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As a journalist who works for a news-based motorsport magazine, it is hard to imagine how we'd have dealt with a racing season like 1955. We certainly would not have been short of things to write about. The mid-1950s were a period coloured with some amazing technical innovations as the world, and Europe in particular, rebuilt itself after the Second World War and resources that had previously needed to be directed elsewhere became available to racing once again.
The Formula One World Championship was five years old, and was run to a set of regulations that encouraged some thinking outside of the box. Not all of the ideas that found their way onto a Grand Prix car were effective, and some of them were downright dangerous, but there was a diversity from car to car - and frequently from race to race - that is far less apparent now. Merely keeping track of all of those would have filled a couple of pages of each issue of our magazine - and that's before you add Sports Cars, very much a significant part of the racing landscape back then, into the equation.
But not all of the news during the season was good. Spectators along the main straight at Le Mans during that year witnessed - or, perhaps, were a casualty of - the worst accident in motorsport history. The Indy 500 was also marred by a fatality, while in Formula One, a former World Champion was killed testing a Sports Car at Monza just days after sending his Grand Prix car into the harbour at Monaco. And these were by no means the only fatalities during that year.
I shudder to think of what the repercussions would be if we were faced with a season like that in the modern era. Looking back from an early 21st century perspective, it seems amazing that motorsport survived to see 1956. Even if you sidestep the more gruesome aspects of 1955, it was still a remarkable year. Stirling Moss and Denis Jenkinson averaging almost 100mph while winning the Mille Miglia would have filled a few pages, and given the recent hysterics over team orders it's interesting to ponder how we'd have viewed the British GP, where Juan Manuel Fangio may or may not have allowed Stirling Moss to take a win on home soil.
