In 1959, Behra moved to Ferrari where he partnered with
Tony Brooks. Behra won a international race of Formula One cars at
Aintree, in April 1959. He averaged 88.7 miles per hour in an event in which Brooks took second place, 10 seconds behind. While still contracted to the team, 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. Despite the lack of initial success, 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. In so doing, Behra had beaten
Scuderia Ferrari's own F2 entries, enraging
Enzo Ferrari and doing little to ease tensions in an already strained relationship with the team. Things came to a head later that weekend, after he retired 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. Less than a month later, Behra crashed his
Porsche RSK in rainy weather in the sports car race that preceded the
German Grand Prix at
AVUS, in
Berlin, Germany. He was thrown from his car and fatally injured when he hit a flagpole, causing a skull fracture. 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. The AVUS was unique among race tracks. It used a strip of the
Autobahn in length. The north and south bound lanes were fifty feet apart. At one end was a
hairpin turn which drivers negotiated at around . At the other end was a high, steeply banked loop. Behra lost control in the pouring rain, while going . The Porsche began to fishtail with the tail of the car going higher and higher up the slick, steep bank. Then the Porsche spun and went over the top of the banking, with its nose pointing toward the sky. It landed heavily on its side on top of the banking. It remained there wrecked, while the race continued on underneath. Behra was thrown out and for a fleeting moment he could be seen against the background of the sky, with his arms outstretched as though attempting to fly. He impacted one of eight flagpoles arranged at the summit of the embankment which bore the flags of the competing nations. The flagpole toppled over when Behra collided with it, about halfway to its top. Behra came down into trees and rolled almost into a street where drivers and cars often waited in a paddock to practice. A doctor arrived from a Red Cross ambulance close by. He examined Behra briefly and shook his head. A hospital bulletin stated that Behra broke most of his ribs in addition to the skull fracture which killed him. Currently AVUS is a vital part of the German public highway system as Autobahn A 115. ==Mourning==