James Dean was killed in a Porsche 550 Spider. The crash has been simulated more than once and posted on youtube:
Essentially James Dean was cut off by the driver in Detroit Iron.
The Porsche 550 Spider is a mid-engine, swing axle special intended to be raced. It's origins goes back to the foundations of the modern race car, Auto Union Grand Prix cars of the 1930's. These were also mid-engine swing axle cars. The combination of mid engine chassis layout and swing axles made these race cars difficult to drive in too many ways. Telling is the rear suspension of the 550 Spider was revised no less than three times and the Auto Union Grand Prix cars suspensions were also revised.
Ferdinand Porsche appears to have been involved with both cars. It also appears the tail happy chassis dynamic was a German ideology from that era. In time, the 550 Spider evolved to become 904, 906, 908...917-10 which was the car Mark Donahue pronounced "un-drive-able". This was the point in Porsche's history when Mark Donahue and Rodger Penske got involved with Porsche. This was when Porsche was a no-name German brand in the US of A. Penske and Donahue were tasked to promote Porsche to a race winner. There is a wonderful account of Mark Donahue at the Porsche test track trying out the Porsche 917-10 and telling the German Porsche engineers what a pile-O-pooo their car was, then proceeded to tell them how to fix it in this book:
https://www.amazon.com/Mark-Donohue...coding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=Q2CSVBAVTB0SAEVREMYA
Know German engineers from that era NEVER had any driver tell them how to design a race car or what is wrong with their design. These comments from Donaue did not sit well with those German engineers. Eventually, Porsche, their engineers got to understand Donahue and Penske's ways which resulted in the legendary 917-30.. that is most of not all of what Donahue grew to understand about how to make a race car for the real needs of a race car driver. It was directly due to the efforts of Donahue and Penske that resulted in the Porsche Brand status of today in the US of A. The knowledge and expertise Porsche gained from working with Donahue-Penske and their crew eventually helped Porsche in endurance racing a much more.
Keep this in mind each and every time some one toots about superior German Porsche engineering in their sports and race cars.
Bernice