Wolfgang Von Trips - Death in Italy

Death in Italy

The 1961 Italian Grand Prix on 10 September could have been the culmination of von Trips' career, as a third place would have been sufficient to secure the Formula One World Drivers Championship that year. At the Italian Grand Prix at Monza, his Ferrari collided with Jim Clark's Lotus. His car became airborne and crashed into a side barrier, fatally throwing von Trips from the car, and killing fifteen spectators.

Clark described the accident, saying:

"Von Trips and I were racing along the straightaway and were nearing one of the banked curves, the one on the southern end. We were about 100 metres from the beginning of the curve. Von Trips was running close to the inside of the track. I was closely following him, keeping near the outside. At one point Von Trips shifted sideways so that my front wheels collided with his back wheels. It was the fatal moment. Von Trips' car spun twice and went into the guardrail along the inside of the track. Then it bounced back, struck my own car and bounced down into the crowd."

At the time of his death von Trips was leading the Formula One World Championship. The belief that Wolfgang von Trips would not have been spared his fate, as a plane he was scheduled to fly in to the USA crashed over Scotland, is an urban myth. However, he seemed to be jinxed at the Autodromo Nazionale Monza, where he crashed cars in the 1956 Italian Grand Prix and the 1958 Italian Grand Prix, and was injured in both events.

In 1961 von Trips had established a go-kart race track in Kerpen, Germany. The track was later leased by Rolf Schumacher, whose sons, Michael and Ralf, made their first laps there. Coincidentally, Michael's win in the 1992 Belgian Grand Prix was the first full-length Grand Prix won by a German since von Trips' last win at Aintree in 1961.