As a young drag racing fanatic (5 years old) I had a relative gift me a book about auto racing. There were two pages dedicated to this race and even then I knew how insane the whole thing was. Great research and even better presentation, two thumbs up!!!

Henry Ford quoted " auto racing started right after the second car was built!!..

Excellent, very much enjoyed, thank you..

Great presentation. 80mph??? in those cars???????

This is insane! Wow , what a mess! Those drivers were crazy guys!

80 mph with only inches to spare with feet of steering play im sure. Holy shit

Excellent discussion, fascinating to hear about it from a modern and American perspective. There are a few things I would view rather differently, the main one of which is the idea that this was a spectator event. These events were seen as tests for machines and sporting events for the drivers, with a view to presenting the results in the reporting and advertising media. The organisers, as you noted, did much to avoid spectators turning up - hence the 3.30am start- but were badly caught out. Remember also that the population of France in those days was a fraction of what it is today. The biggest result of the 1903 Paris-Madrid was the almost instant development of circuit racing, rather than open road racing, with a view to limiting crowd sizes and controlling spectators and their access to the track. The Gordon Bennett race a couple of months later was rapidly reorganised to conform to this new idea, albeit that the circuit still covered some 70miles of (public) road. It’s also worth remembering that the cars were largely devoid of engine control: engines were set at a constant speed, no accelerator, so slowing down was not as easy as it might have been. If you wanted to go fast your governor was set to maximum revs, making engine braking almost non-existent. Grab a lower gear and you’d over-rev, more than likely resulting in the destruction of the motor. Challenging..!

As always thank you!

We con not now imagine how this tragedy could not be anticipated from the perspective of 2021 trying to put ourselves into that series of events. I as a technician and understanding forces and inertia multiplied by speed and weight, as a starting point can see the start of a series of deadly eventualities. Then add the lack of information to the nearby crowds of spectators of what the safety risks of the machines, traction on curves, steering control, braking capabilities on soft surfaces, fire risks of uncontained burning fuel, tire and rim failures at speed, driver errors at high speed, spectators allowed very near and on the race course. A course as long as that over that much time would even now be impossible to secure completely. I think the authorities did what was best after the fact at that point in time. I see some similarities between that race and motorcycle board-track racing which was eventually banned because of its intrinsically unsafe style that could and often enough was deadly to the racers themselves. Even into the years before the mandate of the safety fuel-cell in 1965, race cars would catch fire in relatively minor collisions and result in driver fatality in an otherwise survivable injury. It did take a full human lifetime to bring the achievable level of safety into the automotive racing sport, but at the cost of many human lives. I am sixty-seven now and when I was a young boy I would watch the nightly news on TV and most every night there was a story of a plane crash where several hundred people would die, and I recall saying to my father that they just tell the deadly crash and just move on to the next story; which they don't do so coldly now as they did then. in conclusion I will say that safety in technology is an evolutionary process!

So crazy!

I believe that's where they body came from in the movie Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

Vitoria... Isn't that in Portugal?

Just sounds like a cammed ford flathead

Hit the nitrous guys......

@dukecraig2402

3 ай бұрын

Boom

until Le Mans 1955.