Practice for the event saw Stirling Moss and Mike Taylor injured in separate accidents, with Taylor suffering injuries after a crash at Stavelot which ended his racing career, and Moss injured seriously enough (two broken legs) after crashing at Burnenville to keep him out of racing for a number of months including the 1960 24 Hours of Le Mans. In the race itself, the Lotus drivers Innes Ireland and Jim Clark got off to good starts before Ireland eventually spun out with clutch trouble on lap 14.
Fatal accidents
On lap 20 Chris Bristow, driving a year-old Cooper for the British Racing Partnership, went off line at Malmedy while battling for sixth place with the Ferrari of Mairesse. Bristow lost control, crashing into a 4-foot (1.2m) high embankment, and was thrown from his car and landed on a barbed wire fence which decapitated him.
Five laps later, Alan Stacey was hit in the face by a bird at Masta, causing him to lose control with his car somersaulting off the track and landing in a field. The car then caught fire and Stacey, still trapped inside, was burned to death. It was the only Formula One race meeting in which two drivers were killed until the deaths of Roland Ratzenberger and Ayrton Senna at the 1994 San Marino Grand Prix.
Race conclusion
The race distance had been lengthened to 36 laps from 24 laps. Jack Brabham crossed the finish line first a minute and three seconds ahead of his Cooper-Climax teammate, Bruce McLaren. The results highlight an unusual quirk in the rules regarding classification of non-finishers. Under modern rules, Graham Hill would have been classified third, since he completed lap 35 before the lapped Olivier Gendebien. Hill then retired, in the pits, but was not classified since he did not push his car over the line after the winner took the finish (as required by the rules of the time). In fact the rule about crossing the finishing line was inconsistently applied – at the 1959 German Grand Prix, Harry Schell was classified seventh despite only completing 49 of the race's 60 laps.[1]
This was the Formula One World Championship debut race for Belgian driver Willy Mairesse.
Excluding the eleven Indianapolis 500 races - that were part of the Formula One World Championship between 1950-1960 - this was the first Formula One World Championship race where a Frenchman did not participate. In all the other 77 races, a Frenchman had participated. A British driver had been present at 75 of those races.
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Jack Brabham 
Innes Ireland 
Phil Hill 
