The Way to Dusty Death. Alistair MacLean

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      The official inquiry into the cause of the accident, held almost immediately afterwards, predictably failed to indict any one man as the sole cause of the disaster. Official race inquiries almost never did, including the notorious inquiry into that unparalleled Le Mans holocaust when seventy-three spectators were killed and no one was found to blame whereas it was common knowledge at the time that one man and one man only – dead now these many years – had been the person responsible for it.

      This particular inquiry failed to indict, in spite of the fact that two or three thousand people in the main stands would unhesitatingly have laid the sole charge at the door of Johnny Harlow. But even more damning was the incontrovertible evidence supplied in the small hall where the inquiry was held by a TV playback of the entire incident. The projection screen had been small and stained but the picture clear enough and the sound effects all too vivid and true to life. In the re-run of the film – it lasted barely twenty seconds but was screened five times – three Grand Prix cars, viewed from the rear but being closely followed by the telescopic zoom lens, could be seen approaching the pits. Harlow, in his Coronado, was closing up on the leading car, a vintage privately-entered Ferrari that was leading only by virtue of the fact that it had already lost a lap. Moving even more quickly than Harlow and well clear on the other side of the track was a works-entered fire-engine-red Ferrari driven by a brilliant Californian, Isaac Jethou. In the straight Jethou’s twelve cylinders had a considerable edge over Harlow’s eight and it was clear that he intended to pass. It seemed that Harlow, too, was quite aware of this for his brake lights came on in keeping with his apparent intention of easing slightly and tucking in behind the slower car while Jethou swept by.

      Suddenly, incredibly, Harlow’s brake lights went out and the Coronado swerved violently outwards as if Harlow had decided he could overtake the car in front before Jethou could overtake him. If that had been his inexplicable intention then it had been the most foolhardy of his life, for he had taken his car directly into the path of Isaac Jethou who, on that straight, could not have been travelling at less than 180 miles an hour and who, in the fraction of the second available to him, had never even the most remote shadow of a chance to take the only braking or avoiding action that could have saved him.

      At the moment of impact, Jethou’s front wheel struck squarely into the side of Harlow’s front wheel. For Harlow, the consequences of the collision were, in all conscience, serious enough for it sent his car into an uncontrollable spin, but for Jethou they were disastrous. Even above the cacophonous clamour of engines under maximum revolutions and the screeching of locked tyres on the tarmac, the bursting of Jethou’s front tyre was heard as a rifle shot and from that instant Jethou was a dead man. His Ferrari, wholly out of control and now no more than a mindless mechanical monster bent on its own destruction, smashed into and caromed off the nearside safety barrier and, already belching gouts of red flame and black oily smoke, careered wildly across the track to strike the far side barrier, rear end first, at a speed of still over a hundred miles an hour. The Ferrari, spinning wildly, slid down the track for about two hundred yards, turned over twice and came to rest on all four wrecked wheels, Jethou still trapped in the cockpit but even then almost certainly dead. It was then that the red flames turned to white.

      That Harlow had been directly responsible for Jethou’s death was beyond dispute but Harlow, with eleven Grand Prix wins behind him in seventeen months was, by definition and on his record, the best driver in the world and one simply does not indict the best driver in the world. It is not the done thing. The whole tragic affair was attributed to the race-track equivalent of an act of God and the curtain was discreetly lowered to indicate the end of the act.

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