histoire, tirée de wikipedia:
However, Mark Webber's #4 became airborne at the Indianapolis corner during Thursday night qualifying session. The car was rebuilt from scratch on Friday, modified for more downforce at the front, and entered in the Saturday morning warm-up. This time, Mark Webber only made it to the Mulsanne kink when the car back-flipped in a spectacular way, this time caught in mid-air on photos. Luckily, neither Webber nor others were injured on either occasion.
Despite the second incident and the awareness of the 1955 Mercedes Le Mans diaster Norbert Haug decided to go ahead and enter the other two cars in the afternoon, with additional modifications and instructions to the drivers not to follow others cars closely over humps.
Despite this, after over 4 hours, driven at the time by Peter Dumbreck, the #5 CLR chased a Toyota GT-One and became airborne at Indianapolis, somersaulting and landing over the barriers into the trees, all on world-wide live TV coverage. The crowd on the Le Mans grandstands was mortified, seeing the pictures without hearing any comment for a long time. Luckly it turn out later that nobody was injured. At that time, the race was under yellow flags, and the remaining #6 car driven by Bernd Schneider had already been retired.
The flying Mercedes at Le Mans brought the almost immediate cancellation of the CLR project and the planned participation in the Norisring and the ALMS series. The surviving #6 car was never raced again nor shown at the Mercedes-Benz Museum, but sold to a private collector.
pour ce qui est de ce qui s'est passé en 1955:
In 1955, Pierre Levegh was invited to drive a Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR after his excellent previous efforts. He was chasing Mike Hawthorn, when Hawthorn's Jaguar passed the slower Austin-Healey of Lance Macklin before suddenly braking and pulling over to the right to enter the pits. This forced the Austin-Healey to move over to the left, into the path of the faster Mercedes of Levegh and Juan Manuel Fangio which were approaching at high speed. Levegh could not do anything, his car ran into the sloped back of the Austin-Healey, was catapulted into the air, and crashed on top of an earth bank designed to protect the crowd. The engine and others parts disintegrated from the chassis and flew into the crowd. The driver and 80 spectators were killed, many others injured. Large portions of the car were made of magnesium, which when ignited burns very intensely, and can be accelerated with the use of water in an attempt to extinguish the flame. Fangio, driving behind Levegh, could narrowly escape. The race was continued, officially to prevent departing spectators from crowding the roads, which would have slowed down ambulances. During the night, by order from Stuttgart, the remaining Mercedes cars (driven by Fangio, Stirling Moss and others) were withdrawn from the race as a sign of respect to the victims. At the end of the 1955 season, Mercedes would retire from racing as planned before. Mike Hawthorn and the Jaguar team continued and won the race, despite refusing to take any responsibility for the crash, were later cleared of any wrongdoings.
In the shock following this disaster, many major and minor races were cancelled in 1955, like the Grand Prix races in Germany and Switzerland - the latter country banned circuit automobile racing, a ban which still remains in effect today.
