History Mike hawthorn Jaguar Le Mans 1956.

[rayke1938]

Turn on your speakers and you can hear the sound of the Jag engine and hear Mike Hawthorn's commentary.

An interesting bit of old film from 1956 showing this bloke having a practice run around Le Mans in 1956 with pushbikes and other traffic sharing the race car track. Amazing! The race has been run annually since 1923 and is a 24 hour endurance race.

An amazing piece of footage of Mike Hawthorn doing a lap of Le Mans in 1956

in a D Type Jaguar. It's incredible to see the bikes and traffic out on the

track, and an almost total lack of safety, bearing in mind the previous year a

Mercedes flew off the track on pit straight and killed 84 people, seriously

injuring a further 120. The accident was inadvertently caused by Hawthorn as he

braked to go into the pits, his Dunlop disc brakes were awesome, and other cars

braking hard to avoid running into the back of his Jaguar lost control resulting

in a Mercedes hitting a sloped earth bank, launching into the air and

disintegrating.

Incredibly the race continued, although Mercedes withdrew it's remaining

cars, and Hawthorn went on to win.

Was this the first on-board camera?

https://vimeo.com/59410466#at=0