Lance Macklin, who has died aged 82, was one of the most gifted post-war racing drivers, but he never made the most of his gifts.
Partly this was due to his relaxed approach to life, but it owed something to the disastrous Le Mans 24-hour race in 1955, when the Mercedes of Pierre Levegh struck the rear of Macklin's Austin Healey and hurtled into the crowd, killing more than 80 people.
The accident came about after Mike Hawthorn, driving a factory D-type Jaguar, made for his pit in a hurry after racing for more than two hours with World Champion Juan Manuel Fangio in his Mercedes. Hawthorn pulled in front of Macklin and braked hard. The brakes on the Healey were no match for those on the Jaguar and, in order to avoid running into Hawthorn, Macklin had to swerve out from behind it - straight into the path of Levegh.
Macklin regarded Hawthorn as a friend, and so was incensed when, in his autobiography, Challenge Me The Race (1958), Hawthorn absolved himself of all blame for the crash, and failed to say who he thought had been responsible. As Levegh had died in the crash, Macklin concluded that Hawthorn was pointing the finger at him, and sued for libel.
Hawthorn's death in a road crash in January 1959 put an end to that, but in Juan Fangio's autobiography My Twenty Years in Racing (1961), he wrote that Hawthorn "had evidently not calculated his pit's position correctly".
Macklin was deeply upset by the Le Mans disaster and his morale received another blow a few months later, when he narrowly avoided a crash which killed two drivers during the Tourist Trophy at Dundrod. He gave up racing in 1956, persuaded to do so by his girlfriend Shelagh Cooper, whom he then married.
Macklin had tremendous athletic flair and, as his friend George Abecassis once said, "he could have been a very great racing driver . . . [or] an Olympic skier. He has a quite astonishing sense of balance and I don't believe that there is any game he couldn't have played really well, but the extraordinary thing was that he was never, ever interested."
Lance Noel Macklin was born at Kensington, west London, on September 2 1919 the son of Noel Macklin, who designed the Invicta sportscar in 1925 and was knighted for designing motor gunboats in the war.
After Eton and further studies in Switzerland, Lance volunteered for the Navy in 1939; he was assigned, appropriately, to motor gunboats. When hostilities ceased, he went into the motor trade with a friend and set out to realise his schoolboy ambition - to be a racing driver.
He bought a half-share in a Grand Prix Maserati, and attempted to enter a race on the Isle of Man. He was surprised to be turned down on the grounds that he had absolutely no racing experience. He finally got his career under way with one of his father's Invictas.
It was typical of Macklin that he should hone his racing skills in Belgrave Square. "In those days it was surfaced with wooden blocks," he recalled. "And the moment it rained it became so slippery it wasn't true. I'd come out of a nightclub at two in the morning, leap into the old Invicta and spend 10 minutes going round the Square in a four-wheel drift."
A good performance at Chimay won him a drive with Ian Metcalfe in his 8-litre Bentley in the Spa 24-hour race. Although they failed to finish, Macklin's performance impressed John Eason Gibson, team manager of the winning Aston Martin. As a result, Macklin won a place in David Brown's Aston Martin team for 1949. The following year George Abecassis joined him and they finished fifth at Le Mans in a DB 2.
Hersham and Walton Motors was at that time planning a season of Formula Two racing with their home-built HWMs. Impressed with Macklin's speed, Abecassis invited him to drive for the fledgling team and he joined forces with Stirling Moss, among others.
Although never able to compete properly with Ferrari and Maserati, HWM enjoyed considerable success on the Continent, which provided a rewarding playground for Macklin and Moss who, when they were not racing, were chasing girls.
A good-looking, smooth-talking charmer, Macklin was easily distracted by female company. If his car blew up in practice he would not be too disappointed. "Oh well," he would say, "I'll go into town and find myself a bird." If there was some blonde he was after he would simply not turn up to practice.
Although he drove an Aston Martin to third place at Le Mans in 1951 (with Eric Thompson), Macklin had no more real success with the Feltham concern than he had had with HWM. He also felt he was worth more than the £300 retainer he was paid by Aston Martin, and when offered £1,000 to lead the Bristol sportscar team in 1953, he jumped at the chance. He had even less success that year. He later admitted that "leaving Astons was probably the worst mistake of my life".
In 1954 he joined the Austin-Healey team, finishing a fine third overall in the Sebring 12 Hours, with George Huntoon. But the next year brought the Le Mans crash.
After giving up motor racing, Macklin joined the Facel Vega car company in Paris to run its export division, until the firm went bust in 1963. He later worked for a time for the London car salesroom H R Owen, before going to live in Spain, where he remained until his health failed. He died on August 29.
His first marriage was dissolved in 1963. He married secondly, Gill McComish, but that marriage was later also dissolved. He is survived by a son and daughter from his first marriage and a son from his second.
