On November 17, 1956 at Paramount Ranch, Bill Pollack's throttle on his Corvette stuck wide open and he went off the road and down an embankment where the car finally came to a stop. Bill was taken to the hospital in the ambulance.
Quite a few younger folk seek me out and want to hear about how wonderful sports car racing was during the fifties. Without exception, they view those days as halcyon and lament that they weren’t there too. Those of us who were there then often look back with nostalgia, but we also sometimes remember that all was not a bed of roses.
Art Evans
Racing during the fifties was dangerous. A number of our friends didn’t make it to the sixties. It’s commonly thought that 1955 was racing’s most tragic year. Brock Yates has even written a book about it, titled Against Death and Time: One Fatal Season in Racing’s Glory Years. One of the worst accidents happened at Le Mans when Pierre Levegh, in a Mercedes-Benz 300SLR, went into the crowd. Numbers vary depending on accounts, but close to 90 didn’t survive.
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