LURE OF SPEED

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXV, 17 July 1930, Page 13

LURE OF SPEED

EXPERT’S VIEWS ON ACCIDENTS. “Throughout the ages, throughout the whole scale of animated life, speed has always been a dominant factor, wrote Sir Henry Segrave, who lost ms life on Friday, 13th. June, in a sensational accident, while making a world record in the speed boat Miss England 11. on Lake Windermere. As reported in our cable messages describing the accident, the boat, after travelling twice over the course on the lake, the first time at a speed of 96.41 miles an hour, and the second time at 101.11 miles an hour, seemed to skid when travelling over the course the third time, when the speed had reached 119.8 miles an hour. It rose into the air with a loud explosion, turned over, and falling back into the water, same below the surface. It rose again, bottom upwards, with a large hole in the hull. After floating for a few minutes it sank to the bottom of the lake, which at that spot is 190 ft. deep. Before it sank, Sir Henry Segrave was rescued, but he died a few hours later in hospital, having received very severe injuries. Both his arms and two ribs were broken. His mechanic, Mr Willcocks, had a thigh broken. The only other occupant of the boat was Mr P. V. Halliwell, an engineer •employed by the Rolls-Royce Co., who supplied the engines in Miss England 11. Mr Halliwell’s dead body was recovered from the water a few days &fter the accident. Sir Henry Segrave’s views on speed are expressed in his book, “The Lure of Speed," published in 1928. At that time he had had eight years’ experience as a racing motorist, and had won many prizes and broken many records in racing cars, but it was not until March, 1929, that he broke all previous records for speed *on land over the course at Daytona Beach, Florida, when his racing car, Golden Arrow, recorded a speed of 231.36 miles an hour. As a racing motorist, he had seen many accidents, and had witnessed the death of some of his comrades, but his nerve remained unshaken, and his love of speed eventually lured him to his death.

Writing in his book about accidents in motor racing, he said: “Comparatively few big races are run without an accident. In the past it was usually the mechanic who was killed. It is difficult to explain just why this was so—perhaps because he was almost invariably the one who was thrown clear, and if the car was travelling fast, the force with which he hit the ground was in itself enough to kill him outright. The driver is luckier—he has his steering wheel to grip, which helps to hold him in position, and if he can only succeed in keeping his head when he realises that a crash is inevitable and stay in the car instead of making a wild endeavour to throw himself clear, he will, in nine cases out of ten, escape with a shaking. .Modern racing cars are very strongly made, and in all the many crashes I have seen the cockpit of the car has seldom been damaged, and the shell of the body has not been crushed.

“It is a curious thing that as a rule only the very fast and the very slow crashes have proved fatal—those happening at speeds of from 40 to 100 miles an hour have resulted in severe shakings for both the occupants. . . . Accidents usually happen either at the beginning of a race, or else just before the finish. The reason is that at the start of a race everyone is keyed up to a high state of nervous tension, and the read appears quite different from what it did in practice, because of the tens of thousands of spectators who assemble at the corners, completely hiding the landmarks picked out by the drivers in practice to warn them of the approach of each corner.

In his eagerness to obtain the lead and the first past the grand stands on the first lap, a driver may take a corner too fast—a wild application of brakes, too late to be of any use—a frantic effort to correct on the steering, a skid, and the car overturns. Towards the end of the race, when all the senses are dulled by hours of speed, with nerves at breaking point, there comes that momentary lapse when the mind ceases to function in unison with the hands and feet, the accelerator pedal is left depressed three-fifths of a second too long—and the result is the same.

“Immediately the accident happens, wild rumours circulate about the cause. Scores of eye-witnesses appear from everywhere, each with his or her different story, and so it grows till eventually the truth becomes so distorted that the bare facts are submerged in a sea of conjecture and criticism. It is almost impossible to say definitely what caused a bad accident, owing to the speed at which it happens. The onlooker’s mind is not prepared for it, and it has happened before he has had time to realise it. Take, for instance, the accident in the 1926 Grand Prix at Montlhery, which resulted in the death of the Italian driver, Ascari. About five different versions of this appeared in the newspapers at the time, and eyewitnesses galore turned up in the hopes of centring interest on themselves and taking a momentary stroll into the limelight. Personally, I disagreed with every published version of this accident, because I had my own theory, springing from a knowledge of the man Ascari, his temperament, his car, the corner where it happened, and the circumstances leading up to the moment when he turned over. He started with the number 8 on his car, and almost immediately obtained the lead, which he retained till his fatal crash. He was driving excessively fast. There was a curve on the Montlhery circuit which could be just taken at 120 miles per hour, and Ascari had been negotiating it at this speed for some time. Suddenly it began to rain. I Ascari arrived at the corner at the I same speed, and, of course, found that on the wet surface there was no hope of him getting round. The car simply turned sideways and went straight on, crashing into the protective palisading at about 110 miles per hour. It then turned over and over, bouncing along the ditch at the side of the road, finally cpming to rest uoside down nearly 30ft yards from where it left the road. Ascari, terribly injured, died on the way to the hospital."

“On the other hand, when Biaggio Nazzaro was killed in the Grand Prix in 1922, it was due to a breakage in the car, and could not have been avoided. He had only ten miles, or thereabouts, left to go, when suddenly, as he was travelling “all out” down the fastest section of the circuit, either his front or his back axle—no one ever found out which—snapped clean in half. The car hurtled end over end along the middle of the road, with a horrible crunching noise, eventually finishing up at the foot of a tree, a tangled mass of twisted metal. The driver was killed, but the mechanic escaped with superficial injuries. “Apart from error of judgment and mechanical failure, I should say without hesitation that another palpable cause of accidents is variation in the road surface. No matter if it is a wet or a fine day, there are few road circuits of which I have any knowledge where the surface is practically the same throughout. It will be macadam here, tarmae there, bits of pave further on. When all these are dry it may be easy enough to get a tyre hold. But with varying degrees of wetness they have also varying degrees of

slippiness. A corner, for example that, on the seventh lap, although dampened by rain, gave a splendid tyre hold, may be like butter on the eighth lap ten minutes later. Then again there are bumps. Sometimes although they may be comparatively small, they nearly upset the stability of a car, and especially they have a tendency to start a skid, particularly on turning. Quite minor bumps will Jif a racing car’s front wheels clean off the road, and it is always on the cards that whilst the front wheels are in the air, the driver, whether he knows it or not, will slightly turn them. When they come down again a violent sideways force is applied to the front of the car, and if the wheels have not a good grip on the road, this may be an extremely difficult thing to check."