On this day in 1961, at the Italian Grand Prix at Monza, Wolfgang von Trips's Ferrari collided with another car, left the track and struck a barrier at the edge of the circuit. He was killed, and so were fifteen people who had come to watch. He was thirty-three years old and leading the drivers' championship with two races left.
The people who died that afternoon were standing where spectators stood in those years: close to the track, behind wire fencing, near enough to hear the engines change note. Most of them are remembered by name in Italy. They had bought a ticket to a Sunday race.
In the years that followed, motor racing began to rethink where a crowd could safely be. Fences were moved back, run-off was widened, and the old habit of letting people press up against the edge of a fast corner was slowly given up. It was a change made late, and paid for by the people who were there. I think of them today, and of his family, and I will leave it there.
At Monza in those years the spectator banks stood only a few metres from the asphalt, separated by a low earth bank and wire mesh fencing of the kind that stopped a person but not a car. Toby, thank you for naming plainly where they were standing.
The newsreels of that week handled it very quietly, Toby — a few seconds of the wreck at most, then the results, then nothing. I have read that a great part of the crowd stayed where they were until the race ended, standing, hardly a sound from them.