Most of us are aware of what is regarded as the greatest ever feat of endurance at Le Mans. It was Pierre Levegh’s attempt to do the entire race alone, sure he could hear something awry in the engine of his Lago-Talbot and convinced that he alone had the mechanical sympathy to make it last the distance. In the end, the irony was that it wasn’t the engine that failed, but the driver trying to look after it when, at or beyond the point of clinical exhaustion while leading by miles with little more than an hour to go, he missed a gear and blew said motor to bits. Of course the race win was duly seized by Mercedes-Benz, and brought Levegh to the attention of Alfred Neubauer who hired him for Benz’s next Le Mans outing in 1955 with the catastrophic consequences we all know so well.
Fewer, I think, know of Luigi Chinetti’s successful attempt to win the race in a Ferrari in 1949, driving for over 22½ hours because the car’s owner, entrant and co-driver Lord Selsdon was so ill he could only manage just over an hour in the car on Sunday morning. Chinetti’s win was his third, 17 years after his first (a span to this date equalled by Hurley Haywood alone) and at the
