It was on around a month ago and the end shows a montage of some photos or maybe stills from a camera pieced together to reconstruct the incident.

Very chilling stuff.

 

Still is. With F1 crashes on TV people forget how much it stings if you get in wrong in less than state of the art equipment. Know people (including my dad) who've been damned lucky to survive a bad crash on a circuit

 

Yes saw it a few weeks ago

 

Fortunately safety is a lot better than it used to be for driver and spectator, but there have been quite a few nasty crashes and deaths in motorsport over the last year or so - very few of them make the news so there's not much awareness.

I might try to catch this on iplayer - how was it factually incorrect though? Don't want to get all interested in it and then realise it was a load of rubbish!

 

Dreamer do watch it and remember this quote from the PH thread

Some of the minor details are wrong (like the BHP output of the D type) but they are minor points. Considering it happened 45 years ago and those that are still alive clearly don't like talking about it I think it was a good documentary!

Watch it and read Shrewd Apes posts on the PH thread that will give you a better understanding of what went on.

 

As was mentioned on the PH thread, the documentary wasn't helped by the narrator, who certainly didn't come across as a motorsport enthusiast.

I thought it was going to deal with the conspiracy theories that said the death toll was higher due to the use of magnesium in the Merc and the suspicion they used some lethal fuel additives. These weren't addressed at all.

I was left with the impression that Hawthorn was largely to blame. He overtook Macklin, pulled back in front of him, and then slowed down to enter the pits. This clearly caught Macklin out who swerved to avoid Hawthorn and collided with Levegh.

Had Hawthorn just held up behind Macklin there wouldn't have been a problem.

 

The magnesium was mentioned.
Read Shrewd Ape's posts on the PH thread. He put the montage together and saw ALOT more footage then they were allowed to show.

 

Notwithstanding the poorly scripted narration and the factual inaccuracies, I thought the programme was OK.

I thought it handled a very sensitive subject quite sympathetically, the eyewitnesses were still clearly shaken, even half a century on and the carnage caused wasn't dwelt on too much, just enough to give an idea of what it must have been like.
The programme didn't try to apportion blame either, and watching the footage the only conclusion I could come to was that the cause was simply 'one of those things', Hawthorn probably shouldn't have slowed immediately after overtaking (especially with disc brakes, when everyone else had drums), Macklin seemed to lose control slightly under braking, Levegh could have held back until it was safer.....a racing incident as far as I can tell and 99 times out of 100 would have not resulted in any problems whatsoever.

I do however think the title was ill-judged, and they didn't make enough of the fact that the magnesium Mercedes made the fire far worse than it should have been.

 

But not specifically how much more dangerous it is in a fire compared to other materials.

As Mark says, probably a "racing incident" ...

 

Where's the PH link?

I had read about the magnesium - presumably caused an issue if they tried to put it out with water