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That Mike might even have been using a hand throttle while changing gear and accelerating rapidly downhill through a corner, in the
wet, beggars belief
One of the discussions of the accident in which Mike Hawthorn died in 1959 had been in Classic Cars magazine (February 1999
issue) which revived a theory raised by Chris Nixon in his book 'Mon Ami Mate'. In this detailed account of the lives of Mike Hawthorn
and Peter Collins is a chapter devoted to "Mike's Last Mile", in which Nixon proposes that to driver error and conditions should be
added a previously undisclosed modification to the Jaguar - a hand throttle "fitted to the car a few days earlier."
Chris Nixon cites the possibility "that either some part of the device failed at about the time the Jaguar began its fatal slide, or perhaps
Mike made a frantic attempt to disengage it, only to increase the engine's speed by mistake in the heat of the moment. He would have
fought to correct the slide purely on reactions but those reactions were not programmed for a hand throttle which had been installed
only a few days before and which was now holding the engine at peak revs."
Frankly, this image of incompetence and panic on the part of the World Champion is not very believable. That he might even have been
using a hand throttle while changing gear and accelerating rapidly downhill through a corner, in the
wet, beggars belief. In any case, the instinctive reaction to a jammed throttle is to turn the ignition off.
But Nixon speaks very positively about the hand throttle and the Classic Cars writer states it as fact; however, hard evidence for such a
device being on the car is zero.
The hand throttle proposition arises solely on the basis of a single, uncorroborated incident which Mike's friend Nick Syrett claims took
place in 1959. It relates to a conversation Syrett says he had with Hawthorn on the Saturday afternoon before the accident, in a public
house near the garage in Farnham. According to Syrett, Hawthorn said "I'm having a hand throttle fitted to VDU. With long legs and big
feet like ours I thought it would be nice to take a rest now and again and get the same result with a hand throttle." Classic Cars adds
that Nick Syrett also says that Bill Fields came into the pub to say that he needed another 45 minutes to complete the installation of a
hand throttle. "Hawthorn told him to close up and finish the job on Monday."
Even if Mr Syrett has remembered it correctly, Hawthorn talked only of an intention to fit the hand throttle,
not that one was in the end fitted.
But there are other, even more cogent, reasons to regard the Syrett account as unreliable, as it flies in the face of corroborated
evidence to the contrary. Paul Roach questioned Bill Fields directly about the Syrett statement and he dismissed the entire story as
complete rubbish: he did not, he said, fit a hand throttle to VDU. In this he is corroborated by Ted Papsch.
So neither of the two men responsible for maintaining the car knew anything of such a device.
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On Jaguar's behalf, the highly experienced race car and vehicle prototype engineers Joe Sutton and Phil Weaver followed up the first
examination of the crashed car by the officially appointed engineer and Lofty England. They also discovered no hand throttle - period.
Chris Nixon argues that "such a device would be about the last thing they would have looked for on a car belonging to the world champion," but apart from being factually incorrect (the car belonged to Jaguar, not Hawthorn) this statement is surely
crass. To suggest that Sutton and Weaver, intimately involved with the C- and D-type racing programmes (Phil Weaver was superintendent of the Comp. Shop), could miss something as dramatically obvious as a
hand throttle (or even one having been fitted), is bordering on the absurd.
The proposition that for some inexplicable reason someone removed the
supposed hand throttle while the car was stored overnight prior to the official examination is a dramatic cloak-and-dagger theory which
even Rob Walker appears scornful of.
No. The simplest explanation of why Mike Hawthorn lost his life that day is also the most likely. As Doug Brazier says: "He was just
going too fast round the right-hand bend and the Jaguar broke away. At that moment of control loss, centrifugal force took over. The
main factor in the Hawthorn crash was speed."
As for Rob Walker's claim that he heard the Jaguar's engine running at full throttle throughout the accident, Mr Walker indeed has said:
"One thing I could never understand was hearing Mike's car absolutely flat out all the time. This theory Chris Nixon has of a hand
throttle does seem to answer lots of questions, yet it never appeared in the inquest nor did Lofty England mention it. Lofty has always
maintained it was the tyres.."
However, the engine sound is just as validly explained by Hawthorn trying to use power in a vain attempt to either correct the slide or to
spin the car a harmless 360 degrees - both perfectly plausible manoeuvres for a driver of Hawthorn's calibre.
But perhaps of even more significance is that quite apart from the testimony of the TT Garage's personnel, those who examined the Jaguar
after the accident found no hand throttle on it.
You should read our page on the Radiator Blind that Ted Papsch later described as being
fitted to the Jaguar Mk 1. This is a possible cause of confusion since it involves a fixable hand control.
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