1958 24 Hours of Le Mans

It was a hot and sunny afternoon when the French tricolour fell at 4 pm. The first driver away was Moss in his Aston Martin – as lightning-quick off the line as usual – chased by his teammate Brooks and the Jaguars and Ferraris. Just 4½ minutes after his standing start, Moss came past at the end of the first lap with a quarter-mile, five-second, lead on Hawthorn, Brooks, von Trips, Gendebien and the Aston of Salvadori. The best Jaguar was tenth.[15] At the end of the second lap, Sanderson brought in one of the Ecosse Jaguars with a broken piston. Five laps later, his teammate Fairman arrived with the same terminal problem.[7] The rapid Allison/Hill 2-litre Lotus, so fast in practise, had also retired after only three laps with a blown head-gasket.[16]

Moss was very fast – extending his lead by 3 seconds a lap over the pursuing Ferraris. Hawthorn, leading the pack, tried his hardest – setting the fastest lap of the race at 4min 08sec. After the first hour, Moss was leading Hawthorn by 26 sec. Then came von Trips, Brooks, Gendebien and Hamilton in his Jaguar, with only the first three on the lead lap.[17] Behra's uprated Porsche was leading the 2-litre class, running in 11th ahead of bigger Ferraris, Jaguars and Listers and well ahead of the rest of their class. Meanwhile, the two OSCAs were leading the S-750 class as well as the Index of Performance. The Ecosse Jaguars were gone – the team blaming the ‘official’ fuel for burning out the pistons[11] though it was traced to defective valvegear operation.[7]

Such was Moss's pace, all the competitors with exception of the first three leaders, had been lapped at least once. In the next hour Moss extended his lead to 95 seconds. Hawthorn tried to keep up, but his car was now suffering from a slipping clutch, with von Trips and Brooks rapidly closing in on him.[17] Then at 6.10pm just a lap before the first pit-stops were due, Moss stopped at the Mulsanne corner with a broken conrod.[12] Hawthorn went to the pits for an extended stop and it was the other works Ferraris – Hill ahead of von Trips – who took up the lead positions, ahead of Brooks’ Aston Martin and Hamilton's Jaguar.

Soon after, the weather (which was to dominate the rest of the race) suddenly changed as an enormous storm swept across the circuit, flooding the track and reducing the visibility to nil.[10][9] The track was soon awash and a terrible series of accidents began: between 6.30 and 10pm, no less than a dozen cars were involved in crashes. In the 3rd hour Maurice Charles lost control of his Jaguar in the downpour at Maison Blanche and was taken to hospital after being hit by two other cars.[7] In the 5th hour as a second downpour started, Stuart Lewis-Evans tangled the second Aston Martin with a back-marker at Dunlop Curve doing terminal damage.

But the worst happened in the twilight just after 10pm when Jean-Marie Brussin (racing under the pseudonym “Mary”) lost control of his Jaguar going into the sweeping Dunlop curve after the pits, hitting the earth bank, rolling and ending up near the crest of the rise. Unsighted, the next car on the scene was Bruce Kessler’s NART Ferrari, running 5th, who smashed into the Jaguar and burst into flames. Kessler was fortunate to be thrown clear, receiving only heavy bruising and broken ribs, but Brussin was killed in the accident.[18][17][19] Duncan Hamilton, running second at the time, was next to the scene but was alerted by an anonymous spectator throwing his hat onto the track – an action that Hamilton later considered possibly saved his life - by giving him just enough time to lift off and avoid the wrecked cars.[20]

Hamilton was driving extremely well in the wet and soon after 10pm had his Jaguar up to second and within the hour had taken the lead after the next scheduled pit-stops. Phil Hill recalled the night-time driving: “The volume of rain was amazing but I discovered that if I sat on the tool roll to prop myself up – no, we didn’t use seatbelts – and then tilted my head back and looked just over the tip of the windshield and under the bottom of my visor, the view wasn’t too bad.” He also keenly listened out for the sound of downshifting gears from cars ahead to get an idea of the approaching Mulsanne corner at the end of the long straight.[21][22][23]

Indeed, around 11.40pm von Trips (in the second-placed Ferrari) came to the high-speed Mulsanne kink and saw wreckage across the track and a driver lying unconscious on the road. Jean Hébert had been thrown clear when he rolled his Alfa Romeo avoiding a crashed car, and which had then caught fire. Von Trips stopped, ran back and pulled the Frenchman clear, as well as the biggest of the wreckage. When marshals ran up from the nearest post, he got back into his car and carried on his race. Hébert was not seriously injured.[24][25]

Another major accident then occurred at the Dunlop curve just before midnight. American Jay Chamberlain crashed his Lotus also avoiding a spinning car. He was lucky to be picked off the track before François Picard, in the Equipe Los Amigos Ferrari, crashed into it and destroying both cars, although both Chamberlain and Picard only received minor injuries. At 12.15am Wolfgang Seidel slipped his Ferrari, running 3rd, off at Arnage. Although only suffering light damage, it was well and truly stuck in the thick mud. Seidel was later reprimanded for not making more of an effort to dig out the car.[23] Hill, having taken over from Gendebien, drove exceptionally through the rain to catch and pass Hamilton's co-driver Ivor Bueb to go back into the lead. By 2.30am he had established a solid lap-and-a-half advantage.[26]

Hawthorn and Collins finally retired at 2am – having driven back up to 9th after falling as low as 18th with their clutch problems. NART's last Ferrari running – the 2-litre 500 TR of Rodriguez / Behra - retired just before half-time with a holed radiator.[27] At this point, there were just 26 cars left running, just half the field. The weather was not improving. Hill/Gendebien were still leading with Hamilton/Bueb a lap adrift. Now in third, some five laps behind the leader was the Aston Martin of Brooks/Trintignant, still going strong. The S-2000 Behra/Herrmann Porsche (proving very stable in the rain) had moved up to 4th overtaking the Whitehead brothers’ Aston Martin. The Halford/Taylor Lister was 6th with the Barth/ Frère Porsche in 7th leading the S-1500 class. Meanwhile, in the Index of Performance, it was a very close race between the works cars of de Tomaso's OSCA and Laureau's DB[17][9]

Soon after 6am Trintignant, who had been running a solid 3rd through the night, was stopped by a broken gearbox.[12][28] It ground to a halt at Mulsanne corner, where Moss had parked the sister car almost exactly twelve hours earlier.

Bruce Halford's Lister-Jaguar was running in 7th when it struck engine problems. Losing half an hour replacing the camshaft it then stopped on the Mulsanne straight. Watched by a crowd, and discretely advised by his mechanic standing nearby, co-driver Brian Naylor spent over an hour repairing the gearbox on his own and bump-starting it again.[29]

Hamilton had been running a solid 2nd place all morning but it was another heavy thunderstorm around noon that led to his retirement. Coming into Arnage he was suddenly confronted with a stationary Panhard in the road. Taking avoiding action, he lost control and rolled the Jaguar which landed upside-down straddling a water-soaked ditch. Once again, he was lucky as two spectators were nearby, sheltering from the heavy rain, and could pull out the unconscious Hamilton before he drowned. He was taken to hospital with concussion, minor cuts and leg injuries.[20][9][4] Hamilton's accident had happened right in front of Hill and the Jaguar's demise left the Hill / Gendebien Ferrari with an enormous 10-lap lead over Whitehead's Aston Martin. The Porsche team had been having an outstanding race with the Behra / Herrmann 1.6L RSK up to 3rd despite, struggling with fading brakes. The 1.5L variant of Barth/Frère was a lap behind and the privateer Porsche of Carel de Beaufort in 5th.

By mid-afternoon the rain finally ceased, so it was rather ironic that the race ended in sunshine on a drying track. Hill crossed the finish line at 4pm, ending one of the wettest and most difficult 24 Heures du Mans in history. Second step on the podium went to the private-entry Aston Martin of the Whitehead brothers. Porsche completed its best Le Mans to date with a remarkable 3-4-5 result with the S-2000 and S-1500 class victories after so many of the bigger-engined cars failed.

The OSCA of de Tomaso/Davis won the S-750 class, finishing 11th overall, having been chased hard throughout the race by the DB-Panhard of Laureau/Cornet, eventually finishing only 2 laps ahead of them. Three DBs finished, however only a single representative from Lotus, Stanguellini and Monopole got to the finish line in this largest class. In contrast, both OSCAs finished and claimed a 1-2 success in the Index of Performance, giving both major trophies to Italian cars. Alejandro de Tomaso subsequently founded his own supercar company in the next year, with his racing wife, Coca-Cola heiress, Elizabeth Isabel Haskell.[30][31] The new Tojeiro-AC eventually finished 8th, and second in S-2000 (the only other classified finisher in the class) but 31 laps behind the Porsche. Throughout Sunday Stoop and Bolton had battled loose handling, traced to the differential mountings gradually falling apart and had driven very cautiously in the bad weather. It managed to exactly meet its Index requirements with a ratio of 1.0, whereas the other AC, finishing 2 laps behind just missed out being classified. The Lister made it to the finish but its delays had also cost it too much time to be classified.[32][33]

This was Ferrari's third win, and coincidentally, the 1954 second victory had also been a contest in the rain versus Duncan Hamilton's Jaguar. This time however none of the Jaguars or works Aston Martins finished. Despite the atrocious weather for most of the race, the race distance of winners Gendebien and Hill would still have given them fifth place in the previous year's race. For the fourth consecutive race, Hawthorn was the quickest driver over a single lap, but his best lap of 4’ 08 was well down on his 3’ 58.7 record of 1957.[10] Sadly, this was the last Le Mans for the Ferrari works drivers: both Musso and Collins were killed in Grand Prix later in the year and, after retiring as the 1958 F1 World Champion, Hawthorn would also be killed within the next year.[34][35] In a grim year it also saw the death of Peter Whitehead, killed in an accident when his half-brother was driving in the Tour de France Automobile.[12]