The pits were a long, breast-high wall laden with team personnel and refuelling rigs like great insects. They faced the spectator area, three enclosures and huge, ponderous grandstands set back. In front of them the crowd, 50 deep and more, stood tightly packed up to the protective earthen bank on the rim of the road. It was a wonderful place to watch the cars go by just in front of you and see all the drama of the pit stops which were now due to begin. A pedestrian tunnel, an umbilical cord, passed under the road.Macklin saw a Jaguar and two Mercedes loom into the middle distance behind him, beginning to swallow the ground as they came.Mike Hawthorn, driving the Jaguar, wore a bow tie even in Grand Prix races. Another ex-public schoolboy, blond and genuinely debonair, he liked pretty girls, too.

He did not like German cars and sometimes used four-letter words to describe them. Nor, so soon after the war, do the potential strains between a British and a German team need elaborating. Since the race began at 4pm he had engaged in a ferocious, almost fanatical, struggle with the Mercedes of the Argentine Juan-Manuel Fangio, the greatest driver in the world. Once Fangio got past and Hawthorn confessed to being momentarily mesmerised by the whole Mercedes legend. Then he thought, damn it, why should a German car beat a British car? The 300,000 crowd watched with mounting excitement and incredulity – this was supposed to be a 24-hour endurance test – as the two cars hunted each other nose-to-tail.

Fangio beat the lap record twice, Hawthorn equalled that, Fangio lowered it twice again, Hawthorn beat that, Fangio beat that, and Hawthorn produced a climactic lap to beat that.Jaguar and Mercedes fielded three-car teams and Hawthorn nursed an intractable problem: an inexperienced co-driver, Ivor Bueb, while Fangio would hand over to Stirling Moss. Hawthorn could hold Fangio during his stints, but Bueb could never hold Moss. Norman Dewis, another Jaguar driver that year at Le Mans, explains the tactic that was designed to combat this. “Hawthorn [would] go out and set a fast pace – so the Mercs would chase him – with no real thought of winning Le Mans with that car. Hawthorn was sent off to blow up the Mercedes.” This would open the way for another Jaguar to win.Passing the pits, Hawthorn saw a signal to come in next time round and hand over to Bueb. Macklin had no way of knowing that, nor did he know that, of the two Mercedes he’d seen coming up, the nearest was being driven by a 50-year old Frenchman, Pierre Levegh, who was on an orthodox endurance run and about to be lapped by Fangio.Levegh, a pseudonym, had dedicated his life to winning Le Mans and three years before tried in a French car to drive the whole 24 hours himself.