Accident of Wolfgang Von Trips at Monza, 1961.

Wolfgang von Trips’s crash during 1961 Monza race is one of the worst accidents in F1 I think. On the long straight before Parabolica he made a contact with Jim Clark while he was trying to overtake Clark, which caused him to lose control of his car and went straight into the crowd at high speed. Von Trips died and also 15 spectators died as well. Before this race Von Trips was leading the Championship ahead of Phil Hill and he had strong chances of winning the Championship of 1961. In the end Phil Hill won the Championship, but I don’t think he wanted it to happen quite like this.

Just stumbled upon these videos again on youtube and thought I’d make a post here on CT for the people who haven’t heard of this accident yet. Imo this is an interesting (and terrible) part of F1 history. You can clearly see that 60s was still an era of optimism in motorsports, even though many accidents had happened during 50s (for example the Le Mans crash in 1955). Crowd was extremely close to a track on high speed section with next to no cover between cars and the spectators. Just crazy that nobody at the time had any thoughts that it’d be very likely for a big accident to happen there.