Pierre LEVEGH

The story

Born in 1905, Pierre Bouillin raced under the name Pierre Levegh — that of a racing uncle, Alfred Velghe, of which it is an anagram. He belonged to that generation of gentlemen drivers who made racing an expensive passion, run at their own cost and for honour, in a discipline that was not yet a salaried trade. He is remembered for the 1952 Le Mans 24 Hours: leading, alone at the wheel for twenty-three hours, he broke his engine an hour from the finish for having refused to hand over.

In 1955, at forty-nine, he drove for Mercedes. On 11 June, at twenty-eight minutes past six in the evening, the cars slowed in front of the grandstands: an Austin-Healey swerved, Levegh's Mercedes struck it and took off. The car came down on the earth bank at the edge of the track — the only thing then separating the public from the race — and broke apart: the engine, the bonnet and the front axle were thrown into the crowd at full speed.

The toll was eighty-three dead — Levegh and the spectators — and more than a hundred injured. It is the deadliest disaster in the history of motor sport, and it remains unequalled. The race was not stopped: the organisers feared that two hundred thousand spectators leaving at once would block the roads and keep the ambulances from moving. The choice has been argued over ever since, but it followed a logic of rescue and not of indifference.

The consequences went beyond sport. Mercedes withdrew from competition for thirty years. Switzerland banned motor racing on its territory — a ban that would last into the twenty-first century. Circuits the world over reconsidered the separation between track and public: protecting the spectators, until then left to the good sense of organisers, became a constraint of design.