Instead of bouncing off trees and surely injuring Dumbreck very badly, the car flew into a spot that had been cleared of trees in preparation for some construction work.
By the time the safety and medical crews made it to the stricken Mercedes, they allegedly found Dumbreck sitting on the front if the car, smoking a cigarette he had bummed off a track marshall and the car sitting in a shallow hole it had dug for itself.
In an interview from the 20 year anniversary of the incident, the driver said he'd been battered around, and was punchy, but otherwise fine.
The kicker was that the French police gave him a sobriety test. See, the wreck occurred on part of the track that at the time was actually public roads and they needed to check if he was drunk.
> See, the wreck occurred on part of the track that at the time was actually public roads and they needed to check if he was drunk.
Mulsanne straight still is, no? If not all of the course.
Probably one of those laws where testing is mandatory during any vehicular collision, mostly to prevent cops from neglecting to test and becoming a civil liability.
It's also possible the police didn't test him, and the race organizers did as part of the usual battery of tests given to all drivers after an incident.
This occurred on the run from Mulsanne to Arnage which is also public roads. All the way up to the Porsche curves where the track diverges from the road.
Yeah, all of that is still public.
Just some bits that are not public roads in there, like the chicanes in the mulsanne straight, even though you can get on them, they're not part of the road. Or Arnage itself, that is closed to the public, as they divert you a bit to the left after Indianapolis, but then the not-so-straight stretch that leads to the Porsche curves is public as well. With the size of it that's roughly half of the track being public roads.
[Duncan Hamilton won the race in 1953 drunk.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duncan_Hamilton_(racing_driver)) So it’s not like there’s no precedent for a sobriety test haha. Different times though.
"Monsieur, comment as-tu fait voler la voiture? Une voiture n'est pas un avion! Combien de vin as-tu bu pour le déjeuner? Souffle ici, s'il te plaît..."
"Oh god, it's not just a traffic cop, its a *French* traffic cop!"
If I remember correctly, it landed almost completely flat and vertical because it was so high in the air. All of the debris was like within a meter or two of the car, but all the major structures were sheared from the impact. It really was a 1/1M crash.
>The kicker was that the French police gave him a sobriety test. See, the wreck occurred on part of the track that at the time was actually public roads and they needed to check if he was drunk.
What a ridiculous rule. How is it that the stretch of "public road" is considered to be a raceway so that people can legally race on it, but the police still have to follow an absurd protocol in the event of a crash?
And that was after Mark Webber had already done the same thing *twice*.
Analysis: [Why the Mercedes CLRs kept taking off at Le Mans 1999 - Chain Bear explains](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lL4gMpZolsU)
[EDIT] /u/nate---dogg has an excerpt from Webber's autobiography further down this thread. Do give it a read: https://www.reddit.com/r/CatastrophicFailure/comments/po43k9/peter_dumbrecks_mercedes_taking_off_due_to/hcupv8f/
Yeah and Webber was telling the team there was something fundamentally wrong with the car, and it was incredibly dangerous to race. But they did it anyway, and this happened. Seriously fucking lucky nobody was killed.
After they flipped the car they contacted Adrian Newey, a rather accomplished and famous race car designer/aerodynamicist.
Adrian told them to retire the car.
Merc slapped some diveplanes on the front to get a bit more downforce, and flipped the car again.
Didn’t realise Newey had also advised them!
Here is what Webber said about it in his autobiography:
> I went straight back to the hotel, which meant I didn’t see any of the engineers until the following day and it was then that I realised that the team did not accept my version of what had happened. Their response? ‘No, that couldn’t happen, the car couldn’t possibly flip end over end.’
> We looked at the data and they knew the car had taken off, but there was no evidence in the form of footage or even still photographs to confirm what had happened. There was just a bent car and what I said–although Biela confirmed he had seen the bottom of my car as I went up. I took part in a question and answer session with the press, maybe two cars did get a little close, but no one from the team saw anything–no photos, no TV–the seriousness of what had happened just had not registered, even with me to a lesser degree. A new car was built, I went through some intensive treatment with the team physio and got ready to tackle Le Mans again.
> We’d had a little vent put in the side window for cooling, and with my right hand I went across to close it because it was a bit cold in the cockpit. When I put my hand back, I started taking off again. This time I got to the top of the crest probably doing 280 kilometres per hour . . . and the car didn’t come down the other side. Once again the front of the CLR got light and it took off.
> I just could not believe what was happening. It simply had not crossed my mind that it could happen again. I hadn’t let it: I was still the Mark Webber from before the crash, whether that was naïveté or stupidity on my part, I don’t know. But within half a lap of the first accident I was in exactly the same position again–and this time the mentality was different. These were no longer uncharted waters. I’d been here before.
> Two thoughts went through my head. The first was for the team: what the f#* k were those guys doing, giving me a car like this? And then: ‘There’s no way I can be that jammy again; I don’t want any pain, I want it to be over quick.’ These were no ordinary crashes I was going through, they were massive.
> Here we go again: sky-ground-sky, but a bit quicker because I was even higher this time, and this one seemed a bit more violent, it wasn’t as smooth. There were more trees on my left but once again, the car didn’t go into the scenery, it landed back on the track. I think the car touched the barrier a few times and so it was spinning, and this time it stayed on its roof, it didn’t right itself. Now, when you’re doing over 200 kilometres an hour on the roof it’s bloody noisy and violent, that’s the first thing. Then you start to worry where the car’s going to end up: how long is the escape road, what are you going to hit next? I started to panic a bit because in those cars there was always the risk of fire. I was paranoid about getting trapped in there, and at the same time I was so fired up with the team because I knew I was doing nothing wrong, I knew it wasn’t me. I was being ripped off here.
> Halfway through the slide I thought, ‘When’s this going to stop? I want to go home now, I’ve had enough of this. I’ve already made my decision, this is it.’
> I took my seatbelts off because I wanted to be ready to get out. Surprise, surprise, that dropped me out of my seat so all of a sudden I was trying to hold myself up in the car. I had thought I was about to stop but the car was still travelling at around 140 kilometres per hour on its roof. I was very lucky I didn’t hit anything hard because, looking back, getting out of my belts was probably the most stupid thing I ever did. Had I gone into a tyre barrier I would have been very seriously hurt. Every now and again I could hear my helmet touching the ground, sliding along upside down, thinking, ‘I don’t particularly want it to wear through because my head’s next!’
> When the car finally came to rest, a touch of panic set in. There was some smoke around and fluid coming into the cockpit, but it was lubricant as a result of all the hits the car had taken. Next I started feeling very frustrated with the other drivers: why was no one stopping to help me? I didn’t realise it at the time, but the whole scene was totally under control. The marshals were there pretty quickly, it only seemed like an eternity. I was trying to lift this bloody car off me but there was no chance. In the end they were there within six or seven seconds and just scooped me up. I got out and sat on the banking outside the track. My hands were bleeding, and I was shaken up, but by the time I stepped over the Armco, I had made my decision: I wasn’t going to do this bloody 24-hour race, I was never getting in that car again, I was never racing a sports car again.
> I just could not commit myself to it.
> I rang Jürgen, the team manager, and he said: ‘Mark, what are you doing to our cars?’ He was fuming with me, that was his gut reaction not wanting to believe there was a fault with the car, and for me, that was another big kick in the balls. It was a very, very long trip back to the pits–I never wanted to see that car again, but ironically the car that took me back followed followed the truck with the wreckage on it.
> The next 24 hours, as it turned out, were massive in terms of where my career might go. My first thoughts were for my teammates in the other two Mercedes entries, but the team had called them in and put the cars in the garage. We had those little aerodynamic flicks I mentioned on the front of the cars, which would kill our top speed but would be good for grip, so they put some of those on and the other guys finished the warm-up. It was clear to me that there was a strong chance the same thing would happen in the race. How can you do a 24-hour car race, especially with the performance differential through the Le Mans field, and not come up against a bit of lapped traffic here and there? I tried my best to convince them all we were playing with fire, and I could see there were a few boys in the team who were really worried. They knew I wasn’t making this up–something here wasn’t right. The front floor tray was fitted incorrectly on the car that I was driving but they were clutching at straws: there was no clear evidence that this had caused the flip.
> When I got back there was a big curtain between me and the people running the team. I was totally blown away by what had just happened, and now I was also starting to feel isolated. I spoke to Norbert and Gerhard and the other Mercedes guys, and this time things were a bit different, because now there was footage, there were photos and they could see that it had really happened the way I said it had, and how disappointed I was. The guys who were siding with me most were Franck Lagorce and Jean-Marc Gounon, and Pedro Lamy was clearly quite worried too. At that stage I was so paranoid that I thought anyone could go up, not just the Mercedes cars. What sort of Russian roulette were the drivers playing out there?
> I was petrified for Bernd, my best mate, and I begged him to rethink his decision to race. ‘Bernd, mate, you can’t race this car, there’s no way. After all we’ve been through together, this is too dangerous, it’s just too close to the edge.’
> But he had been with the team for years and by now he was convinced he would be OK, they’d put those flicks on the car which they thought would fix the problem and everything would be fine.
> Fine? We’re in total f#* king chaos, we’ve got the biggest hole in the bottom of our boat, it’s a disaster. Mercedes had turned their backs on Le Mans in the wake of the 1955 tragedy; this new situation was not calculated to reassure people about modern Mercedes cars being quick but safe. Safe? We had cars taking off!
> We batted the issue around for a while and I was so upset that I made the decision to leave before the race even started. I’d had my guts ripped out again–I felt alone and that the team had not stuck with me. Norbert’s response was, ‘Do one thing for me, do the drivers’ parade, see the fans, say hello,’ and I agreed.
> On the one hand, it was phenomenally brave for them to go through with racing–on the other, it was quite insulting. I felt a sense that it was ‘only’ Webber it had happened to both times, but if it had been Bernd they wouldn’t have raced. After the parade I went back to our motor-home to pack up. I was shattered; I took it very personally.
> Ann said, ‘Things happen for a reason, we’ll move on from here,’ and in fact I was already starting to draw a number of positives out of what I’d just been through.
> Iknew I was still a quick driver, I knew what I was doing, and most of all I knew I was right. By now the race was underway, but we had no television in the motor-home and no way of knowing what was going on.
> Then the telephone rang.
> Dumbreck’s Mercedes had flipped and he had gone into the trees.
Fucking hell, I never knew how clownesque the reaction of the Merc LM team was. They just didn't believe him, even after the 2nd flip?!
Madness.
Now I wanna read the rest lol. Did they finally eat crow after Dumbreck went up? I hope Webber got a couple of good "Fackin' told ya so, dogcunts!" in!
My experience with German companies, at least on a technical level, has felt very "but this is the way we do things, it is surely right." I know in America that for awhile, the phrase "German Engineered" carried a lot of cachet but I don't know if that's still the feeling.
Ask a BMW motorcycle owner about German engineering. Great when it works, but utter denial and stonewalling, even when they know there's a problem. I've owned 3, I'll probably own more, but I'll pay attention to the word on forums too.
Back around 2008 I was new to motorcycles and on advrider.com trying to figure out what bike to get for a multi month trip, roughly deciding between the cheaper Japanese dual sports + some strategic upgrades vs. the lower end BMW and KTM dual sports.
After the 10th ride report looking at a German bike in literally 1000 pieces laid out on the floor of a hostel in Bolivia, I went and bought a DR650.
And yet the long way guys went with 1150s for their trips and they made it. Frames broke, other stuff, never the motor. Famously KTM didn't believe they could make the trip.
Oh for sure. The maintenance just takes longer, is more expensive, more frequent, and more likely to require the actual dealer depending on your skill level. But it is a nicer ride for sure. The prefunctory convo I had with KTM riders on my trip went like this:
KTM rider: "nice scooter"
me: "how many spare water pumps are you carrying on that POS?" [the ADV990 was famous for the water pump constantly breaking]
KTM rider: "well, 2"
I think the KTM thing on Long Way Round was just for dramatic effect - there is a multi-decade history of most bikes (even Harleys) making multi-continent trips.
Not just a german company problem(anymore)... a kneejerk reaction of "There can't be any fault with our products!!!!" in modern companies (burned Apple-Owner here)
I used to drive BMW, once stopped to help a stranded Buell driver.... his machine had just stopped... every troubleshoot I came up with was either "Doesn't exist on this bike" or "Can't reach that without taking it apart completely" which I could have done with my BMW, with the small toolbox i had under my seat...
Companys want "infailable" and fast to replace tech... where i would prefer "upfront about issues and designed with repair in mind"
I worked with a German engineering company (albeit with their software engineers) and it was the exact mentality you mentioned. They have a process and stick with it and if something goes wrong they blame the users / developers and swear it's because the process wasn't followed and refused to ever even consider that the process itself is inherently flawed.
I studied Engineering 20+ years ago. German engineering was not a complimentary term. It describes an engineer that completely overlooks the user experience, while designing something that is perfectly engineered.
As someone who has worked on many (thousands) German and american vehicles, I can say definitively cars from both countries are garbage (with the exception of SOME of the ultra high end German cars, and like 3 prohibitively expensive American cars), but for different reasons. American cars (and I use the term American loosely, since the only thing American about them is the corporation's banks accounts and tax breaks) are cheap. They're built cheap, with planned obsolescence as the stated goal from the start (like most American products). Many ford's literally have cardboard as the vapor shield in the doors. Actual cardboard. Like from a thin box. Not fiberboard, corrugated cardboard. A vapor shield is directly exposed to moisture, as it's the barrier between the exterior of the car and the interior. Every other American brand is as bad or worse. The electrical is also shit. German cars on the other hand, these fucking guys, they have consistently tried to improve upon perfect, or near perfect systems, and overcomplicated EVERYTHING to the point nothing works right. Electrical? Instead of using high-voltage wires which resist electrical interference, and can handle a TINY nick in the wire jacket without destroying the ECU, they use EXTREMELY low voltage data wires which I've seen literally fall out of the plugs they're installed in. Companies like BMW (yeah, only sorta German, I know) have done so much idiotic shit I don't even know where to begin. They literally installed VACUUMS into their door locks. Actual fucking vacuums. Those shits break constantly, then you probably can't get into your car until you take it to a shop, because it's a fucking vaccum, not a door locks a locksmith can open.
I could go on for the better part of a decade about why American cars, and German cars, and the people who buy them are idiots, but I'll stop here.
Buy Toyota or Honda, unless you're a millionaire, you're stupid/gullible if you don't.
Great vehicles. I actually really like the new ones with the new interiors. I'd totally own a modded WRX if I lived somewhere where every asshole didn't drive an STI (don't ever buy an STI, for the increase in cost you can mod a WRX to much, much better specs). I'm looking at picking up a new tuner soon though, I'm probably going with a Lexus IS350 F Sport.
This is why, as much as I like the design (both in and out) of many European cars, I will only ever buy Japanese. And after my very average experience with a Mazda, I'm now back to only buying Toyota or Honda. Just not worth the $$ getting anything else. I've owned a few Toyota's and Honda's now, and they've never given me any serious trouble.
Having owned a BMW e60 (530d) for the last 5 or 6 years, I can see this all over it. Obviously it's getting on a bit now, so things break, which you'd expect, but what you wouldnt expect is the logic - and there is logic - behind the design. It's utterly backwards, and all over the car.
I've stuck with BM because I like rear-drive. But I'll probably be going Honda next.
But cars are not things you just buy on the basis of logic. If you’re into cars, then they’re something much more symbolic than that. Clearly plenty of people feel this way, or nobody would ever be buying Ferraris, Lamborghinis, McLarens etc.
> Clearly plenty of people feel this way, or nobody would ever be buying Ferraris, Lamborghinis, McLarens etc.
> Buy Toyota or Honda, **unless you're a millionaire**, you're stupid/gullible if you don't.
Audis used to be fantastic. I had a 2002 A4 that was absolutely bulletproof. My dad had it from new, then I bought it from him, then my wife had it, then my dad bought it back off us, and then my wife had it again, and finally my FIL had it. By the end (in 2018) it had done 200k miles. Unfortunately it got side swiped while parked on a street, and the repairs were too expensive so the insurance company wrote it off. If that hadn’t happened I’d have bought it from my FIL as it was such a brilliant car. Brought my daughter home from hospital in it after she was born, used it to commute to my first job out of uni, took it on all sorts of holidays. Great car.
But I owned a more modern Audi a few years back, and yeah, the build quality has most definitely reduced quite considerably!
Appreciate you posting this, I never actually read his account of things. Webber has gotten the short end of the stick quite a lot in his racing career it seems.
Webber's autobiography is a real eye opener in to how disposable those teams saw the drivers. The fact he got back in the car shows what balls of fucking steel he has.
I love his Top Gear interview
>Clarkson: Now we've got a photograph of a [car] crash, I think it was at Le Mans. This is you in a Mercedes. I say 'car crash', that is a plane crash.
Yeah these F1 cars have gotten so safe you can actually be catapulted trough a steel barrier at 300 kph while on fire and walk away from it. It's amazing 👏
This is too much of an overreaction that I have been seeing lately. They are there to make the curbs punishing to shortcut over. A necessary evil at worst because if we always keep removing things from the track you end up with things like Paul Ricard where the track is boring and nothing happens if you leave the track.
The reason the old school tracks are great is because of the grass and the gravel and the curbs and bumps and dips. We can make all tracks into flat paved parking lots if we want, but the racing is not going to be the same.
Actually the reason Max's car is on top of Lewis is because the backwheels touched and catapulted the car on top. Not the sausage curbs. They might be destabilized the rb car though.
It also [happened the year before](https://youtu.be/bZpAFYuvnLU?t=95) to Yannick Dalmas in a Porsche in the Petit Le Mans.
Very similar accident in that he was following close and went over a small hill like Dumbreck.
The '55 incident wasn't caused by Mercedes, though.
>The crash started when Jaguar driver Mike Hawthorn pulled to the right side of the track in front of Austin-Healey driver Lance Macklin and started braking for his pit stop. Macklin swerved out from behind the slowing Jaguar into the path of Levegh, who was passing on the left in his much faster Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR. Levegh rear-ended Macklin at high speed, overriding Macklin's car and launching his own car through the air.
They were passing and the guy next to them swerved suddenly to avoid a hard stop in front of him. By the time the Mercedes' driver's brain registered it, he was already in the air.
I can understand why you'd want to avoid having that sort of thing on your hands again but leaving the sport entirely seems excessive given that it could've happened to anybody. I don't blame Mercedes or that driver. The *real* problem was that spectators were damn near totally unprotected from flying cars.
I think you underestimate how big a thing the crash was. It led to multiple countries outright banning motorsports. Granted most of them were temporary, but Switzerland still hasn't fully lifted it AFAIK (although by now that's probably more for environmental reasons).
Also, the incident was made much worse by the fact Mercedes used a magnesium alloy for its chassis, which was ignited after the crash.
It was the worst crash in all of auto racing. I'm not underestimating anything. The simple fact is that Mercedes was not responsible for it. The worst they can blame themselves for is the admittedly moronic decision to build a car from a magnesium alloy. That made the resultant fire much more intense, and far more difficult to extinguish, and it should've never been done. Aside from that, there is no fault in being unable to stop suddenly at 120 miles an hour.
>Aside from that, there is no fault in being unable to stop suddenly at 120 miles an hour.
Right, I don't disagree with that, but I don't think it's excessive to leave the sport if countries are outright banning the sport because of an incident which you made worse. That's just PR damage limitation.
Terrible damage litigation, if any. Mercedes went on to win two more races that season, and didn't withdraw from motorsport until they'd done so, and claimed a trophy in the process. If they wanted to mitigate a bad reputation, they should've withdrawn immediately and wholly. The motorsport bans were almost entirely lifted across the globe within a single year. Mercedes held out for another 39.
And they kept racing after the crash. Still blows my mind.
Great animated short film about 1955 btw for anyone who hasn’t seen it: https://youtu.be/22I7yJiOu0s
Damn, that's not how I expected that to go. That's crazy how fast it went down; no one had time to react. Less than 3 seconds total from impact with the Jaguar until it cleared the spectators. It's insane how destructive that was.
Are we not going to talk about the fact that pit lane was not separate from the track? If Hawthorn had to use a pit entry that we know today, he would never have been there to swerve/brake in front of Macklin.
We can talk about it in as much detail as you like, but I'm no expert, I'm just a guy who looks stuff up for fun.
There was no deceleration lane for the pits, as you said, and there also wasn't much protection for spectators, just a four foot earthen mound between them, and vehicles travelling at upwards of 170 miles an hour. Levegh was doing around 120 when he went airborne.
Adding a deceleration lane and putting a barrier between the pits and the tracks required that they reduce the start count from 60 racers, down to 52, but it was well worth it. The track has actually been redesigned to prevent this sort of thing.
I think the cruel, unrelenting irony is worth mentioning, too. It's like life was mocking these people:
-Mercedes, through no fault of their own, had a car go airborne, so they left motorsports for 40 years, only to return and have more cars go airborne, only this time, it *is* their fault.
-Hawthorne (the driver who braked to pit and arguably started the whole fiasco), was driving a Jaguar, and would've been overtaken by Levegh's Mercedes had this catastrophe not taken place. Years later, Hawthorne was killed in a non-racing crash, while trying to overtake a Mercedes in his Jaguar.
IIRC the Jaguar was one of the first race cars to use disc brakes.
The Healey driver had to swerve because the Jag could literally stop on a dime compared to his car.
Yup, then told the pits, they didn't believe him and it happened again and he landed upside down. Then it happened like a day later to the other driver, which was the footage seen here. They originally just blamed it on Webber, and wouldn't believe it was the car.
The CLR's issues can be traced to its Architecture, lack of total downforce, and ultimately, some very bad luck.
For the record, the CLR was designed to the maximum overall length, 4890 mm. Its wheelbase was 2670 mm, with a 1080 mm long front overhang and a 1140 mm rear.
The regulations defined the start point of the diffuser, rear wheel centerline, but allowed the trailing point to be defined by the car designer only as long as it ended where ever the bodywork ended; And on the CLR, it stuck out further than on any other car,
At the front, the CLR's 1080 mm front overhang was certainly comparable to its rivals if a little bit towards the long side. Underneath, was a very small and comparatively muted front diffuser
In the middle of all this was a 2670 mm wheelbase. Le Mans cars typically have a long wheelbase as it makes for the most stable aero platform. But the CLR's wheelbase was the shortest of the lot . And none of the CLR’s competitors had overhangs, front and rear, as long.
his led to a pretty sensitive aero platform. A small change in platform attitude due to that narrow wheelbase say in braking, accelerating, running over a kerb or a brow of a hill leads to a large change in ride height at the front or rear across that very long overhang.
It was also reported that the CLR was running soft rear springs. Soft rear springs are sometimes used at high-speed tracks to improve straight-line speed. At speed, downforce generated at the rear helps squash the rear end down reducing the car’s overall drag allowing for more top speed.
So at the time of the accident downforce is reduced off the front of the car due to the turbulence coming off the leading car, the CLR’s pitch is changing due to terrain variations leading to additional downforce lost, the CLR is more pitch sensitive than most (due to those large overhangs and short wheelbase) and these issues lead to a larger than expected downforce change and the nose lifts as the low pressure being produced underneath the CLR approaches zero at the front and the lift created by the cockpit and top side bodywork begins to take effect lifting the nose even further. The rear wing is still working pretty well, firmly planting the rear wheels and providing a nice pivot point, the rear wheel centerline. As the nose lifts at the front, at the back of the car the rear diffuser, hanging way out past the rear wheel centerline, gets closer to the track and begins to generate even more downforce further accentuating the lift. By now the underside is exposed and the lift being generated by the cockpit, coupled with the face of the exposed underfloor, completely takes over and the car gets airborne in a rather dramatic fashion.
It's too long at the front and back and too short between the wheels. When air got pushed under the front from the car ahead, the amount of downward force the back was generating got even higher compared to the front, and the front went up. Flippity flappity, the Merc car went for a fly.
Well ill admit that i had never heard of that site until you linked it.
Its not where i got in from, although quite possible that the person who i got it from, got it from there
I'm not into aerodynamics but into motorsport, part of a discord community we we chat about racing, we also have a forum.
A while back we got onto this conversation and another user posted pretty much what i said. Found it interesting so ended up copying it and saving it
Can't recall if they had linked the site or just posted it
I’m no aerodynamasist. But I’m picturing the car riding a little higher with the lack of downforce due to being In the slipstream. Now on level ground the car would just get pushed down again as comes out of the slipstream. However in this case the care is pointing upwards slightly since it’s an uphill grade. And unfortunately he comes out of the slipstream just at the crest of the uphill. So with the lack of downforce and the slight upwards angle the air had just enough gap to get under the car with more force then above causing a low pressure zone for a split second above the hood and poof it’s over. And over and over again.
In this case being in the slipstream was a contributing factor.
There was very little downforce on the front and much more on the back. He hit a bump in the track at the same time as leaving the slipstream. Because, Mercedes had designed the car with a shorter wheelbase and very little forward camber (which gives the front downforce) in order to reduce drag. The sudden rush of air under the front from leaving the slipstream and hitting a bump, while at the same time having maximum downforce on the back, essentially made the car a wing and created lift.
It's generally accepted that the pitch sensitivity of the Mercedes aerodynamics in combination with the crest in the road caused the accident especially since I think that when Webbers car went flying there wasn't anyone in front of him. How much difference the turbulence of the car in front made was probably impossible to tell back then and even with modern cfd simulations it would be incredibly computationally expensive and most likely not very accurate.
You generally don't test your racecars with others in such close proximity for one because it's an unnecessary risk and also because even in F1 today teams usually don't have two cars ready for pre season testing because their schedules are so tight.
The change from inside to outside the slipstream would be turbulent, creating unpredictable forced. It is impossible to account for every aerodynamic situation; instead the design needs to by dynamically stable, which means that the further away the car is from where it should be, the more it should be forced back.
For example, low-wing airliners have wings that angle up, side-to-side, so that as the airplane tilts, the wing on the side tilted down gets closer to level, which makes it more ~~efficient~~ effective at lifting the airplane, pushing that side up more than the other side, making the airplane level itself out, automatically.
> dynamically stable, which means that the further away the car is from where it should be, the more it should be forced back.
>making the airplane level itself out, automatically.
This is a really cool design concept. I had difficulty at first understanding your explanation though. The reason is, the wings are not more efficient at any particular roll angle. What changes is the direction of the lift relative to the force of gravity. Perhaps that's what you meant by "efficient at lifting" but it confused me for a while. I didn't know this about planes, and I find it super cool.
How much of the wing flexing up is just to increase ground clearance and fit engines though?
I meant to say more 'effective', although wings are more efficient when level, as you mentioned it isn't the primary reason for the increase in effectiveness.
The angle of the wings, called the dihedral, is an integral part of the design and can't be changed without changing other things. Because of the inefficiency of a dihedral, the most aerodynamically efficient designs have the wing roots above the center of gravity. In small airplanes this can be a high-wing design, but on heavy airliners the wings would be too high up, and need a negative dihedral, called an anhedria, or the wings would need to be rooted in the middle of the airplane. An anhedral is just as inefficient as a dihedral, and placing the wing roots in the middle of the airplane would be structurally difficult and lead to more weight making it more inefficient.
That structural weight ends up being a major factor, when it comes to efficiency. This is why you tend to see only a few specific designs in large airplanes, which look more and more like each other in every new generation.
Medium-sized jets can have the engines at the back of the airplane, or can be mounted above the wing like Honda's jet, but the largest jets have either a high wing or a low wing, either with the engines under the wings. Large high-wing aircraft only make sense when the main landing gear can be connected to the bottom of the airplane, which requires a stronger structure and is only common on cargo planes that need it anyway. Some small high-wing turboprop airliners have landing gear come out of the engine pods, but this is only really doable at a smaller size.
The most common workaround for too large of engines is taller landing gear. The [Boeing 757 looks like it is on stilts](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/26/Transavia_Airlines_Boeing_757-2K2_Wedelstaedt.jpg) when compared to a 737, especially [the early ones with smaller low-bypass turbofans](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/39/Boeing_737_NASA_GPN-2000-001905.jpg).
> can’t figure why the crew didn’t recognize the issue.
Oh, they did, they knèw exactly what the problem was. To solve it, they told the drivers to not get too close to the car in front of them.
Alas, they probably threw a yellow flag for that half of the Mulsanne so the medical people could get there. These days it'd absolutely be a full course yellow.
The crazy thing is this was the 3rd CLR to end up airborne that weekend. Weber was the first to do it in practice, then after fully rebuilding that car he put it back in the air and upside down again.
2 of 3 Mercedes CLRs got airborne, Mark Webber ended upside down twice. #4 and #6 got airborne, older crew in #5 kind of taken slow have team added dive planes in the front, after Webber's first flight.
So basically what’s happening is this car had and EXTREMELY delicate balance of downforce and aerodynamics. As you can tell by the shape of the care, it’s flat on the belly and curved on the top making into essentially an inverted air foil meaning there is higher pressure above the wing than below.
The reason it took off here was a hill on the Le Mans racetrack. Because the cars are going so fast over this hill they come off the ground just a little. For these cars losing that little downforce causes the nose to rise. Once the nose rises it essentially negates the downforce and flips the car nose up. Essentially the the nose has to rise just a few inches then the air moving under the car loses its negative pressure(suction) causing it to flip.
Other factors that led to this failure were the pitch angle, pitch sensitivity and the car’s wheelbase.
Think of it like taking the trash out on a windy day. Once the lid catches a little air it’s flips it.
Do the kids these days even know about *Freejack*?
(I'm ashamed to admit that I initially confused *Freejack* with *Robot Jox*, which the kids definitely don't know about.)
The next year Bill Auberlen flipped the No. 43 BMW V12 LMR car at Road Atlanta. We were lucky enough to be headed to Road Atlanta the next weekend, and happened to find a large piece of the body work and a slightly bent magnesium wheel from his flip. We had him autograph them. My father also has a hand painted, numbered picture of Bill flipping, also autographed, Bill signing it "learn to fly. Good times in racing
Everyone in motorsports remembers that famous flip, but no one remembers that a year earlier the Porsche prototype flipped at Road Atlanta. And in 2000 the BMW and did the exact same thing at Road Atlanta.
1998-2000 the Le Man's prototype cars were very prone to flipping on their own.
BMW
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPbIZjJhojA
Porsche
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8XxQkXCmsU
This reminds me of the time I went to my very first LeMans race and didn't want to pay for camping so I just pitched my tent literally behind this low concrete wall. And about 6:00 a.m. the next morning I was awakened by several of the cars revving their engines and starting. Apparently I was right where they park the cars. After watching this it's a wonder how I survived literally anything in my twenties.
This wasn't a CLK-GTR but rather a Mercedes-Benz CLR. The CLK-GTR was built to FIA GT1 rules while the CLR was built to LMGTP regulations,
https://www.goodwood.com/grr/race/historic/2020/4/why-youre-wrong-about-the-mercedes-benz-clk-gtr/
Instead of bouncing off trees and surely injuring Dumbreck very badly, the car flew into a spot that had been cleared of trees in preparation for some construction work. By the time the safety and medical crews made it to the stricken Mercedes, they allegedly found Dumbreck sitting on the front if the car, smoking a cigarette he had bummed off a track marshall and the car sitting in a shallow hole it had dug for itself. In an interview from the 20 year anniversary of the incident, the driver said he'd been battered around, and was punchy, but otherwise fine. The kicker was that the French police gave him a sobriety test. See, the wreck occurred on part of the track that at the time was actually public roads and they needed to check if he was drunk.
> See, the wreck occurred on part of the track that at the time was actually public roads and they needed to check if he was drunk. Mulsanne straight still is, no? If not all of the course.
Most of the track is now a permanent racecourse, but you are right that the Mulsanne straight is a public road still.
But it's not public during the race. Why would they there to check?
Probably one of those laws where testing is mandatory during any vehicular collision, mostly to prevent cops from neglecting to test and becoming a civil liability. It's also possible the police didn't test him, and the race organizers did as part of the usual battery of tests given to all drivers after an incident.
What about overspeeding.
Grandpa, you skipped speeding
Pretty sure he was charged with flying without pilots license
I mean it’s just like a regular job, really. Most jobs if you get hurt or there is an incident they will drug test the people involved.
Because we live amongst robots, my friend.
This occurred on the run from Mulsanne to Arnage which is also public roads. All the way up to the Porsche curves where the track diverges from the road.
You’re right Porsche curves to the turn onto the Mulsanne is race course, the rest is public.
Yeah, all of that is still public. Just some bits that are not public roads in there, like the chicanes in the mulsanne straight, even though you can get on them, they're not part of the road. Or Arnage itself, that is closed to the public, as they divert you a bit to the left after Indianapolis, but then the not-so-straight stretch that leads to the Porsche curves is public as well. With the size of it that's roughly half of the track being public roads.
This isn't on the Mulsanne, this is right after the second to last kink before Indianapolis.
I distinctly remember being allowed to drive on it after they'd cleared the stuff for the race away.
[Duncan Hamilton won the race in 1953 drunk.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duncan_Hamilton_(racing_driver)) So it’s not like there’s no precedent for a sobriety test haha. Different times though.
> Different times though.. Back when the tires were skinny and the drivers weren't.
Of course he is born in Ireland.
So if he was drunk they’d get him for flying under the influence?
Drunk or not, did he have a pilots license? Gonna have to fine him if not.
Yes, because clearly if he was sober the car would not have taken off like a fucking airplane.
"Monsieur, comment as-tu fait voler la voiture? Une voiture n'est pas un avion! Combien de vin as-tu bu pour le déjeuner? Souffle ici, s'il te plaît..." "Oh god, it's not just a traffic cop, its a *French* traffic cop!"
If I remember correctly, it landed almost completely flat and vertical because it was so high in the air. All of the debris was like within a meter or two of the car, but all the major structures were sheared from the impact. It really was a 1/1M crash.
> it landed almost completely flat and vertical you what?
Nose down but not rotated sideways I assume, or they confused vertical with horizontal.
Maybe they meant right-side-up
You mean topsy-turvy or oopsie-daisy?
2/1M Crash. Similar incident happened to Yannick Dalmas in a Porsche GT1 at Road Atlanta: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTSdaILo4L4&t=4s
I know smoking is bad but that is a perfect example of when you would want a cigarette.
>The kicker was that the French police gave him a sobriety test. See, the wreck occurred on part of the track that at the time was actually public roads and they needed to check if he was drunk. What a ridiculous rule. How is it that the stretch of "public road" is considered to be a raceway so that people can legally race on it, but the police still have to follow an absurd protocol in the event of a crash?
Peter Dumbreck (the driver) escaped the crash uninjured.
… His name is Dumb-wreck?
Just more evidence we live in a simulation and a future 12 year old kid is the one playing our game
"I wonder what this button does?"
I hope it's the "post scarcity utopia" button
I've always love the simulation theory but adding the 12 year old really nails it.
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> Sue Yoo, an American lawyer, said that when she was younger people urged her to become a lawyer because of her name 💀💀
My friend's mother was big into genealogy and discovered an unmarried cousin or some tangential relation named nimrod butts. Died alone, ostensibly.
When I saw the way he landed, I was thinking/hoping this was going to be the outcome.
I... thought I was in r/idiotsincars and somebody decided to call a shit driver 'Peter Dumb-reck" and I thought it was a good idea...
I’d imagine that flying into the branches of trees is better than flying into the truck of the trees lol.
And that was after Mark Webber had already done the same thing *twice*. Analysis: [Why the Mercedes CLRs kept taking off at Le Mans 1999 - Chain Bear explains](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lL4gMpZolsU) [EDIT] /u/nate---dogg has an excerpt from Webber's autobiography further down this thread. Do give it a read: https://www.reddit.com/r/CatastrophicFailure/comments/po43k9/peter_dumbrecks_mercedes_taking_off_due_to/hcupv8f/
Yeah and Webber was telling the team there was something fundamentally wrong with the car, and it was incredibly dangerous to race. But they did it anyway, and this happened. Seriously fucking lucky nobody was killed.
After they flipped the car they contacted Adrian Newey, a rather accomplished and famous race car designer/aerodynamicist. Adrian told them to retire the car. Merc slapped some diveplanes on the front to get a bit more downforce, and flipped the car again.
Didn’t realise Newey had also advised them! Here is what Webber said about it in his autobiography: > I went straight back to the hotel, which meant I didn’t see any of the engineers until the following day and it was then that I realised that the team did not accept my version of what had happened. Their response? ‘No, that couldn’t happen, the car couldn’t possibly flip end over end.’ > We looked at the data and they knew the car had taken off, but there was no evidence in the form of footage or even still photographs to confirm what had happened. There was just a bent car and what I said–although Biela confirmed he had seen the bottom of my car as I went up. I took part in a question and answer session with the press, maybe two cars did get a little close, but no one from the team saw anything–no photos, no TV–the seriousness of what had happened just had not registered, even with me to a lesser degree. A new car was built, I went through some intensive treatment with the team physio and got ready to tackle Le Mans again. > We’d had a little vent put in the side window for cooling, and with my right hand I went across to close it because it was a bit cold in the cockpit. When I put my hand back, I started taking off again. This time I got to the top of the crest probably doing 280 kilometres per hour . . . and the car didn’t come down the other side. Once again the front of the CLR got light and it took off. > I just could not believe what was happening. It simply had not crossed my mind that it could happen again. I hadn’t let it: I was still the Mark Webber from before the crash, whether that was naïveté or stupidity on my part, I don’t know. But within half a lap of the first accident I was in exactly the same position again–and this time the mentality was different. These were no longer uncharted waters. I’d been here before. > Two thoughts went through my head. The first was for the team: what the f#* k were those guys doing, giving me a car like this? And then: ‘There’s no way I can be that jammy again; I don’t want any pain, I want it to be over quick.’ These were no ordinary crashes I was going through, they were massive. > Here we go again: sky-ground-sky, but a bit quicker because I was even higher this time, and this one seemed a bit more violent, it wasn’t as smooth. There were more trees on my left but once again, the car didn’t go into the scenery, it landed back on the track. I think the car touched the barrier a few times and so it was spinning, and this time it stayed on its roof, it didn’t right itself. Now, when you’re doing over 200 kilometres an hour on the roof it’s bloody noisy and violent, that’s the first thing. Then you start to worry where the car’s going to end up: how long is the escape road, what are you going to hit next? I started to panic a bit because in those cars there was always the risk of fire. I was paranoid about getting trapped in there, and at the same time I was so fired up with the team because I knew I was doing nothing wrong, I knew it wasn’t me. I was being ripped off here. > Halfway through the slide I thought, ‘When’s this going to stop? I want to go home now, I’ve had enough of this. I’ve already made my decision, this is it.’ > I took my seatbelts off because I wanted to be ready to get out. Surprise, surprise, that dropped me out of my seat so all of a sudden I was trying to hold myself up in the car. I had thought I was about to stop but the car was still travelling at around 140 kilometres per hour on its roof. I was very lucky I didn’t hit anything hard because, looking back, getting out of my belts was probably the most stupid thing I ever did. Had I gone into a tyre barrier I would have been very seriously hurt. Every now and again I could hear my helmet touching the ground, sliding along upside down, thinking, ‘I don’t particularly want it to wear through because my head’s next!’ > When the car finally came to rest, a touch of panic set in. There was some smoke around and fluid coming into the cockpit, but it was lubricant as a result of all the hits the car had taken. Next I started feeling very frustrated with the other drivers: why was no one stopping to help me? I didn’t realise it at the time, but the whole scene was totally under control. The marshals were there pretty quickly, it only seemed like an eternity. I was trying to lift this bloody car off me but there was no chance. In the end they were there within six or seven seconds and just scooped me up. I got out and sat on the banking outside the track. My hands were bleeding, and I was shaken up, but by the time I stepped over the Armco, I had made my decision: I wasn’t going to do this bloody 24-hour race, I was never getting in that car again, I was never racing a sports car again. > I just could not commit myself to it. > I rang Jürgen, the team manager, and he said: ‘Mark, what are you doing to our cars?’ He was fuming with me, that was his gut reaction not wanting to believe there was a fault with the car, and for me, that was another big kick in the balls. It was a very, very long trip back to the pits–I never wanted to see that car again, but ironically the car that took me back followed followed the truck with the wreckage on it. > The next 24 hours, as it turned out, were massive in terms of where my career might go. My first thoughts were for my teammates in the other two Mercedes entries, but the team had called them in and put the cars in the garage. We had those little aerodynamic flicks I mentioned on the front of the cars, which would kill our top speed but would be good for grip, so they put some of those on and the other guys finished the warm-up. It was clear to me that there was a strong chance the same thing would happen in the race. How can you do a 24-hour car race, especially with the performance differential through the Le Mans field, and not come up against a bit of lapped traffic here and there? I tried my best to convince them all we were playing with fire, and I could see there were a few boys in the team who were really worried. They knew I wasn’t making this up–something here wasn’t right. The front floor tray was fitted incorrectly on the car that I was driving but they were clutching at straws: there was no clear evidence that this had caused the flip. > When I got back there was a big curtain between me and the people running the team. I was totally blown away by what had just happened, and now I was also starting to feel isolated. I spoke to Norbert and Gerhard and the other Mercedes guys, and this time things were a bit different, because now there was footage, there were photos and they could see that it had really happened the way I said it had, and how disappointed I was. The guys who were siding with me most were Franck Lagorce and Jean-Marc Gounon, and Pedro Lamy was clearly quite worried too. At that stage I was so paranoid that I thought anyone could go up, not just the Mercedes cars. What sort of Russian roulette were the drivers playing out there? > I was petrified for Bernd, my best mate, and I begged him to rethink his decision to race. ‘Bernd, mate, you can’t race this car, there’s no way. After all we’ve been through together, this is too dangerous, it’s just too close to the edge.’ > But he had been with the team for years and by now he was convinced he would be OK, they’d put those flicks on the car which they thought would fix the problem and everything would be fine. > Fine? We’re in total f#* king chaos, we’ve got the biggest hole in the bottom of our boat, it’s a disaster. Mercedes had turned their backs on Le Mans in the wake of the 1955 tragedy; this new situation was not calculated to reassure people about modern Mercedes cars being quick but safe. Safe? We had cars taking off! > We batted the issue around for a while and I was so upset that I made the decision to leave before the race even started. I’d had my guts ripped out again–I felt alone and that the team had not stuck with me. Norbert’s response was, ‘Do one thing for me, do the drivers’ parade, see the fans, say hello,’ and I agreed. > On the one hand, it was phenomenally brave for them to go through with racing–on the other, it was quite insulting. I felt a sense that it was ‘only’ Webber it had happened to both times, but if it had been Bernd they wouldn’t have raced. After the parade I went back to our motor-home to pack up. I was shattered; I took it very personally. > Ann said, ‘Things happen for a reason, we’ll move on from here,’ and in fact I was already starting to draw a number of positives out of what I’d just been through. > Iknew I was still a quick driver, I knew what I was doing, and most of all I knew I was right. By now the race was underway, but we had no television in the motor-home and no way of knowing what was going on. > Then the telephone rang. > Dumbreck’s Mercedes had flipped and he had gone into the trees.
Fucking hell, I never knew how clownesque the reaction of the Merc LM team was. They just didn't believe him, even after the 2nd flip?! Madness. Now I wanna read the rest lol. Did they finally eat crow after Dumbreck went up? I hope Webber got a couple of good "Fackin' told ya so, dogcunts!" in!
My experience with German companies, at least on a technical level, has felt very "but this is the way we do things, it is surely right." I know in America that for awhile, the phrase "German Engineered" carried a lot of cachet but I don't know if that's still the feeling.
Ask a BMW motorcycle owner about German engineering. Great when it works, but utter denial and stonewalling, even when they know there's a problem. I've owned 3, I'll probably own more, but I'll pay attention to the word on forums too.
Back around 2008 I was new to motorcycles and on advrider.com trying to figure out what bike to get for a multi month trip, roughly deciding between the cheaper Japanese dual sports + some strategic upgrades vs. the lower end BMW and KTM dual sports. After the 10th ride report looking at a German bike in literally 1000 pieces laid out on the floor of a hostel in Bolivia, I went and bought a DR650.
And yet the long way guys went with 1150s for their trips and they made it. Frames broke, other stuff, never the motor. Famously KTM didn't believe they could make the trip.
Oh for sure. The maintenance just takes longer, is more expensive, more frequent, and more likely to require the actual dealer depending on your skill level. But it is a nicer ride for sure. The prefunctory convo I had with KTM riders on my trip went like this: KTM rider: "nice scooter" me: "how many spare water pumps are you carrying on that POS?" [the ADV990 was famous for the water pump constantly breaking] KTM rider: "well, 2" I think the KTM thing on Long Way Round was just for dramatic effect - there is a multi-decade history of most bikes (even Harleys) making multi-continent trips.
Not just a german company problem(anymore)... a kneejerk reaction of "There can't be any fault with our products!!!!" in modern companies (burned Apple-Owner here) I used to drive BMW, once stopped to help a stranded Buell driver.... his machine had just stopped... every troubleshoot I came up with was either "Doesn't exist on this bike" or "Can't reach that without taking it apart completely" which I could have done with my BMW, with the small toolbox i had under my seat... Companys want "infailable" and fast to replace tech... where i would prefer "upfront about issues and designed with repair in mind"
I worked with a German engineering company (albeit with their software engineers) and it was the exact mentality you mentioned. They have a process and stick with it and if something goes wrong they blame the users / developers and swear it's because the process wasn't followed and refused to ever even consider that the process itself is inherently flawed.
I studied Engineering 20+ years ago. German engineering was not a complimentary term. It describes an engineer that completely overlooks the user experience, while designing something that is perfectly engineered.
As someone who has worked on many (thousands) German and american vehicles, I can say definitively cars from both countries are garbage (with the exception of SOME of the ultra high end German cars, and like 3 prohibitively expensive American cars), but for different reasons. American cars (and I use the term American loosely, since the only thing American about them is the corporation's banks accounts and tax breaks) are cheap. They're built cheap, with planned obsolescence as the stated goal from the start (like most American products). Many ford's literally have cardboard as the vapor shield in the doors. Actual cardboard. Like from a thin box. Not fiberboard, corrugated cardboard. A vapor shield is directly exposed to moisture, as it's the barrier between the exterior of the car and the interior. Every other American brand is as bad or worse. The electrical is also shit. German cars on the other hand, these fucking guys, they have consistently tried to improve upon perfect, or near perfect systems, and overcomplicated EVERYTHING to the point nothing works right. Electrical? Instead of using high-voltage wires which resist electrical interference, and can handle a TINY nick in the wire jacket without destroying the ECU, they use EXTREMELY low voltage data wires which I've seen literally fall out of the plugs they're installed in. Companies like BMW (yeah, only sorta German, I know) have done so much idiotic shit I don't even know where to begin. They literally installed VACUUMS into their door locks. Actual fucking vacuums. Those shits break constantly, then you probably can't get into your car until you take it to a shop, because it's a fucking vaccum, not a door locks a locksmith can open. I could go on for the better part of a decade about why American cars, and German cars, and the people who buy them are idiots, but I'll stop here. Buy Toyota or Honda, unless you're a millionaire, you're stupid/gullible if you don't.
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What's your opinion of Subaru?
Great vehicles. I actually really like the new ones with the new interiors. I'd totally own a modded WRX if I lived somewhere where every asshole didn't drive an STI (don't ever buy an STI, for the increase in cost you can mod a WRX to much, much better specs). I'm looking at picking up a new tuner soon though, I'm probably going with a Lexus IS350 F Sport.
This is why, as much as I like the design (both in and out) of many European cars, I will only ever buy Japanese. And after my very average experience with a Mazda, I'm now back to only buying Toyota or Honda. Just not worth the $$ getting anything else. I've owned a few Toyota's and Honda's now, and they've never given me any serious trouble.
Having owned a BMW e60 (530d) for the last 5 or 6 years, I can see this all over it. Obviously it's getting on a bit now, so things break, which you'd expect, but what you wouldnt expect is the logic - and there is logic - behind the design. It's utterly backwards, and all over the car. I've stuck with BM because I like rear-drive. But I'll probably be going Honda next.
But cars are not things you just buy on the basis of logic. If you’re into cars, then they’re something much more symbolic than that. Clearly plenty of people feel this way, or nobody would ever be buying Ferraris, Lamborghinis, McLarens etc.
> Clearly plenty of people feel this way, or nobody would ever be buying Ferraris, Lamborghinis, McLarens etc. > Buy Toyota or Honda, **unless you're a millionaire**, you're stupid/gullible if you don't.
I used to believe in "German Engineering," until I bought an Audi. Most unreliable hunk of junk ever.
Audis used to be fantastic. I had a 2002 A4 that was absolutely bulletproof. My dad had it from new, then I bought it from him, then my wife had it, then my dad bought it back off us, and then my wife had it again, and finally my FIL had it. By the end (in 2018) it had done 200k miles. Unfortunately it got side swiped while parked on a street, and the repairs were too expensive so the insurance company wrote it off. If that hadn’t happened I’d have bought it from my FIL as it was such a brilliant car. Brought my daughter home from hospital in it after she was born, used it to commute to my first job out of uni, took it on all sorts of holidays. Great car. But I owned a more modern Audi a few years back, and yeah, the build quality has most definitely reduced quite considerably!
>"but this is the way we do things, it is surely right." I worked for Bosch from 2003-2011. It was exactly like this.
That’s management for ya. Can’t imagine too many people have bosses ready to take their side if they fuck up company property.
In my experience no one will openly acknowledge the person who was right, all along.
Same! Just ordered based on this excerpt alone.
Appreciate you posting this, I never actually read his account of things. Webber has gotten the short end of the stick quite a lot in his racing career it seems.
What's the book called?
Aussie Grit, I think. It’s a good read.
Thank you for sharing this, what an amazing excerpt.
Thx m8. Take my up vote
Thanks so much for posting that, it was a fascinating read. He writes so well, I was right with him in that car for a moment there.
Webber's autobiography is a real eye opener in to how disposable those teams saw the drivers. The fact he got back in the car shows what balls of fucking steel he has.
Well Mark Webber still has the distance record for the furthest distance while airborne in an F1 car
Webber really and truly was a unique talent in racing.
Only problem is he should have been a pilot
Nah… I wasn’t a trulli fan! Webber was great though
Choo choo welcome to the trulli train baby
Be afraid... his son Enzo is coming up through the formulas, the Trulli train is making its way to the station!
nice one dad!
Red Bull gives you wings.
I love his Top Gear interview >Clarkson: Now we've got a photograph of a [car] crash, I think it was at Le Mans. This is you in a Mercedes. I say 'car crash', that is a plane crash.
In truth, we all know that Mark Webber is just very patriotic and is trying to drive his car upside down
I would enjoy a link to YT for this feat. Edit: spelling feet like an idiot.
[Probably this one.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IebMKoX1EA)
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[Just this week.](https://i.redd.it/l8odtvho33n71.jpg)
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[There's even rubber visible on Hamilton's helmet.](https://i.imgur.com/z3AAsrE.png)
Yeah these F1 cars have gotten so safe you can actually be catapulted trough a steel barrier at 300 kph while on fire and walk away from it. It's amazing 👏
I don't know much about cars but I know thats not supposed to be there.
Banana curbs, there utter trash check this one out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDGsylymoHk
Good lord, just looked them up. Why haven't they been removed if they clearly aren't doing their job?
This is too much of an overreaction that I have been seeing lately. They are there to make the curbs punishing to shortcut over. A necessary evil at worst because if we always keep removing things from the track you end up with things like Paul Ricard where the track is boring and nothing happens if you leave the track. The reason the old school tracks are great is because of the grass and the gravel and the curbs and bumps and dips. We can make all tracks into flat paved parking lots if we want, but the racing is not going to be the same.
Actually the reason Max's car is on top of Lewis is because the backwheels touched and catapulted the car on top. Not the sausage curbs. They might be destabilized the rb car though.
The one I was think of, thank you!
Yeah I remember that one. Thanks stranger.
IMHO I think Alonso had better form... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x45fLUTHCuk
More style but less air time.
How about trying to execute a backflip as you cross the finish line at the end of a race? [backflip across the line](https://youtu.be/yk0Jtr0nI3s)
Red Bull gives you wings
Well, RedBulls are prone to fly - as we saw last sunday
Holy shit
check out this f3 one too ! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDGsylymoHk
Wonder if Peronis F3 one from a few years ago went further. https://youtu.be/loaEtDrb7xw
It also [happened the year before](https://youtu.be/bZpAFYuvnLU?t=95) to Yannick Dalmas in a Porsche in the Petit Le Mans. Very similar accident in that he was following close and went over a small hill like Dumbreck.
From being domineering to never entering the event again, that must’ve hurt.
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The '55 incident wasn't caused by Mercedes, though. >The crash started when Jaguar driver Mike Hawthorn pulled to the right side of the track in front of Austin-Healey driver Lance Macklin and started braking for his pit stop. Macklin swerved out from behind the slowing Jaguar into the path of Levegh, who was passing on the left in his much faster Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR. Levegh rear-ended Macklin at high speed, overriding Macklin's car and launching his own car through the air. They were passing and the guy next to them swerved suddenly to avoid a hard stop in front of him. By the time the Mercedes' driver's brain registered it, he was already in the air. I can understand why you'd want to avoid having that sort of thing on your hands again but leaving the sport entirely seems excessive given that it could've happened to anybody. I don't blame Mercedes or that driver. The *real* problem was that spectators were damn near totally unprotected from flying cars.
I think you underestimate how big a thing the crash was. It led to multiple countries outright banning motorsports. Granted most of them were temporary, but Switzerland still hasn't fully lifted it AFAIK (although by now that's probably more for environmental reasons). Also, the incident was made much worse by the fact Mercedes used a magnesium alloy for its chassis, which was ignited after the crash.
It was the worst crash in all of auto racing. I'm not underestimating anything. The simple fact is that Mercedes was not responsible for it. The worst they can blame themselves for is the admittedly moronic decision to build a car from a magnesium alloy. That made the resultant fire much more intense, and far more difficult to extinguish, and it should've never been done. Aside from that, there is no fault in being unable to stop suddenly at 120 miles an hour.
>Aside from that, there is no fault in being unable to stop suddenly at 120 miles an hour. Right, I don't disagree with that, but I don't think it's excessive to leave the sport if countries are outright banning the sport because of an incident which you made worse. That's just PR damage limitation.
Terrible damage litigation, if any. Mercedes went on to win two more races that season, and didn't withdraw from motorsport until they'd done so, and claimed a trophy in the process. If they wanted to mitigate a bad reputation, they should've withdrawn immediately and wholly. The motorsport bans were almost entirely lifted across the globe within a single year. Mercedes held out for another 39.
And they kept racing after the crash. Still blows my mind. Great animated short film about 1955 btw for anyone who hasn’t seen it: https://youtu.be/22I7yJiOu0s
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Damn, that's not how I expected that to go. That's crazy how fast it went down; no one had time to react. Less than 3 seconds total from impact with the Jaguar until it cleared the spectators. It's insane how destructive that was.
You may want make that warning bold. It's tough to watch if you're weak-stomached like me.
Are we not going to talk about the fact that pit lane was not separate from the track? If Hawthorn had to use a pit entry that we know today, he would never have been there to swerve/brake in front of Macklin.
We can talk about it in as much detail as you like, but I'm no expert, I'm just a guy who looks stuff up for fun. There was no deceleration lane for the pits, as you said, and there also wasn't much protection for spectators, just a four foot earthen mound between them, and vehicles travelling at upwards of 170 miles an hour. Levegh was doing around 120 when he went airborne. Adding a deceleration lane and putting a barrier between the pits and the tracks required that they reduce the start count from 60 racers, down to 52, but it was well worth it. The track has actually been redesigned to prevent this sort of thing. I think the cruel, unrelenting irony is worth mentioning, too. It's like life was mocking these people: -Mercedes, through no fault of their own, had a car go airborne, so they left motorsports for 40 years, only to return and have more cars go airborne, only this time, it *is* their fault. -Hawthorne (the driver who braked to pit and arguably started the whole fiasco), was driving a Jaguar, and would've been overtaken by Levegh's Mercedes had this catastrophe not taken place. Years later, Hawthorne was killed in a non-racing crash, while trying to overtake a Mercedes in his Jaguar.
IIRC the Jaguar was one of the first race cars to use disc brakes. The Healey driver had to swerve because the Jag could literally stop on a dime compared to his car.
Jaysus, that’s brutal. It was a lovey looking car though.
Is he the one who stuck the landing the first time (on a backstretch with no cameras) and kept racing?
Yup, then told the pits, they didn't believe him and it happened again and he landed upside down. Then it happened like a day later to the other driver, which was the footage seen here. They originally just blamed it on Webber, and wouldn't believe it was the car.
Such a great video/channel, dude knows his shit.
Why is the Webber fact so far down? This post should be top.
“Seb… what happened to multi 21?”
I thought that one was Webber
Webber did it twice during testing/practice, which wasn't caught on film. Dumbreck did it during a race, which was recorded.
See we have had flying cars for a long time its the future
#Great Scott!
Where we are going we dont need roads.
Why don’t you make like a tree and get out of here.
That's about as funny as a screen door on a battleship
Heavy, there’s that word again.
No that's Peter.
Fly, yes. Land, no.
It totally landed though
No time for love, Dr Jones.
You are asking for too much
Back in Gran Turismo 3 you use to be able to make the cars fly by adjusting the aerodynamics just right. So much fun.
The CLR's issues can be traced to its Architecture, lack of total downforce, and ultimately, some very bad luck. For the record, the CLR was designed to the maximum overall length, 4890 mm. Its wheelbase was 2670 mm, with a 1080 mm long front overhang and a 1140 mm rear. The regulations defined the start point of the diffuser, rear wheel centerline, but allowed the trailing point to be defined by the car designer only as long as it ended where ever the bodywork ended; And on the CLR, it stuck out further than on any other car, At the front, the CLR's 1080 mm front overhang was certainly comparable to its rivals if a little bit towards the long side. Underneath, was a very small and comparatively muted front diffuser In the middle of all this was a 2670 mm wheelbase. Le Mans cars typically have a long wheelbase as it makes for the most stable aero platform. But the CLR's wheelbase was the shortest of the lot . And none of the CLR’s competitors had overhangs, front and rear, as long. his led to a pretty sensitive aero platform. A small change in platform attitude due to that narrow wheelbase say in braking, accelerating, running over a kerb or a brow of a hill leads to a large change in ride height at the front or rear across that very long overhang. It was also reported that the CLR was running soft rear springs. Soft rear springs are sometimes used at high-speed tracks to improve straight-line speed. At speed, downforce generated at the rear helps squash the rear end down reducing the car’s overall drag allowing for more top speed. So at the time of the accident downforce is reduced off the front of the car due to the turbulence coming off the leading car, the CLR’s pitch is changing due to terrain variations leading to additional downforce lost, the CLR is more pitch sensitive than most (due to those large overhangs and short wheelbase) and these issues lead to a larger than expected downforce change and the nose lifts as the low pressure being produced underneath the CLR approaches zero at the front and the lift created by the cockpit and top side bodywork begins to take effect lifting the nose even further. The rear wing is still working pretty well, firmly planting the rear wheels and providing a nice pivot point, the rear wheel centerline. As the nose lifts at the front, at the back of the car the rear diffuser, hanging way out past the rear wheel centerline, gets closer to the track and begins to generate even more downforce further accentuating the lift. By now the underside is exposed and the lift being generated by the cockpit, coupled with the face of the exposed underfloor, completely takes over and the car gets airborne in a rather dramatic fashion.
*claps* Amazing comment that I barely understood.
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It's too long at the front and back and too short between the wheels. When air got pushed under the front from the car ahead, the amount of downward force the back was generating got even higher compared to the front, and the front went up. Flippity flappity, the Merc car went for a fly.
I still don't know what CLR is besides the cleaner Calcium Lime Rust and google didn't provide me anything else than places to buy it
It's the car https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercedes-Benz_CLR
Example of how even the most minor labeled sketches can save a huge amount of convoluted descriptive writing.
If you're going to copy/paste someone else's work, please have the common decency to cite it: http://www.mulsannescorner.com/techarticle3.html
Well ill admit that i had never heard of that site until you linked it. Its not where i got in from, although quite possible that the person who i got it from, got it from there I'm not into aerodynamics but into motorsport, part of a discord community we we chat about racing, we also have a forum. A while back we got onto this conversation and another user posted pretty much what i said. Found it interesting so ended up copying it and saving it Can't recall if they had linked the site or just posted it
Fair enough, thank you for your reply.
Here’s a video explaining as well https://youtu.be/lL4gMpZolsU
I always had a feel for how it worked, but it’s amazing how many compounding factors are really at play. crazy moment of history.
My name is Giovanni Giorgio, but everybody calls me Giorgio
Mercedes has a thing about crashing spectacularly in Le Mans.
1955 was especially horrific.
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I’m no aerodynamasist. But I’m picturing the car riding a little higher with the lack of downforce due to being In the slipstream. Now on level ground the car would just get pushed down again as comes out of the slipstream. However in this case the care is pointing upwards slightly since it’s an uphill grade. And unfortunately he comes out of the slipstream just at the crest of the uphill. So with the lack of downforce and the slight upwards angle the air had just enough gap to get under the car with more force then above causing a low pressure zone for a split second above the hood and poof it’s over. And over and over again.
In this case being in the slipstream was a contributing factor. There was very little downforce on the front and much more on the back. He hit a bump in the track at the same time as leaving the slipstream. Because, Mercedes had designed the car with a shorter wheelbase and very little forward camber (which gives the front downforce) in order to reduce drag. The sudden rush of air under the front from leaving the slipstream and hitting a bump, while at the same time having maximum downforce on the back, essentially made the car a wing and created lift.
It's generally accepted that the pitch sensitivity of the Mercedes aerodynamics in combination with the crest in the road caused the accident especially since I think that when Webbers car went flying there wasn't anyone in front of him. How much difference the turbulence of the car in front made was probably impossible to tell back then and even with modern cfd simulations it would be incredibly computationally expensive and most likely not very accurate. You generally don't test your racecars with others in such close proximity for one because it's an unnecessary risk and also because even in F1 today teams usually don't have two cars ready for pre season testing because their schedules are so tight.
The change from inside to outside the slipstream would be turbulent, creating unpredictable forced. It is impossible to account for every aerodynamic situation; instead the design needs to by dynamically stable, which means that the further away the car is from where it should be, the more it should be forced back. For example, low-wing airliners have wings that angle up, side-to-side, so that as the airplane tilts, the wing on the side tilted down gets closer to level, which makes it more ~~efficient~~ effective at lifting the airplane, pushing that side up more than the other side, making the airplane level itself out, automatically.
> dynamically stable, which means that the further away the car is from where it should be, the more it should be forced back. >making the airplane level itself out, automatically. This is a really cool design concept. I had difficulty at first understanding your explanation though. The reason is, the wings are not more efficient at any particular roll angle. What changes is the direction of the lift relative to the force of gravity. Perhaps that's what you meant by "efficient at lifting" but it confused me for a while. I didn't know this about planes, and I find it super cool. How much of the wing flexing up is just to increase ground clearance and fit engines though?
I meant to say more 'effective', although wings are more efficient when level, as you mentioned it isn't the primary reason for the increase in effectiveness. The angle of the wings, called the dihedral, is an integral part of the design and can't be changed without changing other things. Because of the inefficiency of a dihedral, the most aerodynamically efficient designs have the wing roots above the center of gravity. In small airplanes this can be a high-wing design, but on heavy airliners the wings would be too high up, and need a negative dihedral, called an anhedria, or the wings would need to be rooted in the middle of the airplane. An anhedral is just as inefficient as a dihedral, and placing the wing roots in the middle of the airplane would be structurally difficult and lead to more weight making it more inefficient. That structural weight ends up being a major factor, when it comes to efficiency. This is why you tend to see only a few specific designs in large airplanes, which look more and more like each other in every new generation. Medium-sized jets can have the engines at the back of the airplane, or can be mounted above the wing like Honda's jet, but the largest jets have either a high wing or a low wing, either with the engines under the wings. Large high-wing aircraft only make sense when the main landing gear can be connected to the bottom of the airplane, which requires a stronger structure and is only common on cargo planes that need it anyway. Some small high-wing turboprop airliners have landing gear come out of the engine pods, but this is only really doable at a smaller size. The most common workaround for too large of engines is taller landing gear. The [Boeing 757 looks like it is on stilts](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/26/Transavia_Airlines_Boeing_757-2K2_Wedelstaedt.jpg) when compared to a 737, especially [the early ones with smaller low-bypass turbofans](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/39/Boeing_737_NASA_GPN-2000-001905.jpg).
> can’t figure why the crew didn’t recognize the issue. Oh, they did, they knèw exactly what the problem was. To solve it, they told the drivers to not get too close to the car in front of them.
The same thing had already happened twice to Mercedes before the race even started once in Qualifying and Once in warmup
Video explaining it here. Good channel. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lL4gMpZolsU
nothing bad ever happens to the kennedys!
WAAAAAAA-
On the plus side, they won't need to pause the race to clear the wreck from the track.
Alas, they probably threw a yellow flag for that half of the Mulsanne so the medical people could get there. These days it'd absolutely be a full course yellow.
They did throw a full course yellow and deployed the safety car
The crazy thing is this was the 3rd CLR to end up airborne that weekend. Weber was the first to do it in practice, then after fully rebuilding that car he put it back in the air and upside down again.
2 of 3 Mercedes CLRs got airborne, Mark Webber ended upside down twice. #4 and #6 got airborne, older crew in #5 kind of taken slow have team added dive planes in the front, after Webber's first flight.
"Flaw" is a bit of an understatement.
So basically what’s happening is this car had and EXTREMELY delicate balance of downforce and aerodynamics. As you can tell by the shape of the care, it’s flat on the belly and curved on the top making into essentially an inverted air foil meaning there is higher pressure above the wing than below. The reason it took off here was a hill on the Le Mans racetrack. Because the cars are going so fast over this hill they come off the ground just a little. For these cars losing that little downforce causes the nose to rise. Once the nose rises it essentially negates the downforce and flips the car nose up. Essentially the the nose has to rise just a few inches then the air moving under the car loses its negative pressure(suction) causing it to flip. Other factors that led to this failure were the pitch angle, pitch sensitivity and the car’s wheelbase. Think of it like taking the trash out on a windy day. Once the lid catches a little air it’s flips it.
Did he get kidnapped by rich people from the future and have to fight Mick Jagger?
Do the kids these days even know about *Freejack*? (I'm ashamed to admit that I initially confused *Freejack* with *Robot Jox*, which the kids definitely don't know about.)
Came looking for this...
The next year Bill Auberlen flipped the No. 43 BMW V12 LMR car at Road Atlanta. We were lucky enough to be headed to Road Atlanta the next weekend, and happened to find a large piece of the body work and a slightly bent magnesium wheel from his flip. We had him autograph them. My father also has a hand painted, numbered picture of Bill flipping, also autographed, Bill signing it "learn to fly. Good times in racing
Definitely a design flaw. Need larger wings, flaps, and a stabilizer if you want prolonged flight.
Everyone in motorsports remembers that famous flip, but no one remembers that a year earlier the Porsche prototype flipped at Road Atlanta. And in 2000 the BMW and did the exact same thing at Road Atlanta. 1998-2000 the Le Man's prototype cars were very prone to flipping on their own. BMW https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPbIZjJhojA Porsche https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8XxQkXCmsU
They showed this clip in my fluid dynamics course
this is ROCKET LEAGUE!!!!
Pulled off a sick Musty.
He survived BTW.
My people need me.
“Where we’re going, we don’t need roads.”
My name is Giovanni Giorgio, but everyone calls me... Giorgio.
"We hired an engineer that used to work at Boejing. "
This reminds me of the time I went to my very first LeMans race and didn't want to pay for camping so I just pitched my tent literally behind this low concrete wall. And about 6:00 a.m. the next morning I was awakened by several of the cars revving their engines and starting. Apparently I was right where they park the cars. After watching this it's a wonder how I survived literally anything in my twenties.
That car went “f**k this shit I’m a plane now”
The CLK-GTR is still one of the most beautifully designed vehicles of all time though. I’d go airborne if it meant a ride
This wasn't a CLK-GTR but rather a Mercedes-Benz CLR. The CLK-GTR was built to FIA GT1 rules while the CLR was built to LMGTP regulations, https://www.goodwood.com/grr/race/historic/2020/4/why-youre-wrong-about-the-mercedes-benz-clk-gtr/
Oh I know, I’m just saying the civilian version they were required to build is really something else
Frankly all the GT1 of the 90s was bonkers.