TRAGIC DEATH

Hawera Star, Volume XLVI, 4 March 1927, Page 5

TRAGIC DEATH

ON RACING TRACK. PARRY THOMAS KILLED. WHILE GOING AT HIGH SPEED

ay GABLE—PRESS ASSOCIATION—COPYRIGHT. Received 10.20 a.m. .to-day. LONDON, March 3. Half an hour after Parry Thomas, the world’s foremost racing motorist, stepped unconcernedly into; his famous Babs, at Pendine Sands, against his doctor’s orders, owing to his suffering from influenza, in an endeavour to wrest the speed championship from Campbell, he was lying dead and the car, the product, of his own engineering genius, was a tangled mass of debris.

The disaster occurred on his fourth attempt. He had changed the plugs, had travelled one way and was about to enter for the official mile on his way bark. He had attained a speed of 170 miles per hour when the driving chain of the back wheel snapped, clipped the cogs and looked the wheels, and wrapped itself round them. The car skidded violently, and pieces of the mechanism were hurled hundred of yards. Then the machine somersaulted twice and again almost broadside on. A rear wheel bounded like a rocket towards the sea. The chain unwound, broke through the mudguard with staggering force,, and struck Thomas on the neck, tearing off the scalp from neck to forehead and virtually decapitating him. Death must have been instantaneous. The car came to a stop more than half a mile from the scene of the accident, turned on its side in a crumpled heap, and burst into flames. Pieces of the car body, portions of the mechanism and the windscreen were pounded into an inextricable tangle. Thomas was found lying entangled, and before he could be extricated his legs had to be broken. There was a heartrending scene when one of Thomas’s mechanics rushed towards the starting point crying like a child, and shouting. “Oh. my God! He is dead. Pany Thomas is dead!”