After his drive at the Nurburgring in Germany, Tom Mooney continues his tour of famous European racing circuits from the 1950’s, and reports from Le Mans. The smallish town of Le Mans, to the racing enthusiast, whether you live in Azerbaijan or Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, is not unlike the siren call of Mecca to a Muslim waiter brought up in the Bronx.
You are obligated to go there at least once in a lifetime. And, to your surprise, you might find, outside the actual circuit, once is more than enough. For unlike the grand dame circuits of Monaco and the Nurburgring, where there is palpable bustle within and beyond the tracks, Le Mans the town has little to recommend it.
My abiding memory of le centre ville will be a clique of banks and pharmacies edging a humongous roundabout, with little to indicate that, on the edge of town, is one of the great racing circuits of all time.
Even the sat nav was bored: recalculate, take your next left, and keep going. ‘When you’re racing, it’s life,’ quips Steve McQueen’s character in the film Le Mans. ‘Anything that happens before or after, is just waiting.’
‘Just waiting,’ sums up Le Mans out of season.
The indifference of locals might be either fatigue or a hangover from an incident barely mentioned in the otherwise excellent museum devoted to 24 Heures du Mans.
Search as I did, high and low and in between the cracks, I couldn’t find a reference to a few seconds of mayhem, with a life time of consequences, in 1955 when a flying fireball on four wheels eviscerated and decapitated 82 souls in a stand opposite the grid.
As blood was being hosed away, and the dead and over a hundred wounded were ferried either to makeshift morgues or hospital, the race continued. To gild the infamy, a manufacturer with a not inconsiderable part in the tragedy, Jaguar, won a day later.
A feature of safety in motor racing, in a history as chequered as the victor’s flag, is that the more things change, the more they stay the same: a week after I drove the public section of the circuit, the annual 24 Heures du Mans was revisited by another death: as in 1955, the show must go on, and it did.
Both Le Mans, 90 years old, and Aston Martin, a century, could be forgiven for thinking that 2013 was going to be their year, but Allan Simonsen’s fatal collision in an Aston Martin Vantage GTE after just four laps, the first in sixteen years, put the kibosh on their celebrations.
Looking on as a door and tyre were torn from Simonsen’s car by the impact, was his partner, Carina, mother of their less then one year old daughter.
Yellow flags were unfurled, cars slowed, the flow of champagne stymied in the Aston Martin hospitality tent but as Saturday turned into Sunday, and day turned into night and back again, drivers sped by the corner of Tetre Rouge, where Simonsen’s life came to an abrupt and violent end, though not as bloody as Ferrari’s Jean Lariviere in 1952, decapitated at the same spot by a wire fence.
Le Mans is, of course, the world’s toughest and fastest race. The modern driver faces eight hours of pitch black driving with zero light and invisible exit kerbs, whilst, when the sun finally rises, keeping focused on apexes, gravel, rubber, slip-streaming battles, shorter braking distances, rain, oil, cars facing the wrong way, maximum velocity on the ligne droite des Hunaudieres, aching arms and legs, temperatures, decelerating from 180 to 60 mph quicker than Skippy the bush kangaroo, tyre wear, on board computer systems and a relentless flow of information from a mechanic sitting on his ass in the team garage, munching a cheese dribbling baguette and tapping a computer like Liberace. And that’s just one of 320 laps and 3,200 miles.
Did I mention the thirst?
Back in the 1950s, drivers would tackle the 24 hours slog for ten hours without a rest. It is not and has never been a fair weather track.
If it wasn’t so serious it might just be amusing, but you should view footage on You Tube of Mike Hawthorn testing his Jaguar Type D at over 100 mph on the public section of Le Mans, against an oncoming convoy of cyclists, cars, pedestrians and tractors.
And this a year after the 1955 tragedy, partially caused when Hawthorn braked suddenly and Pierre Levagh’s Mercedes took off over the rear of an Austin Healey and into a bank.
The car exploded, catapulting the engine and bonnet in a scything arc through men, women and children, pressed 30 deep and separated from the track by a wooden fence that wouldn’t keep out a hedgehog. Hawthorn cried when he surveyed Levagh’s body smoking like burnt toast, over which his freshly widowed wife wept, but he quickly recovered to drive like a man possessed, and win the race.
The absence of a joie de vivre therefore outside the Le Mans circuit is perhaps understandable, but levity is restored once your throttle earns its keep and you set off into the soft May sun. A long, ruler straight, section of the circuit, from near where Simonsen met his end, to the Virage Porsche, named in honour of the marque with the most 24 hours victories (16), is a public road and subjected to regular speed limits, but you can push your car when nobody’s about and hold a line without missing a beat.
The circuit doesn’t engender the primal fear of the Nurburgring, with which you are never less than wary, but press the throttle, feed the engine, get it hoarse until it begins to drown the soubrettish murmur of the French countryside, and you are sucking at the teat of Nirvana nectar.
Le Mans is, of course, much more than 24 hour pressure cooker once a year in June, and with 750,000 passing through its stiles annually for ten meetings, it is the most frequented circuit on the planet. The Bugatti Circuit was finished in 1965 but incorporates Le Mans landmarks, old and not so old, such as the Dunlop footbridge and the Virage du Garage Vert, 800 metres of 250 km living on the edge.
More formidable on race day in the dark is the Circuit De La Sarthe, shaped like a Sherman tank, where speeds between 319-335 km are reached at Boss de Mulsanne and Ligne droite d’indianapolis, and a series of bends and chicanes are bookended by Tetre Rouge and Virage d’Arnage.
Watching Le Mans diminish in my mirror, I couldn’t help but reflect on the principal cause of the crash in 1955: the technological advances of racing cars had finally outstripped the capabilities of the circuit, but track owners were slow to adapt. Wolfgang von Trips’ airborne Ferrari killed himself and 16 spectators at Monza in 1961. Today it is an even contest. Le Mans is a circuit continuously in flux, eight different lengths between eight and ten miles since 1923, but its very adaptability will ensure its survival.
