It is virtually unheard of for two Grand Prix cars to crash into each other after the race has finished, but that is precisely what happened at the end of an eventful 1962 French Grand Prix.
The race was returning to Rouen for the first time in five years, but without the Ferraris because of a strike in Italy. For this, the fourth race of the World Championship season, Jim Clark put the new Lotus 25 on pole, ahead of Graham Hill’s BRM and Bruce McLaren’s Cooper. The three drivers each had a win to their credit that year. Hill crossed the line first in the Dutch Grand Prix at Zandvoort, McLaren emerged victorious in Monaco and, three weeks before Rouen, Clark had picked up his first championship win, at Spa. And now just 0.6 seconds separated the three different marques on the front row in France.
Hill got away first from Clark and McLaren but his BRM team-mate Richie Ginther stalled on the grid and had to be pushed to the pits, finally joining the race almost a lap in arrears. By lap three of 54, John Surtees’ Lola had moved up to second and was threatening Hill but a pit stop through fuel starvation on unlucky lap 13 dropped Surtees back to eighth. The Coopers were also proving surprisingly unreliable. Jack Brabham had to retire on lap 11 with a collapsed rear suspension and McLaren’s car was plagued with the same problem. Although the New Zealander was able to rejoin the race, the delay had cost him any realistic chance of victory.
Up front, Hill had pulled out a healthy 22-second lead over Clark by lap 30. He had just lapped Jack Lewis for the second time when the Cooper’s brakes failed and the car rammed Hill’s BRM under braking for the next corner, sending Hill in a spin. This mishap enabled Clark to sneak through, only for the Scot to retire three laps later with a faulty front suspension. With 12 laps remaining and a 25-second advantage over Dan Gurney’s Porsche, Hill seemed assured of his second win of the year, but then the BRM developed a fuel-injection difficulty and came to a halt at the hairpin, allowing Gurney to go on and gain his and Porsche’s first championship victory. Having fought his way back up through the field, Surtees slipped down again with gearbox trouble, and so South African Tony Maggs was able to finish a surprise second in a Cooper, a lap behind the winner. Ginther was a further lap back in third.
But the real drama of the race was yet to come. As Surtees crossed the line in fifth and headed for the pits, he found his way blocked. At that point, Maurice Trintignant’s Rob Walker-entered Lotus came rushing through in seventh and, swerving to avoid Surtees, left eighth-finisher Trevor Taylor in a works Lotus with nowhere to go. Taylor smashed into Trintignant at 80mph (128.7km/h), wrecking both cars but fortunately causing no lasting damage to either himself or the Frenchman. It was an expensive end to the day for both Rob Walker and Lotus.