Speed & Suspense

In les vingt-quatre heures, the great 24-hour endurance test at Le Mans, France last week had everything that 250,000 paying spectators could have asked of an auto race: spectacular speed right from the start, heart-stopping suspense, and, almost inevitably, sudden death on the treacherous track.

Britain's Champion Stirling Moss whirled out of the pits and whirled into the lead with his dark green Aston Martin, hoping to con the whole team of Ferraris into giving chase. Last year this stunt made wrecks of the bright red Italian cars; they burned out before they really got into the race. This year California's Phil Hill and his co-driver, Belgium's Olivier Gendebein, played it smart: they kept their 3-liter Ferrari well back in the pack. And they saw the field thin rapidly as they nursed their car along. Last year's winning Jaguars, their engines cut down to meet the new 3-liter limit, began to fail after 15 minutes. Moss rattled to a stop within three hours. The course became an automobile boneyard.

There was worse to come. A series of heavy rainstorms drenched the dangerous track and dimmed visibility. Five crackups, one a three-way collision, followed in rapid succession. With good equipment and good driving, no one was seriously hurt. Then, roaring through pitch black night into the tricky stretch that leads to the corner called Tertre Rouge, French Driver Jean Mary (real name: Jean Brousselet) drove head on into a steep embankment. His Jaguar bounced back into the path of an onrushing Ferrari. Somehow the Ferrari driver, Los Angeles' Bruce Kessler, dived from his seat just before the explosive crash, and escaped death. But Jean Mary died in the wreck.

Through all the downpour, Hill and Gendebein and their Ferrari managed to stay out of trouble, and slowly they worked into the lead. At the end, none of the competition was really close. Hill finished the race after covering 2,549 miles in 24 hours at an average speed of 106.21 m.p.h. He had beaten the second-place Aston Martin by 100 miles. If the worst weather and the worst track conditions in the memory of Le Mans veterans had kept him from a speed record, Phil Hill had still set a record with which he was more than satisfied. He was the first American ever to win les vingt-quatre heures.

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