Racing’s Deadliest Day
November 20, 2024 at 09:30PMDespite, or perhaps because of, growing up in the heart of NASCAR country, I am not a fan of car racing. I am, however, a huge fan of Michael Mann, and ever since watching the movie Ferrari last Christmas, I’ve had a morbid fascination with historical crashes at racing events. Enter this piece by Darrell Hartman, which details the 1955 Le Mans disaster, in which 82 people were killed, many of them decapitated. (I do not recommend looking up video footage of the incident like I did.) In crisp prose, Hartman explains how the disaster changed motorsport forever:
The Le Mans disaster laid bare the grand illusion that motorsport had evolved beyond the bloodiness of its early years. The primitive scenes of violence from the grandstand area, which appeared in newsreels around the world, made it gruesomely clear that the sport’s safety standards had failed to keep up with the increasing speed and deadliness of its cars.
The moment marked the end of an age of innocence, which is probably one reason the scale of the 1955 Le Mans disaster has never been surpassed. Though it stands alone in this respect, the incident also served as just one example in a larger argument. Were horrific crashes like this one unavoidable? Or could more be done to prevent them without compromising the fundamental draw of the sport? The racing establishment of this era resisted self-reform, and only got serious about redefining safety standards following crashes in which innocent bystanders were killed and public outrage ensued. Le Mans was the most devastating of these disasters, but not the only one. Another was the 1957 crash during the Mille Miglia that killed two drivers and nine spectators, which led the Italian government to outlaw racing on public roads, and landed Enzo Ferrari on trial for manslaughter.
Change did not come swiftly. On the contrary, Formula 1’s deadliest season, in which separate accidents claimed the lives of four drivers in five months, occurred in 1958. Ferrari’s Wolfgang Von Trips and 15 spectators were killed at the 1961 Italian Grand Prix. It would take years before elite drivers stopped dying at alarming rates, and for the popular image of them as peacetime fighter pilots—fast, courageous, likely to be killed in action—to fade away.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/11/20/racings-deadliest-day/
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