Sweden's first F1 winner Jo Bonnier was born OTD in 1930. A committed safety campaigner, he lost his life at Le Mans, a race the Swede consistently criticised for being too dangerous. Adam Cooper remembers him in today's Great Read
Despite the massive success he achieved elsewhere in sports car racing, Jo Bonnier hated Le Mans. He hated the fact that if you tried to actually race, your car would fail. And above all, he hated what he felt were unacceptable risks.
"I've done it because I've been under contract to do it," he told writer Peter Manso in 1969. "It was part of my job, but it's not racing. The moment you start to race at Le Mans you're not going to finish. So what you're trying to do is just nurse the car through 24 hours, and this is not what a grand prix driver likes. And it's unnecessarily dangerous. You have little cars and big cars, with a tremendous speed difference. And you have a bunch of amateurs who know nothing about race driving..."
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