His Last Victory: Peter Collins & Ferrari at Silverstone

The Klementaski Collection has recently acquired the remaining archive of T. C. ("Tom") March who covered certain major British races from 1950 up into the late 1970s. This photograph is from those in his archive and shows Peter Collins in the Ferrari 246F1 on his way to his last F1 win in the British Grand Prix at Silverstone on July 19, 1958. At the bottom of this post you will find directions to the Tom March archive on their website.

For this race Ferrari entered three cars for Collins, Mike Hawthorn and Wolfgang von Trips. At the start Collins shot out of second row on the grid right into the lead followed by Hawthorn and the Vanwall driven by Stirling Moss. Moss retired with a blown engine at one-third distance leaving Hawthorn to cruise behind Collins to the finish while von Trips also retired somewhat later, again with engine failure.

This was the last Grand Prix win for Collins and took place under a brilliant clear sky. Two weeks later at the German Grand Prix on the challenging Nürburgring Nordschleife he and Hawthorn were chasing Tony Brooks' Vanwall when Collins misjudged the entry to the right hand corner in the Pflanzgarten section, slid into a bank and was thrown from his car into a tree as the car flipped over. Collins suffered head injuries which proved fatal as he was being taken by helicopter to a hospital in Cologne. The 1958 Grand Prix season was truly a season of death for Ferrari as Luigi Musso had been killed when his Ferrari crashed at Reims during the French Grand Prix, then Collins in Germany and World Champion Mike Hawthorn in a road crash in England during the winter.

Photo by Tom March ©The Klemantaski Collection – http://www.klemcoll.com

To see the Tom March photographs on their website, please click on this link: http://www.klemcoll.com/TheGallery.aspx. Then select Photographer>Tom March and click on Search.