Aaaand Charlie wins the race, blazing past the cheering spectators at 409 chars/answer!!
Congratulations!
Instantly the Mercedes was airborne. A 3,000-pound metal projectile with a tank of flammable liquid was 15 feet off the ground, rocketing at about 150 mph toward a crowd of spectators, with Levegh still hunched over the wheel. The car hit an embankment and exploded, hurtling fiery chunks of metal into the gathered mass. What was at one moment the social high point of the year —a party accented by the clink of wine glasses and the bellowing of sports car engines— became something unimaginably horrific. Dozens lay prostrate and bleeding. Fire raged; the car's magnesium body, made of a material similar to that used in early camera flashes, melted quickly into a thik soup of white-hot metal. Panic ensued. Those who were able to get on their feet fled and into that wave of foot traffic, photographers covering the race aimed and snapped, freezing shocked faces in black-and-white celluloid.
(723 characters)
Welcome to a new edition of the game!
If this is your first time, there's some info for beginners at the end of this post.
The above is an excerpt from the prologue to Go Like Hell, a book about the rivalry between Henry Ford II and Enzo Ferrari, and the history of the Ford GT40, since its inception to its victory over Ferrari at Le Mans in 1966.
The proposed text talks about the 1955 Le Mans disaster, a sad milestone in car racing which forced teams and sponsors alike to rethink the role of safety in motor sports.
The goal is to translate the given text to Spanish, using as few letters as possible, while keeping all the original text's meaning and concepts more or less intact.
My own non-golfed translation follows:
Instantáneamente el Mercedes saltó por los aires. Un proyectil de metal de 1350 kilos con un tanque de líquido inflamable iba a 5 metros del suelo, como un cohete a unos 240 km/h hacia una multitud de espectadores, con Levegh todavía aferrándose al volante. El coche dio contra un terraplén y explotó, lanzando fieros trozos de metal hacia la masa reunida. Lo que un momento antes era el mayor evento social del año —una fiesta adornada con el tintineo de vasos de vino y el bramido de los motores de los coches de carreras— se convirtió en algo inimaginablemente horrorífico. Docenas estaban postrados y sangrando. El fuego se extendía; el cuerpo de magnesio del coche, hecho de un material similar a lo que usaban los flashes de las cámaras antiguas, se fundió rápidamente en una sopa de metal candente. Cundió el pánico. Los que podían mantenerse en pie huyeron y en medio de esa ola de tráfico a pie, los fotógrafos que cubrían la carrera apuntaban y disparaban, congelando en celuloide blanco y negro las caras en choque.
(823 characters)
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