and includes pit areas, grand stands and the high speed Wissant Straight. This is the longest and fastest racing strait anywhere in the world. Drivers battle exhaustion, darkness, and unpredictable weather in a grueling test of teamwork and strategy that pushes drivers and their machines to the limits. It's an endurance race and it's twenty four hours long. Instead of racing until you hit a certain number of laps or distance like an F one, the winner of la Mon's is the team that covers the most distance over twenty four hours. Unlike other races where cars are basically designed to go fast, La Mons challenges companies to create reliable cars that didn't break down eighteen hours into a race that needed fewer pit stops, can cram more lap time into those twenty four hours. They say. Lamon's is most exciting and dangerous race in the world, and probably because drivers have been away for more than a day. The long straightaways followed immediately by sharp turns tested groggy drivers and those who failed failed. Big Lamanz crams more racing into a single day than Formula One racks up in a year. Leading up to today's race, Ferrari, Jaguar, and Mercedes Benz had all spent time in the winner circle, with their teams showing up now to offer new and improved car models. I'm going to tell you the rest of the car manufacturers that had vehicles racing at Lamon's this year and you put a finger down for any that you don't recognize. There was Aston, Martin, Porsche, Maserati, Talbert Lago, Gordini, Bristol Cunningham, Duche Bonnet, which sounds Dutch but it's actually French. And off we see specials at Costruzzioni Automobile. You may not have heard of that last one, but I've actually got two of them dead in my driveway right now. This was the twenty third edition of Lamon's and our story takes place on June the eleventh, nineteen fifty five. Between two hundred and fifty and three one hundred thousand people piled through the turnstiles along the route to bear witness. This is the kind of ridiculously huge crowds that no other sport could attract. I'd compare that kind of crowd size to Woodstock or our manager Devi Temple Apocalypse of two thousand and five episode this race. The nineteen fifty five race was set, nay faded, to be a showdown between heated rivals Jaguar and Mercedes. Jaguar was an exotic British car with a small rural team just whistling along while Mercedes facilities had been all too recently turned into craters during Allied bombings. Jaguar had won Lamans in nineteen fifty one and nineteen fifty three, and this year they were unveiling the fastest car that they had ever built, the long nosed D type. It had a sleek, aerodynamic and elegant minimalist design, with two hundred and seventy horsepower a three point four liter in line six engine, and it could hit one hundred and seventy two miles or two hundred and seventy seven kilometers an hour. Its most iconic feature is either its elongated, sculpted front nose that enhanced airflow, or its central fin which rose from behind the driver's seat, which increased its stability at high speeds and gave the car a bit of a shark like appearance. There were only seventy five of these ever made, so you can pick one up today for about five hundred and eighty thousand dollars. By contrast, Mercedes Benz entered a three hundred slr Ulenhaut Koup. It was a much boxier car, and it was made of an ultra light magnesium alloy and an era dynamically narrowed towards the back, just two seats covered by a small windshield with side mounted air intakes, simple but more aggressive looking, with a three hundred horse power three liters straight eight engine and a top speed around one hundred eighty miles or two hundred and ninety kilometers an hour. An actual nineteen fifty five model just sold at auction for one hundred and forty two million. My view, that was one of only two in existence. Some called this race World War two because actual World War II only ended a handful of years earlier, and people were in the mood to see Germany get its teeth kicked in and people love an underdog, which in this case was written being the underdog. The three hundred SLR was produced by a battalion of engineers backed by one of the world's most powerful automotive manufacturers in the heart of industrial Germany, while the dtaied Jaguar was built by fourteen guys in a barn in Coventry. It was basically the David versus Goliath plot of Rocky four, only in cars. Taking a look backwards, those steam powered autogyros of old topped out around seven miles or eleven kilometers an hour. In nineteen twenty three, when the Lamon's track was first built, top speeds were somewhere closer to sixty miles or one hundred kilometers an hour. But at today's race in nineteen fifty five, top speeds for leading cars could reach higher than one hundred and seventy miles or two hundred and seventy kilometers an hour. And this was one hell of a time to be a race fan. You know, we live in a world defined by painted lines and railings that keep us divided from ever touching or really experiencing anything, but not in nineteen fifty five, all that separated approaching cars from the grandstands was a four foot tall earthen bank, and all that separated of fans from spilling out onto the track was a white wooden picket fence, and drivers didn't e wear seat belts. Most modern race cars come with a five point safety harness system and helmets and a fireproof suit. By nineteen fifty five, Can you imagine how many horrible things you would have had to have seen to firmly believe that it was just better to be thrown from your car than to be trapped inside one after a crash. Well, we'll come back to that. When you bought a ticket to Lamon's it actually said motor racing is dangerous printed right on it. In fact, there are people who get really, really disappointed if something doesn't crash during a race. We'll come back to that too. Pierre Levy would be driving in one of Mercedes cars this day. He was an older driver. He completed more miles at Lamans than any other driver, which made him a kind of a French folk hero. English car manufacturer Jaguar meanwhile, gave the nod to British racing star Mike Hawthorne. This guy was so British that he drank tea and he even wore a tie during races. He carried anti German beef in his heart after the war, and he would be damned before he was going to let some German win the day. So what made Hawthorne so great at driving? Why his impending death. Of course, he was dying of kidney failure and he was well aware of it. The doctors told him he'd be dead by thirty and so he just lived and he drove like it. The stands were packed, Like I said, tickets were only four francs, and spectators crammed the fences trying to get the best views. A sea of children, ladies and gentlemen in clean press suits lined both sides of the track right up to the roadway. The most prize spots for watching the action were overlooking the pit areas. So you know, the pit area is just a spot off the track where racers pull in for fuel or tea or new tires. Anything and everything that could possibly go wrong get spider monkeyed by quick moving pit crews of mechanics. Another thing fans loved but the race was the Lamans start. You know how a car race works, They just wave a flag and everyone goes fast and they keep turning left. But the Laman start added a foot race into the mix. Drivers lined up on one side of the track, opposite their vehicles, and when the officiate waved a flag and yelled those famous words commence race day, the drivers sprinted to their cars, jumped in, cramped them up, and took off. It was a little chaotic and it led to an injury here or there, and sadly, if you didn't watch races before nineteen seventy, they stopped doing it. By then, and with that the thrill of speed of man versus machine, of striving against human and mechanical fatigue begins and they do it for twenty four hours. That's about four hundred laps in total. The crowd and the grand stand strained to see as the cars came into view. LaVey's Mercedes was leading Austin Heally's car driven by Lance Macklin, with Juan Manuel found Gio closely behind driving for fur Rack. Sorry, Fangio was a crowd favorite, but he got his pant legs stuck in his gearshift at the beginning of the race and he had trouble getting going, and although it took a while, he managed to climb back up to third. This is a really long race and most drivers respect the length of the course and they paced themselves accordingly. But Levey and Hawthorne took off like a shot. See, there's a lot of strategy that goes into a race this long, and their strategy said that they could probably tease Fangio into chasing them, which would strain his car too hard beyond its mechanical limits and eventually, hopefully it would just explode. Well, we'll just have to wait and see. As the cars approached the end of lap thirty five, Mike Hawthorn started to overtake Lance Macklin's Austin Healey. When he saw the sign telling him to head into the pits for fuel. Hawthorne braked sharply and turned in front of Macklin as he slowed to leave the track. Here's a different way of saying that, Mike Hawthorn pulled to the right side of the track and break checked Macklin's Austin Healey. Macklin was just looking to keep turning left until they gave mareth and a bottle of champagne to chug. He hadn't really been expecting any of this. Maclin's Austin Heely also did not have the kind of lightweight stated the art brakes as the Jaguar. They couldn't stop as fast and he had to swerve to avoid him. He swerved to the left and hit the brakes before pulling back into the middle of the track, right into the path of Mercedes bench driver Pierre Levey. Problem was, of course, LaVey was passing up the left side, going way faster than any of them. He'd joined this whole mess doing about one hundred and fifty or two hundred and thirty kilometers an hour, so he had no time to break and his front wheels smashed right into the back of Macklin. And what happened next would redefine automotive racing and change the sport forever. The time was six twenty six PM. Macklin swerved left to avoid Hawthorn, who was slowing down, but lost control and veered across to the center of the track, which somehow put him directly in front of Hawthorne. LaVey's front wheel rode up onto the left rear corner of the Austin Martin. And you remember how sleek and aerodynamic these things were. The Austin Healy acted just like a ramp, and Levy took flight and not calmly like something out of the dukes of Hazard. No, his car appeared to roll end over end, that's ass over tea kettle for eighty meters or two hundred and sixty feet. He unintentionally jumped his car over the length of sixteen Dodge caravans. I should mention his car was pointed straight along the length of the pack grand stands running parallel to the track. Spectators were protected by their hats and that little wooden fence I told you about. The Mercedes struck the four foot tall earthen barrier at the foot of the grand stands. He did this at over two hundred kilometers or one hundred and twenty five miles an hour. From there. The car exploded, before continuing and smashing into one of those large concrete stairwells that line the stand At this moment, the car became a kind of fragmentation grenade, showering the stands in sharp, flaming metal. The majority of the car stayed together for the most part, big mechanical chunks the engine, the suspension, the tires, all of it pirouetted through the crowd, carving a three hundred foot path along the stands at incredible speed. It looked like a toy car had been ripped apart, set on fire, and then thrown angrily by God into the stands. The engine rolled through the crowd like a bouncing ball, crushing and decapitating as it went. Same with the suspension. It stayed pretty much intact, but it lost all of its resale value because of all the blood. The hood or bonnet ripped free from the car and incredibly flattened out and flew like Captain America's shield for his being through the tightly packed crowd. It decapitated everyone it touched like a horizontal guillotine. Survivor said, after the leaf of the bris wooshed past, they would turn to the person beside them, only to realize that they were excitedly emoting into a neck hole. There were a lot of headless bodies wearing binoculars for no reasons. In the stands that day. People grabbed their families and ran madly scrambling, you know that kind of running where you're using your hands and your feet to pull you along, that kind of panic, while fire shot into the air behind them, and they were forced to leap over the bodies of the injured and the dying. So, dear Lord, how could this possibly get worse? Well, here's the thing about the Mercedes. I told you they were using a lightweight magnesium alloy for most of the bodywork. And you know that little bear who taught you about fire when you were in school, He taught us how to stop, drop and roll, but he didn't spend any time on magnesium and magnesium burns. Actually, it doesn't just burn, It burns easier than most materials, and hotter too. Paper burns at two hundred and thirty three celsius or four hundred and fifty one degrees fahrenheit. Ray Bradbury wrote a book about that stopian story about the dangers of censorship and governmental overreach, and it actually came out the same year as our story. But we're not burning books, we're burning cars. Magnesium burns around thirty one hundred celsius or fifty six hundred fahrenheit or freedom units. As a listener recently explained to me, I figured I could cook a frozen PiZZ in fifteen seconds in a flaming magnesium oven. When the car first hit the embankment, the fuel tank separated and exploded with flaming liguid was thrown hard and fast everywhere over the stands, over the crowds. So you're taking in the greatest automotive race of all time. When the leads race by and the guy beside you now has a flaming hubcap sticking out of his chest, would you know what to do? It's worth mentioning the main reason we don't use magnesium for birthday candles is they're really hard to blow out. Race fans can get very excited when they see cars whiz by, but you can only imagine how excited to get when the car disassembles and throws itself into the stands. All that debris, once touched by fire, immediately ignited into white hot, flaming shards and showered the crowd with magnesia. Members. And the human instinct when we see fire is to smother it. At least it was for hundreds of thousands of years until we learned how to farm. Check this out. I explain this to my wife. Here is my theory of the evolution of human firefighting. See, once we knew how to grow food instead of chasing it around all the time, people began to gather into communities, and when communities grew enough, they became municipalities. And the whole point of municipality is to take care of all the things that you need in a community. They get electricity into your house, get water into your house, pave your streets, just all that kind of stuff. However, pretty much since we all moved indoors and were given running water, we've all been trained to throw water onto fire. Where for most of history you'd just use dirt. So here is why the introduction of agriculture to human development really eft the people at le Mans that day. If you went to the races and a flaming piece of car hood whacked itself into the guy beside you, your instinct would be to pour your drink on it, just extinguish it. But pouring water onto burning magnesium has the opposite effect. You plash the spear sticking out of the guy beside you, and now he goes up like the human torch. And why is that? Because magnesium actually rips the oxygen out of the water molecules. The hydrogen just sort of blows away and the fire goes crazy. So when you pour water on it, you're actually feeding it oxygen. So how do you extinguish something that doesn't want to be extinguished? You got to figure a better way to remove its oxygen source. And you wouldn't just throw a towel over something like this, like it's a cooking fire. I'm sure that towel would vaporize before it even landed. But sand, as an example, sand can beary a magnesium flame, just rob it of all that oxygen. At graves, no muss, no fuss, And just so you know, all kinds of metals will burst into flames. Sodium, potassium, titanium, lithium, they all do it. And because of that, fire departments are now requesting that you take a serious thought towards no longer charging your cell phones while you're asleep. They get really hot, they burst into flames, and there's not much you're gonna do to put them out. But here's what I would say. Theoretically, you could upend a plant pot onto a burning phone like a hat and just see what happens. But I have to tell you that you are better off with a Class D fire extinguisher. It's a dry chemical fire extinguisher. You've probably never seen one in your life outside of home depot. It fires out a blend of powdered graphite, sodium chloride, and copper to smother and crust over whatever was combusting. Most people would never own a classic fire extinguisher, but with lithium replacing all the batteries in our lives, it might not be a bad idea in the future. If you found yourself earned in one of these situations, I'm gonna tell you what to do in two phase This is phase one. Get that burn under cool water, not cold, and not spring out of a hose, just a nice cool flow of water to help draw heat away from the wound and remove any traces of chemicals. You got to remember, when you actually get a burn, you are still cooking. You're cooking, and you want to stop yourself from cooking. Hold it underwater until it's cool enough for you to be able to cover it up super loosely with the cleanest arius thing that you can find, the closest thing you've got to gauze. And you don't want to wrap very tight because just remember how much you are not going to look forward to unwrapping it if the cover sticks into your wound. And here's the thing about burns that you generally don't read on safety posters and factories. If your burn is hurting, cool it, and if it starts hurting again, just keep cooling it, keep rinsing. The last thing you need to do is panic, So take your time, which leads me to phase two. You definitely want to go to the hospital. It's one thing if you burn yourself touching the pan, but it's quite another if you get a chemical or a metal burn. If you weren't alone when you got the burn, it's entirely likely your screams would have already prompted others to call for a ride ahead of you. But just make sure you get a ride. Metal and other chemical fires burn a hell of a lot faster than regular household stuff, so it can inflict more harm, more faster, and this is also important for your peace of mind. The reason that you probably don't have a type the extinguisher is because these fires are more often than not found in industrial settings. And if you found yourself in an industrial setting and you catch a flame off a burning stack of magnesium, what you want to do is screen, get me my lawyer, and the management of whatever company or factory that is will bend over backwards to make sure that you get the absolute best and quickest care humanly possible. The track was on fire, the stands were on fire, people were injured and dying, and the race continued even as the car burst and sparked with flaming projectiles, as people tried in vain to extinguish it, even as the dead and injured were dragged off and taken away, while others frantically search for loved ones, and two priests were performing last rites on victims where they lay. The race did not stop, not here, not today. Drivers didn't even know what had happened. When you think of race cars and you think of crashes, you think, well, they're going to wave a red flag indicating it's too dangerous to continue, and a pole car will probably come out and purposefully slow everyone down, and if someone died, the race would just be over and everyone would go home early. But not here. And the funniest observation I found was because there was no real in car radio communication, They just make these little signs that say oil or tires and wave drivers into the pits. No one had been putting up a sign saying dead people ahead. More than two hundred people were injured by the white hot debris and fuel spray, and about one hundred and twenty many of them required serious medical attention. Those that got more intimate with car parts fared way worse. Eighty three spectators had been killed. Then rescue workers poured water onto the inferno, which reacted more like gasolene, and the car burned for several hours, which only made things more chaotic and frightening, and this wasn't even the only crash of the day. The Austin Healy, which the Mercedes hit, went on to smash into a barrier before swerving into the pit lane. The Austin Martin narrowly missed ramming into cars that were refueling, which would have created its own inferno, but instead it crashed through a retaining wall and plowed through a policeman, a photographer and two race officials, and despite the overwhelming panic and chaos, the race continued. Jaguar driver Mike Hawthorne returned to the pits completely distraught. He knew that he had caused what the press was later going to go on to describe as a holocaust. Worth noting this is less than ten years after the actual Holocaust of Jews across Europe. The press saw what happened this day and said, yep, pretty much the same thing. And he had no idea how many people had died, just that it was a lot, and he blamed himself. His team ordered him back onto the track to keep racing, but after one lap he stopped. When he emerged from his car, his sadness and grief had been turned up to eleven. He was emotionally destroyed. It's one thing to lose a loved one, it's another to actually take a life unintentionally. He was trying to wrap his head and his heart around the fact that he, meaning to or not, probably just killed dozens of people. And he had been so despondent that it is fair to say that if you could have been inside that car during that last lap, that would have been the saddest and most awkward single lap of automotive racing in history. So what happened, well, so many things, and we're not even done here. Case in point, Imagine that you're Levey's teammate John Fitch. You're standing on the sides of the pit with Lvey's wife when the race turns into a horror movie. Now imagine how she reacts as her husband's smoking corpse skids to a halt on the pavement directly in front of them, severely burnt and in full view of everyone. He'd been thrown out of the car while it tumbled through the air and crushed his skull on impact. My wife, when she saw the video of this incident, and yes, there is video to see, she pointed out that this man did all this in his underwear, with his pants dragged down to his ankles. A police officer tore a banner off the stands to cover his body. Imagine running to a payphone to assure your family that you're okay when you overhear people saying that so far they've counted forty eight dead. Now imagine that all this is going on and you're still listening to the sound of engines screaming in the background. Yep, that's right. Remember officials did not stop the race, so they let it keep going. Why Stupidly? At first they offered up the show must go on, which was really just shorthand for they didn't want to end up losing money in sponsored lawsuits. They even pointed to the recent Farnborough Air Show crash of nineteen fifty two, which happened just three years earlier, as a precedent for keeping it going. Long story short, a Dhavalin DH one to ten jet fighter was performing a high speed pass over the air show when it disintegrated in mid air, sent de free into the crowds below and killed thirty one spectators and both pilots. But that show had to go on too. The more reasonable or maybe believable excuse was that if the huge crowd of spectators tried to leave all at once, they would have choked the roads and prevented access for medical and emergency vehicles. The more practical excuse was if they sent everyone home two hours into a twenty four hour race, they were going to lose a lot of money. The whole Mercedes team knew they had to pull out of this race for the dignity of those who were dying all around them, if nothing else. It wasn't an easy decision, but it was the right one, and they knew full well this was going to be a pr nightmare if they finished. The chief engineer for Mercedes went over to the Jaguar pits to let them know that they were pulling out and asked if they would pull out two out of respect for the disaster. The Jaguar team manager met his gaze, put his hand on his shoulder, and gave him a look of understanding before telling him to keV where he reaches out to shake your hand and then quickly pulls it back and runs it through his own hair, laughing. Mercedes didn't just withdraw from the race. They withdrew from competitive racing altogether. One of the amazing things about this disaster was that the track was very long, and because no announcements were being made, most people had no idea that anything was even wrong unless they picked up on that one car that was now missing or Hawthorne's screaming sobs as he whiz passed on his last lap. They wouldn't find out until the next day. With Mercedes out and Ferrari facing technical problems, the Jaguar team won by five laps over Austin Martin, who came in second. The man whose breaking started the chain reaction of events went on to win the race, and this was twenty two hours after the accident. Hawthorne drank from the ceremonial jug of winner Champagne, but only to a smattering of applause. No one was in the mood to celebrate their accomplishment, except for one excited photographer who snapped a picture of him victory burping into a microphone, and the press had a field day with it. Following the disaster, the various teams involved went back and forth throwing around blame, so an inquiry was held, which ultimately came to the conclusion that none of the drivers had been to blame. Instead, they blamed the track. When I said how all these manufacturers bring their newest machines every year, what I meant is you have vehicles of vastly different speeds and abilities all sharing the same space. And the investigators concluded that after thirty years of development, the track was simply no longer suitable for cars that now drove three times as fast as it was designed to handle. Cars just fresh off a last minute turn before the straightaway either wanted to slow down to enter the pits or blast off on the straightaway, and they all had to do it kind of together because there was no deceleration lane for cars coming into the pits. They also went on to make a very open and shutcase about the closeness of the stands. They were parallel to the course, and they were so tight to the track you could practically smell the tires. The disaster led to an immediate temporary ban on auto racing across Europe until race tracks could be brought to a higher safety standard. Even overseas in America, the US dissolved their existing racing association to form a proper sanctioning and officiating body responsible for anything like this that could happen in the future. Lance Macklin was a guy they described as jovial and relaxed, but after Lamance he became bitter. He sued My Hawthorn for libel. Why we talked about how immediately after the incident, Hawthorne had been weeping and admitting that he had caused the accident, but after the race he kind of did a one eighty and vehemently denied any responsibility. He even went on to write a biography that covered the accident in detail and spread the blame a little more liberally. After Lamanz, My Hawthorn went on to win the World Championship in nineteen fifty eight, and he retired shortly afterwards, and three months after that he was dead. He died in a traffic accident, of all things. He'd been trying to pass the Mercedes in his Jaguar at the time and plowed headlong into a truck. But believe it or not, there was some good that came out of all of this. The death of LaVey left a huge impression on the American driver John Fitch. He continued racing, but he became obsessed with improving road safety. In fact, you might not know him from racing, but you know those yellow plastic barrels on the highway. They're usually filled with sand or water, and they're there for cars to crash into rather than crashing into poles or concrete. Well. They are called Fitch inertial safety barriers and they were invented by John Fitch as a direct result of the nineteen fifty five La Monts disaster, and since they first went into use in the nineteen sixties, they have saved thousands of lives over the years. Fanngio in the Ferrari he had a better view of the disaster than anyone. He never raced a LeMans again, and three years later he retired from racing altogether. The French government and event organizers provided medical costs and burial expenses to the families affected, and they spent nine hundred thousand dollars moving the stands to a safer location, as well as other improvements like oh picket fence replacement. If you're a modern racing enthusiast, you might not like having to watch races through a fence, but now you know the reason they're there. The Laman's pit areas and grand stands were bulldozed and rebuilt. The pit area was designed and widened to remove that kink just before them, and room was created for a dedicated deceleration lane. Even the pits complex were pulled down and rebuilt, giving more room to the teams. The grand stands were rebuilt with spectator terraces and a wide ditch was placed between them and the racetrack. It may have made racing duller, but safer for drivers and the fans that love them. Despite the safety improvements, the following year, when Laman started up again, French driver Louis Hare was killed when his car flipped on the second lap. The nineteen fifty five Lahman's racing disaster remains, and hopefully will forever remain, the most catastrophic, most costly, single greatest loss of life in motorsport history. Let there be no rush to beat that record. People said I should make this episode because it would be awesome, and they said I should make it to honor the memory of the not one, not two, but three cars that I have had towed to Asgard in the last nine months. And how safe did I feel sitting on the highway in a passenger car with an air bag and a flimsy shoulder belt. Well not at all. I sat about fifty feet up the road, straddling the impact barrier, never taking my eye off the road, because people have a strange habit of unconsciously steering into the backs of broken down cars and it happens all the time. So compared to a professional racetrack, highways are a million times more dangerous. Do you know the name Tim Horton, Well, tim Horton's is the name of a global coffee powerhouse that started right here in Canada, and it was named after a hockey player who spent the majority of his career playing for the Toronto Maple Leafs, but also played with the New York Rangers, the Pittsburgh Penguins, and the Buffalo Sabers. And really long story short, Tim Horton died in Saint Catharine's, Ontario, a city that my dad lived in. One time, while visiting there, he asked me if I knew how Tim Horton died. He said, you won't hear about it on the Tim Horton's website, but he died flying down the QW Highway blasted on coke and amphetamines and barbituates behind the wheel of a D Tomaso Pantera. I asked what a D Tamaso Pantera looked like and he said it didn't matter. Just draw a car on a piece of paper, crumple it into a ball, light it on fire, and throw it away. Tim Horton was racing down the QWW when he hit a pothole and exploded. You have any idea how fast you need to be driving for witnesses to not be able to identify the color of your car. Well, if you're completely loaded on uppers and downers and thinking of going for a drive, why not throw your keys into a sewer and consider becoming a supporter of the show. It really helped fulfill my dream of doing this full time. And if you and a few thousand of your friends could spare a buck or two, you'd really help keep the show and frankly me alive. Before I tell you about Patreon, if you are into it but aren't looking for a whole relationship, you can visit, buy me a coffee, dot com slash doomsday and just make a one time donation. And for those of you who do, I appreciate you from a deep place. I myself think getting episodes a little early, with no sponsor interruptions and with additional ridiculously interesting material in each new episode is worth it, and if you agree, you can find out more at patreon dot com slash funeral Kazoo. A quick and heartfelt shout out again to Jenis Panell, Mary Lassiter, Jacob Meyer Scott, and Laney Tolly for helping support me on Patreon. You can reach out to me on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook at doomsday Podcast, or fire an email to Doomsdaypod at gmail dot com. I love hearing from you, but I'm a little behind now. I know I was doing really good for a long time there, but I'm only a little behind. So barfags, stickers, hugs, and return letters are coming soon. Older episodes can be found wherever you found this one, and while you're there, please leave us a review and tell your friends. I always thank all my Patreon listeners, new and old, for their support and encouragement, but I also say, if you can spare the money and had to choose, I ask you to consider making a donation to Global Medic. Global Medic is a rapid response agency of Canadian volunteers offering assistants around the world to aid in the aftermath of disasters and crises. They're often the first and sometimes the only team to get critical interventions to people in life threatening situations, and to date they have helped over three zero point six million people across seventy seven different countries. You can learn more and donate at globalmedic dot CAA. On the next episode. You know how you see people leaving a sporting event early and you think, ah, look at those jerks just trying to get out to avoid traffic. Well, let me tell you the best apologies are often offered while holding your hat in your hands, crumpling it in front of your chest. It's the Acra Stadium disaster of two thousand and one. We'll talk soon. Safety goggles off and thanks for listening.