Jean
Behra

Jean Marie Behra was born in Nice on 16 February 1921. Before moving to sports cars and Grand Prix racing, he competed on motorcycles for Moto Guzzi. In 1952 he won the Reims Grand Prix, a non-championship race.

Behra took part in the Formula One World Championship from 1952 to 1959. He drove for Gordini from 1952 to 1954 and for Maserati from 1955 to 1957. With Gordini he won the 1954 Pau Grand Prix. The following year he won there again, this time with Maserati, and he won once more in 1957. In 1956 he finished fourth in the championship, taking five podiums from seven races. In 1958 he raced with BRM and Maserati, and with BRM he came fourth in the Portuguese Grand Prix at Porto.

In 1959 Behra joined Ferrari, where Tony Brooks was his team-mate. In April he won a non-championship Formula One race at Aintree. Alongside this, he began developing a Formula Two car based on the Porsche 718 RSK. The Behra-Porsche team entered Maria Teresa de Filippis at the Monaco Grand Prix, but she failed to qualify. At the Formula Two race in Reims, held in support of the French Grand Prix, Hans Herrmann took the car to second place. Behra retired from the Grand Prix itself with a piston failure. That same weekend he had a dispute with team manager Romolo Tavoni. Ferrari parted company with him before his death.

On 1 August 1959 Behra was killed in a crash at the AVUS in Berlin, driving a Porsche RSK in a sports car race held before the German Grand Prix. He was 38 and was buried in Nice. In the Formula One World Championship he made 52 starts and reached the podium nine times. He never won a race or took a pole position in the championship.

Source: Wikipedia, “Jean Behra”. Text licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.