Michel Wilmet's Fatal Crash @ Spa Francorchamps 1975 (Aftermath)

The 1975 edition of the 24 Heures de Spa-Francorchamps - that year valid for the Trophée de l'Avenir - was held on 26 and 27 of July of that year. Sadly, it was marred by two fatal accidents that resulted in the deaths of two men and in injuries to several others.

The first fatality occurred on the eighth hour of the race, in the evening of Saturday, 26 July 1975. The Opel Commodore GS/E #14 entered by the Dutch National Racing Team for Wim Boshuis, Aloys Mattijssen and Loek Vermeulen, while Boshuis driving, had a broken half-shaft after passing Stavelot. At La Carrière the car spun, and stopped in the middle the road. The oncoming drivers couldn't avoid impact and Boshuis’s vehicle was then T-boned at high speed by two BMW 3.0 CSis - one driven by Jeannot Sauvage, another by Jean-Jacques Feider - and by the Sunbeam Avenger driven by Freddy Grainal. Boshuis was instantly killed in the accident.

The carnage from this accident - involving four cars - was such that several hours were needed to completely clean the track. Those were times before the use of safety cars, and the neutralization of that sector of the track was nearly unthinkable. Therefore the race continued, even though the marshals continued to work on the middle of the road. Under the pitch dark of the night the marshals had to resort to white handkerchiefs to attract the attention of the drivers. Most competitors drove cautiously through La Carrière, but some of the drivers did not lift - and took the marshals as moving chicanes instead.

Less than half an hour after that pile-up, another serious accident occurred - this time with the #1 BMW 3.0 CSi entered by Luigi Cimarosti's team Luigi Racing, for drivers Alain Peltier and Marc Demol. That car was one of the main contenders for the race, it then occupied the second position in the overall classification, and Peltier had set the fastest lap of the race just before Boshuis' crash.

With Peltier still at the wheel, the BMW suffered a blown tyre - probably after running over debris from the other accident. It left the road at Blanchimont, approximately two kilometers after La Carrière, hit a guardrail and somersaulted. A young marshal, Michel Wilmet, 20, was hit by a piece of guard-rail that had not been properly fixed, and was killed almost instantly; another man by surname Desnaril, had a fractured wrist.

The accidents at the 1975 24 Heures de Spa-Francorchamps intensified the criticisms that the circuit had been facing over its safety - and that had cost the transfer of the Belgian Formula 1 grand prix to Zolder and Nivelles-Baulers. One of the consequences from the accidents in that event was the adoption for the 1976 race of flashing light triangles to warn drivers of dangers on the race track - replacing the handkerchiefs used by marshals until then.

R.I.P