1958 24 Hours of Le Mans
| 1958 24 Hours of Le Mans | |
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The 1958 24 Heures du Mans was the 26th running of the 24 Hours of Le Mans, Grand Prix of Endurance, and took place on 21 and 22 June 1958, on the Circuit de la Sarthe. It was also the fifth round of the 1958 World Sports Car Championship, which was running to new regulations introduced at the beginning of the season. Some 150,000 spectators had gathered for Europe’s classic sports car race, around the 8.38-mile course. The prospect of an exciting duel between Ferrari, Jaguar, Aston Martin and giantkiller Porsche was enough to draw large crowds to the 24 Hours race.
The race was dominated by fifteen hours of rain, three of which were torrential, marking a bad summer solstice. Thirteen accidents, one killing gentleman-driver Jean-Marie Brussin. It marked the first ever overall win for an American and a Belgian driver and was the third win for the Scuderia Ferrari. The works Testarossas took over the lead in the third hour when, this year, it was the British challenge that ran out of steam. After their 1957 rout, the Italians took their revenge as Osca also won the Index of Performance.
This year, the second under the new FIA Appendix C rules, a revision put a maximum engine size of 3.0 litres. This was an effort to limit the very high speeds of the new Maserati and Ferrari prototypes (and, indirectly ruling out the Jaguars) in the Sportscar Championship. The equivalence for forced-induction engines (supercharged or turbo) was reduced from x1.4 down to only x1.2 to encourage manufacturers to utilise that technology.
For the race itself, the Automobile Club de l'Ouest (ACO) allowed an increase of a driver’s stint to a maximum of 40 laps (from 36), although the 14-hour total limit was still in place. Pushing a car anywhere on the track, aside from in the pit-line, was now no longer allowed.
Following Colin Chapman’s example for Lotus in the previous year, many cars adopted the ‘wraparound’ windscreen to meet the official dimension requirements. This year Chapman introduced tonneau-covers for the passenger seat to reduce draught and air resistance.
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