Limit, The (10 page)

By 6:20 p.m., with the early summer sun still high, Hill was preparing to spell Maglioli, then in fifth place. He was standing on a counter behind the pits with his helmet and goggles under his arm when a mechanic tugged on his pant leg and pointed
across the track. Somebody in the grandstand was trying to get his attention. It was Tom McGeachen, a neighbor from Santa Monica. He was holding a 16mm movie camera and waving. The track was so narrow that the two could shout across to each other in the lulls between passing cars.

As they talked Mike Hawthorn neared the pits in his long-nosed Jaguar. With its rounded flanks and single tailfin, it looked like a sea creature moving at 160 mph. He had gone twenty-eight laps in less than 120 minutes. His pit crew signaled him to pull in for refueling. They may have been late holding the sign up, or perhaps Hawthorn was slow to respond. Either way, he abruptly braked his Jaguar and swerved to the right toward the pits. In doing so he cut off Lance Macklin, a British driver in an Austin-Healey who was running four laps behind Hawthorn. In his split-second desperation to avoid hitting Hawthorn, Macklin jammed on the brakes and swung left into the path of Levegh, who was coming up behind at 150 mph—too fast to steer clear. Levegh's Mercedes hit the rear of Macklin's Austin-Healey and bounded end-over-end for eighty-five yards. It flew over spectators, its white underbelly flashing overhead, and landed on a dirt barrier. The Mercedes bounced and rammed hard against a concrete stanchion, spraying its parts into the tightly packed grandstand. “The crushing sound of its landing is unforgettable,” said J. D. R. McDonnell, a reporter sitting at the start line.

The hood spun loose and sliced through the crowd like a giant scythe, decapitating a row of spectators. The engine, suspension, and brakes followed in a hundred parts. A fireball of burning gasoline sprayed through the scene. Entire families died in a second. A woman awoke from unconsciousness to
find herself lying under a pile of bodies. Fifty yards from the grandstand a girl screamed when a severed foot hit her.

Meanwhile, Macklin's Austin-Healey spun along the pit wall to the right and rebounded across the track, where it came to rest on the embankment. Macklin was barely hurt, and he ran back across the road to the pits.

There was a moment of silence, followed by police whistles and the insistent two-note siren of French ambulances. Black smoke hung over the scene. Body parts and pieces of cars lay scattered. Many of the uninjured spectators surged forward for a closer look, pushing through the recoiling throng. The loudspeaker called for doctors and blood donors. Priests in long black robes administered last rites to the gravely wounded. They pulled back sheets covering the dead and whispered prayers as they made the sign of the cross. Neubauer stepped out from the pits and waved cars through the smoke and debris. Through it all the French carnival music droned in the background.

“The scene on other side of the road was indescribable,” recalled Duncan Hamilton, a British driver. “The dead and dying were everywhere; the cries of pain, anguish, and despair screamed catastrophe. I stood as if in a dream, too horrified to even think.”

Eighty-three people died and more than a hundred were seriously injured. Hill's friend Tom McGeachen was not hurt, though blood splattered his camera case. The hulk of Levegh's car was crumpled against the stanchion, its magnesium alloy frame burning like a white-hot furnace. Levegh's body, singed to a black crisp, lay on the pavement in full view of his wife. “He is dead,” she said over and over. “Pierre is dead.” A gendarme ripped down a banner and laid it across the body. Levegh's helmet was later found with bits of his brain in it.

The moment before hitting Macklin, Levegh had raised his arm in warning to his teammate Fangio, who was a hundred yards behind him. It was the last gesture Levegh would ever make, and it likely saved Fangio's life. With that tiny bit of notice, he veered to the right and slipped untouched through the smoke and wreckage. “It was by pure chance, by destiny if you like,” Fangio said, “and after I had passed through the crashing cars, without touching anything or anyone, I started to tremble and shake, for at that moment I had been holding strongly to the steering wheel, to wait for the blow. Instead the way had opened and I passed through.”

Hill had a front-row view of it all. “I could see a body up on the burning hay bales,” he said, “and there was smoke and lots of commotion.” He moved forward for a closer look, but the Ferrari pit manager held him back. Better for a young driver not to see the carnage up close, particularly one as sensitive as Hill.

The Ferrari team always locked the door at the back of their pit area to prevent curious passersby from entering. “Now the lock meant we couldn't get out,” Hill said, “and everyone scrambled over each other.” In their panic they knocked over Joan Cahier, wife of Bernard Cahier, Hill's friend from International Motors, who was now working as a correspondent for
Road & Track
and other publications.

As ambulances carted off the casualties, Maglioli pulled into the pits. The last thing Hill saw before taking his first laps was a gendarme with his leg neatly severed. On his first lap he encountered wreckage all along the track from unrelated crashes. As Hill rounded the Maison Blanche turn he saw a plume of smoke where an MG had overturned and caught fire.

“At this point I was numbed by it all, shocked that all this could be happening at once and on my first-ever Ferrari racing lap of Le Mans,” Hill said. “But then Stirling Moss went by me like a streak in his Mercedes 300 SLR, and that woke me up. That was a lesson I never forgot, which was that when something happens, get on the gas.”

By several accounts Hawthorn stumbled around behind the pits weeping and hysterically declaring that he would never race again. (He would absolve himself of blame in a memoir published three years later.)

On every lap Hill passed a yellow flag, the warning signal waved after crashes. He passed the amusement park and dance hall and the endless flash of headlights as the sun set and the race bore on into the night. Officials decided against canceling the race because they didn't want departing crowds to block the ambulances and other rescue vehicles. “
Et la course continue
,” said Charles Faroux, a veteran journalist who served as race director. So the race went on with a persistent rain adding to the gloom. Hill and Maglioli moved up as high as third place before a rock pierced their radiator, forcing them to withdraw.

That night John Fitch, who had been Levegh's co-driver, urged his Mercedes handlers to quit the race out of respect for the dead. They might win the race, he said, but they would surely lose the public relations battle. The headlines in European newspapers, he predicted, would be “Germans Trample 80 Frenchmen on Their Way to Victory,” or some such.

Stirling Moss, who shared a Mercedes with Fangio, argued against pulling out, saying it was a “theatrical gesture” that appeared to accept blame.

After some debate the company directors in Stuttgart sent
orders to withdraw the two remaining cars, one of which was in first place. They were flagged in a few minutes after 2 a.m. “It's finished,” Neubauer told the press. “There are too many dead.” The Mercedes team was already gone when the church bells rang from the Catholic chapel early the next morning, summoning the faithful to mass. Four months later Mercedes stopped racing altogether. Its factory team would not compete again for more than fifty years.

Mercedes invited Jaguar to withdraw from Le Mans with them, but Lofty England, the Jaguar team manager, refused. There was a smattering of applause when Mike Hawthorn crossed the finish line the next afternoon to win in record-breaking time. He smiled on the podium and swigged from a bottle of champagne. A French newspaper ran a photograph of him with the sarcastic headline, “Here's to You, Mr. Hawthorn!”

Hill had planned to barnstorm Europe in Guiberson's Ferrari, but so many races were canceled after Le Mans—Spain, Mexico, and Switzerland banned racing altogether—that he returned home instead. Away from the endless rehashing and recriminations he could more “easily build a case inside my head for racing,” he said. “It's pretty amazing what the mind can do for us. It allows a young race driver faced with death and his own mortality to write his own story reconciling racing with his continuing existence.”

Hill was stunned when Phil Walters, one of the drivers he most admired, decided to quit racing after Le Mans. Walters was an aggressive, sharp-elbowed New Yorker who grew up racing hot rods and midgets under the pseudonym Ted Tappett so his family would not know. He flew gliders during the
war, until he was shot down and severely wounded during the invasion of Holland. By coincidence the German surgeon who saved his life by removing a lung and kidney had seen Walters win a midget race in Philadelphia five years earlier.

After the war, Walters thrived on the European sports car circuit with a smooth, nuanced driving style. He was so respected that Ferrari waived the customary test drive when he came to Maranello to discuss a job. “Why test? I'm sure he can do it,” said Nello Ugolini, the Ferrari team manager.

After witnessing the full horror of Le Mans, Walters called up the Maranello office and, using a secretary as a translator, told Ferrari that he could no longer race. “So many women and children were killed there,” he later said. “I just couldn't justify having anything to do with even the possibility of something like that happening.” He never raced again.

Walters' retirement should not have shocked Hill, given his own ulcerous history. But Hill had by now learned to protect his enthusiasm for the sport by hardening his mind to its harsher realities. He could no longer imagine abandoning his quest for a life on the European circuit. “I spent a great deal of time pondering why this driver for whom I had so much respect walked away from the sport I held in such esteem,” he said.

In the months after Le Mans, Hill raced in Beverly, Massachusetts; Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin; Torrey Pines, California; and the Bahamas. It must have seemed as if he were one step ahead of a curse. On September 30 the actor James Dean was driving his Porsche 550 Spyder to a sports car race in Salinas, California—the kind of regional race Hill might easily have entered—when he collided with an oncoming Ford coupe at the intersection of Highways 46 and 41, about a mile from the
town of Cholame. Dean was taken to a local hospital where he was pronounced dead on arrival.

In January 1956, Hill returned to Buenos Aires, where he had seen Eric Forrest-Greene burn to death two years earlier. This time he shared a Ferrari with Olivier Gendebien, an aristocratic Belgian who had distinguished himself as a Resistance fighter during the war and now lived in a grand manor house in the Fontainebleau Forest. In a field that included the biggest names of the day—Juan Manuel Fangio, Eugenio Castellotti, Stirling Moss, and Jean Behra—they came in second.

After the race Hill sat gasping in the pits with exhaust stains smudged across his cheeks and two pairs of goggles dangling from his neck. Eraldo Sculati, the Ferrari manager, walked over and casually asked if he would like to join the Ferrari team for the rest of the season. Hill was beside himself with joy, and he showed it. Any competent driver could drive a privately owned Ferrari, but the company team—the works team, as they called it—was reserved for an elite. This was the invitation he had dreamed of since his hot-rodding days but had never fully believed he would earn. No American had ever raced on the Ferrari team.

A few weeks later Hill traveled to Modena and checked into the Albergo Reale, a hotel across from 11 Viale Trento e Trieste, the old company workshop where Enzo Ferrari lived in a modest upstairs apartment. The hotel was a de facto Ferrari dormitory run by a bustling red-haired woman, a former brothel madam, or so it was said. The drivers met in the lobby over grappa, Campari, and Lambrusco, and they ate as a group at a long table in the simple dining room. In a city where the cathedral and other landmarks dated back eight hundred years, the
drivers discussed how to shave lap times by tenths of a second. Six thousand miles from California, Hill had found a place that felt like home.

It would not be an easy home. As he would soon discover, Modena was a Shakespearian court, full of subterfuge and friendships cut short—and lorded over by the implacable Enzo Ferrari.

Enzo Ferrari as an Alfa Romeo driver in 1921. “One must keep working continuously. Otherwise, one thinks of death.” (Associated Press)

F
OR ALL THE GLAMOUR
of the Ferrari name, its founder lived a circumspect life of Old World persuasion. Enzo Ferrari parked his considerable heft in the same barber chair—the first one on the left—at 8:30 every morning for a shave. He ate lunch,
salsicce cotto
or
tortellini alla panna
, with the same consiglieri in a private room at Il Cavallino, a restaurant he set up in a farm building directly across from the factory gate in Maranello. He and his cronies talked about the blunders of Il Canarini, the local soccer team, the evening card game, and the whores who joined them for grappa.