Mike Hawthorn

MIKE HAWTHORN d1959. British F1 driver with Ferrari / Vanwall & BRM between 1952 and 1958. 47 races with 3 wins. Le Mans 24hour winner in 1955. The First British F1 World Champion driving a Ferrari Dino 246 in 1958 (with one win in France and five second places). He retired from F1 at the end of his Championship season. In earlier life, he had lost a kidney to infection and began suffering problems with his remaining kidney in 1955. This was so serious, he was at the time only expected to live a short number of years. However, just a matter of months into his retirement (on 22nd January 1959), he died aged just 29 in a road accident on the A3 by-pass near Guildford, driving his highly tuned British Racing Green Jaguar 3.4. What happened that day is still unknown. Suggested causes being ; driver error, mechanical failure or blackout. The crash has been attributed to a combination of high speed, bad weather and competitiveness. Rob Walker was ahead of him and perhaps Mike Hawthorn pushed his car too hard in an effort to pass Walker's Mercedes 300SL. Hawthorn's Jaguar (nicknamed "the Merceater") was heavily modified for high power and speed. "No Kraut car could overtake or out-accelerate ....." Hawthorn's Jaguar (these are the words in his biography "Challenge Me The Race"). A close relation of Hawthorn's had been killed in the war, hence his dislike of Germans ..............