Chaos in the Ardennes: The Race That Made Jackie Stewart a Safety Campaigner

The Spa-Francorchamps used for Grand Prix racing through the 1960s bore only a family resemblance to the shortened, modernised circuit that exists today. The old layout ran to roughly 14 kilometres, tracing a huge, fast triangle of ordinary public roads through the hills and forests of the Belgian Ardennes, lined for much of its length by telegraph poles, stone farmhouse walls, ditches, and open fields with no meaningful barriers or run-off at all. Its scale was so great that entirely different weather conditions could exist simultaneously at different points on the same lap — a phenomenon that had always been an accepted, faintly romanticised quirk of the circuit, and which turned genuinely dangerous on race day in 1966.

Rain fell in torrents at the far end of the circuit near Burnenville and Malmedy while the start-finish straight remained largely dry, meaning the front-runners left the grid with no real warning of what awaited them a few kilometres into the lap. Cars arriving at speed hit a wall of standing water and aquaplaned in rapid succession: eight of the fifteen starters crashed or spun off within the opening lap alone, an extraordinary proportion for a single corner sequence. Jackie Stewart, driving a BRM, was among them, his car spearing off the road, through a telegraph pole and a woodcutter's shed, and coming to rest upside down in a farmer's outbuilding, soaked in leaking fuel, with Stewart himself trapped in the cockpit, his crushed steering wheel pinning him in place.

What followed shaped the rest of Stewart's life as much as the crash itself. There was no dedicated medical or fire response anywhere near the crash site; it was fellow drivers Graham Hill and Bob Bondurant, arriving on the scene after crashing in the same conditions, who pulled Stewart from the wreckage using a spanner borrowed from a spectator's car, since no toolkit had been provided in Stewart's own vehicle for such an emergency. Stewart spent around twenty-five minutes trapped before an ambulance arrived, and was then further delayed by an ambulance crew who got lost en route to hospital. He survived with a broken collarbone and ribs, but the sheer, casual inadequacy of the emergency response — at what was, by any measure, one of the most dangerous circuits then in regular use — became the founding grievance behind Stewart's decades-long campaign for professionalised medical response, permanent barriers, and reduced reliance on the kind of fast, unprotected public-road circuits that Spa's old layout exemplified.

John Surtees won for Ferrari in the treacherous conditions, one of relatively few drivers to navigate the flooded sections of the circuit without incident. Jochen Rindt finished second for Cooper-Maserati. The mass pile-up at the start of the race, rather than the podium result itself, became the race's defining and most consequential story.

The 1966 season marked the start of Formula 1's new 3-litre engine regulations, a significant technical shift that produced faster, more powerful cars — machinery whose increased speed made the old Spa circuit's complete absence of safety infrastructure considerably more dangerous than it had already been under the previous, lower-powered formula.

The mid-1960s sat at the very beginning of what would become a sustained, decades-long campaign — led most prominently by Stewart himself, once he became a leading driver and later a three-time World Champion — to modernise motor racing's approach to safety, an effort that eventually produced permanent barriers, professional trackside medical teams, mandatory fire crews, and, much later, the withdrawal of Formula 1 entirely from circuits like the old Nürburgring Nordschleife and the original Spa layout that could not be made to meet modern safety standards. Stewart's 1966 experience at Spa is widely cited by motorsport historians as the single formative incident behind that campaign, making this one race arguably as consequential for the sport's subsequent history as any championship it actually decided.

Dry at the start-finish area but with torrential, localised thunderstorm rain across the Burnenville-Malmedy section of the circuit — a stark illustration of how much weather could vary across the old 14-kilometre layout's length.