Behra was small in stature and stocky, weighing 178 pounds. He had big shoulders and was scarred from 12 crashes. In 1955 he had an ear torn off from a collision. He was known for being hard-charging and temperamental, which led to confrontations with Ferrari team managers after being accused of overstressing engines at the 24 Hours of Le Mans and the Reims Grand Prix race in 1959. He was dismissed from the Ferrari team after assaulting a team manager, shortly before his death.
Behra raced motorcycles for Moto Guzzi prior to changing to sports cars and Grand Prix racing. In January 1950, he drove (with Julio Quinlin) a Simca 8 coupé to third place in the Monte Carlo Rally. He began driving cars competitively in 1952. Joakim Bonnier claimed that he learned the majority of his racing skill from Behra. Although he never achieved victory in a World Championship Formula One race, he managed an unquenchable thirst for motorsport, being considered a formidable competitor to the day he died. He hit the headlines when he won the non-title 1952 Reims Grand Prix.
Behra drove a Gordini in the Panamericana road race in the Mexican state of Oaxaca in November 1952. He won the first stage of the five-day race from Mexico's southern border to the United States border at Ciudad Juárez near El Paso, starting 19th and finishing with a time of 3 hours, 41 minutes, and 44 seconds. On the second day of competition, he crashed on a curve approximately fifty miles from Puebla.
In April 1954, driving a six-cylinder Gordini, Behra passed the leader in the last ten minutes on his way to victory in the Grand Prix of Pau, France, finishing 200 yards ahead of Maurice Trintignant after many pit stops due to mechanical trouble.
Behra finished first at the Grand Prix de Pau for a second consecutive year, this time at the wheel of a Maserati. Alberto Ascari led until the 19th lap but dropped back after brake failure. A crowd of 50,000 watched as only eleven of sixteen starters finished. Behra and Luigi Musso were teammates in the 1,008 kilometer Supercortemaggiore Grand Prix at Monza, sharing a 3000cc Maserati that won and established course and lap records for the 6.3 kilometer track.
Behra had surgery on his leg in June 1956, forcing him to miss a 1,000 kilometer Monza Grand Prix. He earned the pole position for the Rouen GP, a non-championship race for 3000cc sports cars, in July 1956, clocked at an average speed of nearly 155.46 kilometers per hour. In October 1956, he drove a Maserati to capture the Grand Prix of Rome, a 2000cc sports car event over 166.030 kilometers, averaging 174.003 kilometers per hour and establishing a record for the Castelfusano track.
His best Formula One World Championship season was 1956, finishing 4th overall with 5 podiums from 7 starts.
In April 1957, Behra turned in the quickest time for the Pau Grand Prix, circuiting the 2.77-meter course in 1 minute 35.7 seconds and winning at an average speed of 62.7 mph (100.9 km/h). After being injured while testing a car for the Mille Miglia in May 1957, he recovered and entered a Maserati in the 24 Hours of Le Mans on 22 June. He was triumphant at Kristianstad, Sweden in August 1957 in a Swedish 6-hour Grand Prix at the Rabelov, 6,537-meter asphalt track, followed by a win in the Grand Prix of Modena in September.
Behra drove a Porsche to victory in the 6th Rouen Grand Prix, besting Graham Hill and Alan Stacey. He took 4th place at Porto in the 1958 Portuguese Grand Prix, driving for BRM. He drove a Porsche to first place in the Grand Prix of Berlin, navigating twenty circuits of the 5.19-mile (8.35 km) track in 48 minutes, 14.8 seconds at 128.2 mph (206.3 km/h). Altogether he scored wins in eight straight European races in 1958, piloting a Porsche Spyder in each sports car event while driving exclusively for BRM in Formula One.
Behra finished fourth at Riverside International Raceway in a small Porsche RSK in October 1958, then made a quick exit to catch a flight to Europe for the Grand Prix of Morocco at Casablanca — leaving Riverside in an ambulance to make his flight.
In 1959, Behra moved to Ferrari where he partnered with Tony Brooks. Behra won a 200-mile (320 km) international race of Formula One cars at Aintree in April 1959, averaging 88.7 miles per hour, with Brooks taking second place 10 seconds behind.
While still contracted to Ferrari, Behra began development of a Formula Two car based on a Porsche 718 RSK. The team, known as Behra-Porsche, entered the 1959 Monaco Grand Prix with Maria Teresa de Filippis at the wheel but did not qualify. Behra regarded the project as "tremendous fun" and was rewarded when Hans Herrmann drove the car to second in the prestigious Reims F2 race supporting that year's French Grand Prix — beating Scuderia Ferrari's own F2 entries and enraging Enzo Ferrari.
Later that weekend, after retiring from the Grand Prix with a piston failure, Behra was involved in a strong discussion in a restaurant in which he punched team manager Romolo Tavoni and another patron, and was instantly dismissed from the team. Enzo Ferrari had already learned that Behra intended to race a Porsche at AVUS in breach of their agreement and dropped him as a factory driver ten days before his death.
Less than a month after his Ferrari dismissal, Behra crashed his Porsche RSK in rainy weather in the sports car race that preceded the German Grand Prix at AVUS in Berlin, Germany. The AVUS was unique among race tracks: it used a strip of the Autobahn 2.5 miles (4.0 km) in length, with the north and south bound lanes fifty feet apart. At one end was a hairpin turn negotiated at around 30 mph (48 km/h); at the other end was a 30-foot (9.1 m) high, steeply banked loop.
The sports car race featured entries of small, under 1,500 c.c. engine capacity. After three laps, Behra was third behind Wolfgang von Trips and Bonnier, who eventually finished one and two. Behra lost control in the pouring rain while going 110 mph (180 km/h). The Porsche began to fishtail with the tail going higher and higher up the slick, steep bank, then spun and went over the top of the banking. Behra was thrown from the car and fatally injured when he struck a flagpole at the summit of the embankment, causing a skull fracture. A hospital bulletin stated that he also broke most of his ribs. He died on 1 August 1959.
Behra was buried in Nice on 7 August, six days after his fatal crash. He had three funeral services: one in Berlin, another in Paris, and a final one in Nice, where 3,000 mourners lined the streets from wall to wall. He left a nineteen-year-old son, Jean Paul. Behra's demise left only Maurice Trintignant among living French drivers of fame. Trintignant comforted Behra's family and called on the young men of France to defend the colours of their country in international motor racing. Conspicuously absent among those present in the racing community was Enzo Ferrari, who sent no remembrance to the funeral masses.
This article is based solely on the supplied corpus. No external sources were consulted; claims that could not be substantiated against the corpus were omitted under the drop-the-claim rule.
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