Word: levegh
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Drivers also complain of the race's free-for-all makeup, which mixes skilled professionals with rank amateurs, high-powered racers with little doodlebugs competing for class championships. And still lurking in the minds of all is the tragedy of 1955, when Pierre Levegh's Mercedes crashed into a wall, spewed wreckage into the crowd, killing 87 people...
Some of the reasons were plain. Ever since Mike drove in the 1955 Le Mans, where 83 were killed when a track mixup sent Pierre Levegh's Mercedes into the crowd, Grand Prix racing had not seemed quite the same. Last year came the fiery deaths of his Ferrari teammates, Italy's Luigi Musso and Britain's Peter Collins. At Musso's funeral, Mike grabbed Juan Fangio's hand and muttered: "We have to quit this." (Said Fangio: "That conversation finally decided me to retire...
...Levegh's Mercedes clipped into the rear of the Austin-Healey, sending the little car spinning like a top. The Mercedes rose as if jet-propelled, crashed into a 6-ft. dirt retaining wall...
...loose and scythed through spectators like a guillotine knife. The heavy engine followed, spewing parts. The first row of the crowd was cleanly decapitated. Twenty yards away, the chassis cut another swath. Gasoline took fire; then the Mercedes' magnesium-alloy body went up in a searing white flame. Levegh's headless corpse was burned to a crisp. A 400-sq. yd. stretch of gay and cheering people became a black, hysterical horror...
...roadside turned into a seething mass, the maimed trying to escape, the unhurt pressing forward to see more. It was five minutes before fire crews could get to Levegh's smoldering wreck, a good half hour before private cars, trucks and every ambulance in town started to work carting off casualties. Toll at week's end: 78 dead, 105 seriously injured...