Lewis Hamilton's F1 career and Mercedes' involvement in it might never have happened if Mercedes hadn't bailed out of the 1999 Le Mans 24 Hours race.

They pulled out mid-race after the third incident where one of their CLR cars flipped due to air issues.

Bernd Schneider remembers those crazy events.

Mercedes, with AMG and HWA, made the CLR for the LMGTP rules in 1999, replacing the CLK GTR.

They entered three CLRs in the '99 Le Mans race but didn't spot a design problem before it started, even after about 22,000 miles of testing at different tracks.

The CLR, with its short wheelbase and big overhangs, had a major issue: in the right windy conditions, the front could lift too much. If the lift were stronger than the downforce, the front would come off the ground. This could make the car take off and flip at high speed.

But Mercedes hadn't figured this out when they got to Le Mans for the famous race.

Mark Webber, who later became a successful F1 driver, was driving chassis number four, and he crashed on Thursday when his CLR flipped at high speed. TV didn't catch it; only photos showed what happened.

Webber got back to the pits, but Mercedes wasn't too worried yet, Schneider told the Beyond the Grid podcast. Schneider, a DTM legend and also a former F1 driver, was driving chassis number six.

We didn't know about the flipping problems because other cars had flipped, and our CLK GTR was always a bit in the air. "That's why we didn't race it at Le Mans in '97," he said.

But the '98 car wasn't a big deal. We never had flipping problems. I was in pole position in '98, and the car was really good. We just had an engine issue after a couple of hours.

In '99, we got better. Mark and I were at Hockenheim, going over 200 mph over bumps and everything, really close to each other to see what would happen.

I'm glad nothing happened because there were trees everywhere, and if something went wrong at that speed, I wouldn't want to be in the car. But we never had problems there.

Then we came to Le Mans and had some power issues. We had to turn the power down because it wasn't reliable enough.

This change in reliability made the car act differently.

We had to drive with less power, so we took off some downforce to make up for it and keep the top speed, he said.

We didn't think it would make the car lift so much.

The worst crash wasn't on TV. Mark had it on Thursday. The car was ready for the race, and he was doing laps to see how it would do over the race.

He was behind Frank Biela in the Audi [R8R]. The Audi was slow then, and Biela said he saw Mark coming. After the turn, he stayed left and thought Mark would pass, but Mark disappeared.

[Biela] was scared because he couldn't find him in his mirrors.

Mark said that when he took off, he could see the top of the trees, which are really high. He flipped and landed on all four tires.

I passed the car and thought it was a technical issue. I didn't see any damage. We didn't have cameras in the car, so we didn't see what happened.

I guess it was the highest it ever flew, and it wasn't on TV. But we didn't realize it because we didn't see it. Mark just said he flipped and didn't do anything wrong.

He flipped, but we thought something else must have happened. I remember he was pale and scared, but we didn't really understand what happened.

Even though they weren't sure what caused the crash, Mercedes rebuilt chassis number four. But when Webber went back on the track on Saturday, he flipped again. Luckily, he wasn't hurt either time.

Mercedes decided to take that car out of the race, but Schneider wanted to make sure they didn't stop racing altogether. He said he was okay with driving the CLR, even though motorsport boss Norbert Haug was worried.

I thought the car was fine. "I had no problem," he said.

I drove close to others and never had issues. The team thought there must be a problem with the car's setup, that it was too low in the front. They said if we prepared the car like we did in the simulations, it would be okay.

Then they built a new car for Mark, and he flipped it again in the warmup. Everyone saw it on TV and wondered what was wrong.

Norbert Haug said we had to stop driving at Le Mans if the cars were flipping because if someone got hurt, it would ruin Mercedes' motorsport program.

I told him I wanted to drive, that the car was good.

Then Gerhard Ungar, our engineer, said they'd put the rain setup on it, with more downforce in the front and back, which would make it safe.

We talked him into letting us drive, and that's why we did.

Then Peter flipped into the forest...

Mercedes started the race with the #5 and #6 cars. Peter Dumbreck was driving the #5 on lap 75. He was chasing a Toyota when the front of his car lifted off the ground, and his car flew over the barriers, landing in a patch that had just been cleared of trees. It was all caught on TV.

Unlike Webber's crashes, which were within the track, Dumbreck's crash was on TV and showed how serious it was, so there were no more questions. A lap later, Nick Heidfeld, Schneider's teammate in the #6 CLR, was told to come back to the pits and stop. Mercedes stopped the CLR project and their sports car program.

I had just gotten out of the car. Franck Lagorce, my teammate, came in and said, 'He flipped! He flew into the forest!'

I asked who flipped into the forest.

I was glad Peter was okay, but then I saw the pictures.

It was shocking. I'm thankful he survived and nobody was hurt because otherwise, it would have been my fault for pushing us to race.

It was the second time Mercedes had quit sports car racing. They came back in 2025 with the Iron Lynx project.

During that time, Mercedes focused on Formula 1, where they provided engines to McLaren. They teamed up with Ron Dennis' team in 1995, and Lewis Hamilton joined the McLaren-Mercedes driver program in 1998, getting their help until he joined F1 with McLaren in 2007.

He won his first title a year later. Mercedes entered F1 as a factory team in 2010, and Hamilton switched from McLaren at the end of 2012. He won six more titles with Mercedes, becoming the most successful driver in the sport. All his wins have been with Mercedes power, but he finally left for Ferrari in 2025.

Schneider thinks none of this would have happened if that weekend at Le Mans had been worse for anyone driving the CLRs.

"I always tell people at Mercedes that it was one of the luckiest days for Mercedes motorsports," he said.

If something bad had happened, we wouldn't have had Lewis Hamilton in the Mercedes car, for sure.

The CLR never raced again. Haug said he decided to keep going after the first flips because the data from Webber's crash had been looked at, and the drivers didn't feel any problems with the cars in traffic.

After Le Mans, Mercedes did a private test with the remaining CLR at an airfield to check wind tunnel data. They never released any results, but Mercedes stopped the program soon after.

The two crashed CLR monocoques haven't been seen since, but the remaining CLR has shown up, thanks to a private owner. It's in a German car museum now.