September 10: On This Day in World History … briefly
At the time of his death von Trips was leading the Formula One World Championship.
1961: Wolfgang von Trips and 13 spectators die at deadliest Grand Prix crash
Wolfgang Alexander Albert Eduard Maximilian Reichsgraf Berghe von Trips – also known simply as Wolfgang Graf Berghe von Trips and nicknamed ‘Taffy’ by friends and fellow racers, was a German racing driver and the son of a noble Rhineland family who participated in 29 Formula One World Championship Grand Prix races, debuting on September 2, 1956. He won two races, secured one pole position, achieved six podiums and scored a total of 56 championship points. The 1961 Italian Grand Prix on 10 September saw von Trips tightly locked in the battle Formula One World Drivers’ Championship that year with his teammate Phil Hill. During the race at Monza, his Ferrari collided with Jim Clark’s Lotus. His car became airborne and crashed into a side barrier, fatally throwing von Trips from the car, and killing fifteen spectators.
Clark described the accident, saying:
“Von Trips and I were racing along the straightaway and were nearing one of the banked curves, the one on the southern end. We were about 100 metres from the beginning of the curve. Von Trips was running close to the inside of the track. I was closely following him, keeping near the outside. At one point Von Trips shifted sideways so that my front wheels collided with his back wheels. It was the fatal moment. Von Trips’s car spun twice and went into the guardrail along the inside of the track. Then it bounced back, struck my own car and bounced down into the crowd.”
Movie footage of the crash that surfaced after the race showed that Clark’s memory of the incident was inaccurate: after colliding with Clark, von Trips’s car rode directly up an embankment on the outside of the track and struck a fence behind which spectators were closely packed. He had previous incidents at the Autodromo Nazionale Monza, where he crashed cars in the 1956 Italian Grand Prix and the 1958 Italian Grand Prix, and was injured in both events. In 1961 von Trips established a go-kart race track in Kerpen, Germany. The track was later leased by Rolf Schumacher, whose sons, Michael and Ralf, made their first laps there. Coincidentally, Michael’s win in the 1992 Belgian Grand Prix was the first full-length Grand Prix won by a German since von Trips’s last win at Aintree in 1961.
Most notable historic snippets or facts extracted from the book ‘On This Day’ first published in 1992 by Octopus Publishing Group Ltd, London, as well as additional supplementary information extracted from Wikipedia.
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