Against Death and Time: One Fatal Season in Racing's Glory Years (25 page)

The Englishman was averaging over 122 miles an hour, a record
pace, and had squeezed out an eight-second advantage over Fangio.
Thirty-five laps-280 miles-around the circuit had been completed
by the leaders, and fuel stops were in order.

A buzz of excitement ran through the crowd as they pressed closer
to the earthen barrier across from the pits for a better look as the
leader's crew set to changing tires and adding fuel in a matter of a few
critical minutes. The public address announcer blared in French that
Hawthorn might stop on the next lap.

Ivor Bueb, Hawthorn's co-driver, who was running his first race for
the Jaguar team, stood on the pit counter, helmet on, hands gloved, in
case his partner wanted relief. This seemed unlikely. It would be a
rapid stop, then back to the war. It was expected that Fangio would
also come in shortly.

I looked at my watch. It was 6:26 in the afternoon. Two and half
hours had gone by, and had been almost entirely consumed in a desperate battle between Fangio and Hawthorn.

A hint of dark green arrowed toward us from Maison Blanc.
Hawthorn on the inside of the narrow track. He was presumably
slowing for his pit stop. A wink of silver to his left was coming at 150
mph. Was it Fangio? No. The number 20 sister car-Levegh.
Suddenly another speck of green. A smaller car that had been hidden
behind Hawthorn's onrushing Jaguar popped into view. Lance
Macklin's Austin-Healy. It veered into the path of Levegh's Mercedes,
which didn't seem to alter course.

In one mad moment, the silver car vaulted up the back of the little
green roadster. Its nose pointed high in the air, the Mercedes
slammed down atop the outside barrier, and then, in a crazed,
blurred second, a pair of shattering explosions, and the Mercedes disintegrated, flinging two enormous hunks of metal into the massed
crowd. Macklin's Austin-Healey gyrated crazily down the narrow
straight before shuddering to a stop. Then Fangio came through the
smoke, angling toward the pits and maneuvering through the madness. He barely missed Hawthorn as the Jaguar rolled to a stop.

Pandemonium. Sirens screeching. Men waving yellow flags.
Screams of agony from the crowded gallery. Macklin scrambled out
of his wrecked car and staggered into the pits. Gendarmes and track
officials rushed to the wrecked Mercedes, burning fiercely atop the
barrier. Levegh lay face down on the track beside the smoking hulk.
Black clouds poured into the darkening sky. Then the place fell
strangely silent, save for the distant, confused rumble of cars on the back part of the course, the incessant cacophony of the carnival, and
the shriek of ambulance sirens.

"Holy shit," said Coltrin. "Levegh's Mercedes launched like a fucking
rocket off the back of Macklin's Healey. Never seen anything like it."

"The crowd. They must have gotten hit by all the flying debris," I said.

The Italians were gaping and drinking hard. The radio was chattering in the background. Coltrin listened. "They're saying Fitch was
driving. That can't be right. It was Levegh who started the car. It had
to be him. Either way, they say the driver was killed."

We watched in silence as a near-riot broke out across the track. It
was a fair distance away, and difficult to see through the pall of
smoke, but it was apparent that thousands were trying to flee the
scene-now a gaping hole filled with what appeared to be bodies
and smoking bits of car.

"Let's get out of here. To the paddock. They'll know more down
there." Said Coltrin. He claimed that crewmen, drivers, and team
managers would know more than what we could witness from our
distant vantage point.

The area behind the pits was swarming with journalists, crewmen,
and officials. I was reminded of Gasoline Alley following the
Vukovich disaster. Then Fitch elbowed through the crowd, looking
frantic. He had lost his suave composure. A pair of driving goggles
wobbled around his neck as he rushed up. He said to Coltrin, "I must
get to a phone. The Italians are saying on the radio that it was me in
the car. I've got to call Elizabeth in Lugano and tell her I'm allright."

"Try the press tribune. There's a bank of phones there. That's the
best place," said Coltrin.

Fitch's face darkened. "I was having a coffee in the Mercedes trailer
with his wife when it happened. I left her to help get some of the
injured people out of the pits. When Macklin spun, he hit some crewmen and journalists. At first we thought it was Fangio. His wife was
hysterical. Then someone said that it was my car. Then I found Levegh's wife. Before I could speak, she looked at me and said, `I
know, Fitch. It was Levegh. He is dead. I know he is dead: I tried to
tell her that he might have been thrown clear, but she'd have none of
it. She just kept repeating, `I know he is dead: She was right."

He turned away from us and rushed into the crowd.

A large man with a stone-bald head staggered out of the confusion.
A battery of Leicas was draped over his shoulders. He was wearing the
khaki vest with multiple pockets favored by professional photographers. It was spattered with blood.

I had seen him before at Indianapolis. Dan Rubin was a top photographer for Time and Life and other major periodicals.

"Are you all right?" I asked.

"No. Not after what I just saw. I had just crossed over on the
Dunlop bridge and was walking through the crowd. I planned to
shoot the Hawthorn pit stop from across the track. I was checking my
F-stops when I heard this terrible explosion off to my right. I looked
up to see Levegh's car carom onto the barrier. Then these giant hunks
of steel pinwheeled into the crowd. It was awful. Then suddenly people were rushing toward me, all of them screaming. Most of them
were covered with blood. Some were holding gaping wounds on their
faces, arms, and upper bodies. An old man collapsed in front of me.
I knelt down to help him and was nearly crushed. I covered Korea
and I never saw anything like this."

"They say some people were killed."

"Some? You've got to be kidding. There has to be a hundred dead
over there. Maybe more. I need a drink."

"The Ferrari box. All you need up there. Tell 'em I sent you," said
Coltrin.

Rubin reeled off.

"You think they'll stop the race?" I asked.

"They bloody well ought to," said an English journalist. "This is a
bloody catastrophe."

"They're still running out there. You can hear 'em," said Coltrin.
"Like nothing even happened."

"Same at Indy," I said. "They cleaned up the Vukovich crash and
the race went on. Within minutes it was forgotten."

Fitch reappeared. "Thank God I got through to her," he said.
"Elizabeth had just heard on Armed Forces radio about the crash.
They were saying that it might have been me."

"What now?" I asked.

"I've told Uhlenhaut and Neubauer that we ought to retire. Quit
right now. Pull out the cars. There's enough bad blood between these
two countries. We don't need this."

"The French are saying that three or four people are dead," I said.

"Good God! There are dozens dead. Maybe hundreds. What's the
matter with them? That's nonsense," said the Englishman.

"So will Mercedes withdraw?"

"I doubt it. Fangio wants to run. He's very tough-minded. Moss is
ready to keep going as well. But for the sake of the company's reputation, Mercedes ought to drop out."

"They ought to stop the whole bloody show," said the little
Englishman. "Enough is enough."

Another man with a scrawny beard and wire-rimmed glasses
butted in. "No way they'll stop. They've decided that stopping the
race would clog the road, and the emergency vehicles would be
stranded. No way to get the injured out. So they'll keep it going." I
recognized the face. Dennis Jenkinson was perhaps the best-known
British motor sports journalist, a regular for the venerable Motorsport
monthly magazine and having recently won fame as the navigator for
Stirling Moss on his epic, record-shattering victory drive in the Mille
Miglia. "Jenks" was not only a vertitable encyclopedia of racing
knowledge, but a three-time world champion-with Eric Oliver-in
the insanely dangerous sport of motorcycle sidecar racing.

"That's a shitty excuse," said Coltrin.

"Maybe. Maybe not," I said. "They've got to get people t hospitals.
Jamming the highways with traffic won't help. I can see their reasoning:'

"That's ridiculous," snapped Coltrin. "Stop it now. Respect the
dead. Worse yet, the car is German. They've already stirred up the old
Franco-German antagonisms. It's in Mercedes' best interest to retire
to affirm the Company's basic humanity and reputation."

"That's bloody nonsense," growled Jenks, rising to his full five-footfour-inches. "Thousands of people die each day for one reason or
another. It would be bloody sentimentality for Mercedes to withdraw someone because some people died here. One death is the
same as a hundred."

"The press will report that the ruthless German drove to victory
over the dead bodies of Frenchmen. Neubauer wants to keep going.
So do Moss and Fangio. But Uhlenhaut is on the phone trying to
reach the board of directors in Suttgart. They'll be the ones to decide,
said Coltrin.

The argument going nowhere, Jenkinson stalked away.

The place had devolved into madness. The screech and roar of the
cars continued, mixed with the cacophony of the carnival and the endless wailing of ambulances and fire trucks. As darkness fell, the giant
Esso blimp hung dolefully on its flagstaff, seemingly losing air. A bright
neon Mobil Flying Red Horse sign and the garishly lit press tribune and
grandstand were the only hints of color on the gray landscape as the
brightly hued cars blended into the oncoming night.

Rumors flew about the carnage. It had been officially announced
that Levegh was dead, although the track press office remained circumspect about the civilian casualties. Coltrin spoke with crewmen
and other journalists and all agreed that the toll would be high, perhaps over one hundred dead, with scores more injured.

The Fangio and Moss Mercedes had now established supremacy
over the Jaguar, which had fallen two laps in arrears. The team
Ferraris had broken, leaving the little hospitality box dark and empty, save for a chilled bartender and a few Scuderia loyalists. The floor was
littered with empty champagne and wine bottles. The food platters
were picked clean.

Tired and depressed, I sat on the tongue of a small trailer behind
the pits, trying to decide what to do. Surely hard news of the crash
would be forthcoming, although there seemed to be an official reluctance to deal with the reality, perhaps out of fear that more of the
massive crowd would flee the track and further clog the adjacent
highways. Coltrin reported that intense phone calls were being
exchanged between team manager Uhlenhaut and the Daimler-Benz
board of directors in Stuttgart. The sentiment seemed to be leaning
toward an official withdrawal.

It came shortly after two o'clock in the morning, 10 hours after the
start of the race and eight hours following the disaster. An official
statement from Stuttgart claimed that in deference to the dead and
injured, the two remaining Mercedes-Benz 300SLR cars would be
retired. The statement also noted that all of the team cars had operated within the rules of the event and could not be held responsible
for the crash.

I sensed that this would be the opening volley in an ugly, protracted effort by drivers, teams, and even nations to fix the blame on
anyone but themselves.

With the Hawthorn/Bueb Jaguar now far ahead in an uncontested
lead and the major competition from both Ferrari and MercedesBenz gone, the drama had been drained from the race. The night was
dark and cold. It was time for bed. I found Coltrin dragging on one
of his countless cigarettes and sharing a bottle of Scotch with an
English journalist behind the pits.

He agreed to leave, and we trooped to his Fiat in the nearly vacant
press parking lot and weaved back to the city. He dropped me off at
the Moderne with an agreement to meet for a late breakfast at the
Continental Hotel.

My room was pulsing with heat. I opened the window. The whine
of the race cars at the faraway track drifted in, along with the faint
glow of dawn in the east. As I lay there my mind fixed on the image
of Levegh's car's nose pointed into the air, then pancaking onto the
fence, followed by two sharp detonations and the burst of fire and flying metal. If anything, the crash resembled wartime newsreels of a
fighter plane crash. Thankfully, the smoke and the high earthen barrier that was supposed to protect the crowd had at least shielded me
from the awful carnage that ensued. I finally drifted off to sleep while
trying to compose the lead to my story, which I knew would have to
center on the greatest disaster in motor racing history.

Coltrin was at a table in the Continental dining room when I
arrived, unshaven and wearing the same rumpled shirt as the day
before. He was drinking champagne and reading several French and
English newspapers, along with the international edition of the Herald
Tribune. He handed me the front page of Le Monde and said, "It's all in
there. Just as bad as we thought it." The picture accompanying the story
showed the Mercedes tumbling over the fence toward the crowd, and a
second shot of a pile of dead and injured amid a jumble of upturned
chairs, scattered knapsacks and purses, and shredded clothing.

"The car itself never got into the crowd," he said. "The engine and
the front axle assembly tore loose. That's what did the killing. That
and the spilled fuel that caught fire. Most of the papers are saying
eighty were killed. Plus Levegh. But a few of 'em are claiming the
death toll is over one hundred. I doubt the frogs will ever tell us. A
friend of mine who works for Renault says official count will only
include French citizens. The rest will be ignored."