Babel Fish made a better job than usual on that, Don! It makes it even more strange/suspicious/disappointing (choose your viewpoint!) that the inquest totally ignored the possibility of the melted tar having a hand in the tragedy. Even my source Sigurd commented to me that the Highways Board should not be blamed, "as they were normal roads made for buses, cars and lorries", ignoring the fact that they could be expected in my book to have ensured there was the expertise to make a safe surface for the other high-speed traffic that they knew was going to use these roads at least twice a year!
With very soft tarmac because of the heat, Herrero had already fallen at Braddan Bridge, which delayed him. But during the fifth lap he had made up ground until he was in third position, closing on Rod Gould. In Glen Vine he overtook Stanley Woods, who followed him until the fast curved double lefts at the 13th Milestone, "Westwood", where the back wheel of the OSSA lost grip when approaching it at more than 160 Km/h. Woods tells it thus: "Herrero entered very fast, the tarmac was very bad. His machine slid and I could not avoid him. In the crash I lost consciousness and afterwards could not remember much....". With the fall and the crash, Herrero was very seriously wounded (fractured skull with brain injury, fractured spine, collapsed thorax with lung injury, fractures of femur, tibia and fibia, loss of a kidney...). The injuries proved too extensive for him to overcome and he died two days later in Nobles Hospital in Douglas, to where he had been transferred by helicopter