The Le Mans Disaster: A Technical Appendix to Postblogging Technology, May 1955

This is a snip: Source is https://www.mike-hawthorn.org.uk/lemans2.html
Discussion below.

There is something to be said, once again, for the idea that there is no historical era a person knows less about than that of the decade before their birth. Searching around after I personally heard of the Le Mans Disaster of 11 June 1955 for the first time last Sunday morning, I discovered that I was the last guy to the party. In fact, I proved to be so ignorant of the biggest story in the history of motor racing that I am too embarrassed to post the first draft of this paragraph, written in a distracted frame of mind based on some half-assed idea of what should have happened. 

One thing that holds from that draft, which, I reiterate, you will never see because it was so dumb, is that it continues a theme from these posts, which is that people were pretty reckless back in 1955.  This week's post could just have easily have been about the Salk vaccine contamination disaster, which still has me shaking my head as the contemporary press brings me further abreast of it. (The modern view, such as it is, being very much of the "Look forward, never back" variety.) On the other hand, there's a lot of America bashing around, here so a bit of a palate cleanser in the form of a look at an all-European fiasco is welcome! Even if I somehow get back to the America-bashing at the end. Sheesh. 

What the heck, though, it's been a week, and I dearly hope that anyone reading this in  a year's time has no idea what I'm talking about. 

The 11 June isn't terribly interesting in its outline. One car was pulling in for a pit stop, another car manoeuvred to avoid it. A third car, overtaking at high speed, collided with the second car, which happened to be the Mercedes 300SLR that was the subject of an article in The Engineer this month, overrode it, was launched into the spectator area over an inadequate protective system. Many of the victims were killed by flying debris, and more by the resulting fire, exacerbated by the firefighting team's inability to deal with the burning "Elektron" car frame. In the sources I have been using, this is framed in terms of inexperience, but fighting exotic metal fires requires special equipment. Elektron is actually the proprietary name for a family of magnesium alloys, but all are at least 90% magnesium, and burning magnesium strip is a high school chemistry coup de theatre for a reason. We've already visited the growing chemical firefighting industry that was developing alongside exotic aerospace alloys in 1955. These alloys are, and were, much more sparingly used in automotives, and it might be wondered whether it was reasonable to ask the Le Mans team to prepare for fighting magnesium fires. 

As for the accident itself, Le Mans was an outmoded track, and accidents happen in motor sports. The discussion after the fact focussed on which of the two British drivers involved (the Mercedes driver, Pierre Levegh was killed instantly) was more at fault, if either were. One of them, Mike Hawthorn, died in an apparent road racing accident in 1959. The other, Lance(!) Macklin, an Eton graduate and the son of the founder of Fairmile Marine, lived fairly prosperously until 2002 and had three children by two marriages, but seems to have felt the need to defend his reputation against the accusations of, perhaps, his own conscience, which might be why the website linked to above is named for Mike Hawthorn. Or not! I'm not really plugged in to the discussion within the motor sport community, which is, I imagine, can get pretty heated.

So if people arguing about who caused an accident, and the discussion of exotic metal fires behind us, what do I want to technically appendix about? Not the engine, which  fascinates The Engineer, but something that wasn't there, an alleged "explosive additive" that Mercedes was supposed to have been using to dope the engine, and which then caused the out-of-control fire. A conspiracy theory, in other words, but one worth exploring because it goes to a debate that was very much current at the time, over the future of jet fuel. 

Jet fuel is pretty boring, too. It is made by mixing kerosene with enough gasoline to make it economical and viscous/volatile at low temperatures. JT4 was the NATO military standard well past the Moon landing, and Jet A/A-1 are the longterm commercial standards. The subject is in the news in 1955 mainly because the USAF was pushing  JP-3, which was not a Jurassic Park movie, thanks very much, Google. These fuels all have essentially the same density and combustion temperature, just like the various grades of gasoline all have the same energy density. There was a lot of talk of "doping" racing gasoline blends before WWII, but to the extent that this actually worked it boosted octane ratings, allowing the engine to be adjusted to deliver a higher compression rating. It's hard to exhaust all the reasons that adding an "explosive mixture" is a particularly counter-productive and stupid thing to do to your internal combustion and, obviously, jet turbine. (The legendary JP-7 specification for the SR-71 improves operational efficiency by being a good coolant.) 

So what was the deal with the JP-3? The sources are pretty murky, as well they should be since they are arguing for an intrinsically unsafe fuel, but at this point I am going to share a third-hand anecdote that I could probably source through Hansard's if I could be bothered, in which Lord Brabazon of Tara proposed a duel with a debate adversary in the Lords in which they both stood in a pool of the aviation fuel of their choice and dropped a match. John Moore-Brabazon isn't everyone's first choice of an airminded hero of the age, what with being a Tory peer, an appeaser if not an outright British fascist, and the inventor of a dogwhistling peerage title. But on "safety fuels" he was sound at a time when the JP-3 steamroller might have triumphed. (Although again to be fair part of the difference between American JT-3 and British JT-4 was the specification of the kerosene/paraffin that went into it.)  

(I was going to paste in the Parliamentary portrait but apparently he "introduced" the golf cart to Britain, and this is just objectively better than staring at Brabazon's mug.)

So why JT-3? Because it can be  made in dodgy old refineries, so it is more "economical," even if you have to admit that horrifying tarmac fires killing all the passengers trapped in the fuselage of an airliner that might have suffered  nothing worse than a forced landing are a bad thing in the abstract. Wikipedia quotes John D. Clark as saying that the specification was "'remarkably liberal, with a wide cut (range of distillation temperatures) and with such permissive limits on olefins and aromatics that any refinery above the level of a Kentucky moonshine

Stanilow Refinery
By Andrew Jones, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.
wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8551037

r's pot still could convert at least half of any crude to jet fuel,'" which is intended as a joke, but gets at the USAF's intent, which was to open the fuel business to Kentucky moonshiners. (The lost link explains moonshiners, not the aging American refinery infrastructure of circa 1951.) 

It's more good old USAF industrial capture, in other words. We could, of course, argue that picky European standards favoured the ultra-modern, over-capitalised (it might then seem) new refineries that represented the new postwar departure of domestic refining in the postwar petrochemical industry. (A proper reward to Iranian whiners complaining about how they were treated unlike expats in Abidjan, instead of being satisfied with brown people jobs and homes.) 

So that's the story I wanted to wander around. Of course, Stanilow Refinery gets exactly zero space in The Engineer as a possible source of high power motor racing go juice, and a lot of column space devoted to its production of plastics manufacture feedstuffs, so when we come back around to the new British refineries, it will be because I've found something to say about that. For now, that's what I take away from the Le Mans disaster, yet another historical episode that has sunk away into obscurity, except for motor sports enthusiasts. 

 

(Speaking of moonshiner-level refineries, where the heck did George Miller get the inspiration for this? Are there tiny old bespoke refineries sitting on top of equally tiny little oilfields in the Australian Outback? Anyone?)