Limit, The (12 page)

As a young man Ferrari aspired to sing opera, and he handled company affairs with a prima donna's high-flown repertoire of belittling, sulks, browbeating, threats, castigations, walkouts, curses, lawsuits, and reconciliations. Somehow it worked. The Ferrari team was in a constant state of hysteria and chaos—and consistently won through it all.

Scuderia Ferrari dominated in part because the founder was an impossibly hard-driving boss who rarely spent a day
away from the factory. He worked seven days a week, even in August, when Italian industry shut down. He claimed to have never vacationed. “One must keep working continuously,” he wrote, “otherwise, one thinks of death.”

Ferrari intimidated his drivers with extreme outbursts of temper and gratuitous displays of bullying. The first time Hill visited Modena, Ferrari took him to lunch at Oreste, a restaurant in the old district. The owner brought out a special reserve of Lambrusco and made an elaborate presentation of its uncorking. “Ferrari took a little mouthful, thoughtfully testing, and then, with a grimace, spat it on the floor,” Hill said. “He made no attempt at not making a mess of it, and said it was the worst stuff he'd ever tasted.” Then he laughed to show that it was a sardonic joke.

When drivers died, Ferrari put on florid demonstrations of mourning. For days he skulked about in a bathrobe, unshaven and inconsolable. “The violins would come out,” said Denise McCluggage, one of the first woman drivers and a correspondent for the
Herald Tribune.
“He was a tenor, for God's sake.” He wept with the widows and intimated that he was too heartbroken to continue racing. For a man capable of cyclonic fits of rage he could speak in a surprisingly soft register. “Will God forgive me for fabricating such fast cars?” he asked. His mourning was a one-act opera. Ferrari never went to the funerals. He sent his wife Laura in his place while he resumed brooding over engineering details.

Ferrari never became a great driver. Nor was he an engineer or industrialist. Instead, he called himself
un agitatore di uomini.
An agitator of men.

Oddly enough, Ferrari rarely saw his cars in action. He stopped attending races in the 1930s because, he said, it was too painful to see the inert material he had brought to life brutalized on the track. He preferred to listen to radio coverage (in later years he watched on a small black-and-white television) in the gloom of his office with his consiglieri. Occasionally he would telephone instructions to his team manager in the pits. His absence only amplified his authority. Automotive historian Doug Nye compared Ferrari to “a Dr. No character sitting at the center of his web with tinted glasses.”

Ferrari was a menacing figure, but magnetic. It was natural that Hill, who felt no warmth for his father, would gravitate to Ferrari as a surrogate. Ferrari was a “man I respected, from whom I wanted more than anything affection and for him to be a good daddy to me,” Hill said.

Winning Ferrari's affection would prove more difficult than winning the races. For one thing, Ferrari had more sentiment for the cars than the drivers. When Robert Daley, a
New York Times
correspondent, asked Ferrari why he never went to the track, he said, “Because when a man has taken something, some material and, with his own two hands, transformed it into something else, has made not a machine out of it, but a soul, a living breathing soul. Well, then, he goes to a race and he hears this soul which he has created, hears it being mistreated, hears that it is not going right . . .” Ferrari placed his hand over his heart. “It makes a man suffer here. A man cannot bear such things.”

“You mean you suffer too much for the car, not the driver?” Daley asked.

“Oh, the driver too, of course,” he added.

Hill arranged the interview for Daley and sat in during the discussion. Afterwards he said, “I never thought [Ferrari] would say such a thing in front of a driver. I guess we like to think he loves us because we are all so brave and drive so fast. But deep down I suppose all of us knew he cares more about his cars than he does about us.”

The drivers were naturally more concerned with their own welfare. They talked constantly among themselves about how fast they could go without losing control. They believed that every curve had a theoretical maximum speed, known as the limit, beyond which a car's four wheels lost adhesion to the road and the car would spin or flip. “If you go into a 100 mph corner at 101, that's too fast and 99 is too slow,” said Stirling Moss. “You'd better be able to feel the difference in the seat of your pants.” Depending on the car, course, and conditions, the limit could lie anywhere from 65 to 180 mph. The trick was to identify it and stay close for as many laps as possible—but not too close. Moss said that he and the other drivers spent so much time in intimate contact with the limit that they had a “nodding acquaintance with death.”

As much as any driver, Hill knew how to respect the limit. He was shrewd enough to recognize it and disciplined enough to stay within its confines. Not that self-control curried any favor with his boss. On the contrary, Ferrari discouraged drivers from letting lifesaving calculations deter them from speed's mystic calling. “Racing is a great mania,” he said, “to which one must sacrifice everything, without reticence, without hesitation. No reasoning is valid. For no matter how logical the argument, when the race begins it is less than useless.”

There was a rookie Ferrari driver who captured this spirit of abandon, but it wasn't Hill. It was a handsome young German, Count Wolfgang von Trips. Shortly after Hill joined Ferrari, von Trips had shown up in Modena with a playful smile and a driving style that bordered on a death wish.

Burg Hemmersbach, a forty-five-room stronghold surrounded by a moat and prodigious farmlands—a vestige of feudal Germany. It would pass to the young count someday, or so his parents hoped. (Gräflich Berghe von Trips'sche Sportstiftung zu Burg Hemmersbach)

C
OUNT
W
OLFGANG VON
T
RIPS
was heir to a seven-hundred-year-old dynasty of German knights and the only child of Eduard Reichsgraf Berghe von Trips and his wife, Thessa, the daughter of a Bonn city official. In the early part of the twentieth century, Germany society still clung to a feudal code. Marrying below one's station was considered scandalous; Eduard's family spurned him for sullying the bloodline. When his father died, Eduard received no money or inheritance, only the family castle and land granted by law to the oldest son.

In 1932, when Wolfgang was four, his parents moved into Burg Hemmersbach, a moated compound eleven miles west of Cologne that his family had owned for nearly two hundred years. At its center stood a forty-five-room manor house built incongruously on the remains of a Gothic stronghold burned by Austrian soldiers in 1793. The result was a layer
cake of historical styles, with symmetrical windows and cornices capped by a mansard roof and a domed turret overlooking a grassy U-shaped forecourt enclosed by redbrick farm buildings. The high-ceilinged rooms contained ancestral portraits and antlers of animals collected on family hunting trips. Lest anyone forget the von Trips pedigree, a family tree was painted on a parlor wall dating back to the feudal robber barons who tyrannized the Rhineland with taxes and tolls. Beyond the compound lay hundreds of acres of farmland—a vestige of feudal Germany. It was an imposing layout, but charmingly attuned to its wooded setting with stone walls, rustic studded doors, and the sound of gurgling water.

Wolfchen (Little Wolf), as his parents called him, bridled against the formalities of his highborn home—the ceremonious greetings to guests, the Old World table manners, the leggings and ruffled shirts forced on him for social outings. “The days of my youth when I had to go to those parties and was not allowed to get dirty, those are dark memories,” he later wrote in his diary.

Left to himself, von Trips ran wild through the apple orchard and paddled a flat-bottomed boat along the moats that wound among the grounds. He walked the fields with plow horses and rode harvest wagons. When his parents found his secret tree-house, the little count sat defiantly on a high branch ignoring their pleas for him to come down.

It was a rambunctious childhood, but rarefied and isolated by privilege. He had little contact with other children until he went to a local elementary school where he mixed with the sons of farm laborers and coal workers. “The village boys were rather rude to me at first,” he said. “I got many a beating
because of the way I dressed. At first I didn't know how to protect myself.”

When his new school friends came to the castle he led them in pranks. “My friends and I did the cruelest things to stir up the grown-ups,” he later wrote in his diary. “We pushed again and again, and sometimes went a bit too far.” One early summer day they capsized his canoe in the moat and hid beneath it to scare his grandmother and nanny.

Von Trips' first car crush was the family Opel Super 6, a boxy German sedan polished and cared for by a chauffeur named Arnold. At age eight von Trips was too short to reach the pedals, so he directed a friend to sit on the floorboards and push the clutch while he steered around the cobbled driveway inside the courtyard. His father allowed them to muck about with the car as long as they stayed under Arnold's watchful eye.

When von Trips was ten he snuck the car out when his parents and Arnold were gone. His friends sat on the hood and stood on the running boards. “We drove the car through the gates, careful that nobody saw, and out into the park,” he said. “Then we raged around like savages. Branches whistled past. The Opel got its first scratch. A few tumbled down and sprained ankles, and whatever else you can sprain. Then we put the car back in the garage. Of course, everything was found out. There was a murderous row. I couldn't touch the car for weeks.”

Von Trips was also a horseman, a fast one, galloping across potato fields and through oak forests on his stallion Rialto. He often rode the castle grounds with his father, who had raced horses and fought with the Düsseldorfer Cavalry in World War I.

Despite his own intrepid history, Eduard urged his son to curb his wild streak. As if to dramatize his warning, Eduard
took a harrowing fall one Sunday when Bianca, his beautiful giant mare, bucked him over its head. Eduard landed head first on the cobblestones. He crawled to the curb with blood streaming down his face and asked his son to fetch the car.

In 1939, when von Trips was eleven, he joined his father on holiday trips to the family hunting lodge in the Eifel, a low mountain range with rushing trout streams and steep valleys wreathed in mist. For weeks they chased boar, red deer, and rabbits accompanied by Breitschwert, a quiet gamekeeper and guide who patiently answered the young count's questions about the mysteries of the natural world: Where do the forces of nature come from? How do trees know where to grow? How far away are the stars?

A distant engine drone sometimes broke the silence of the woods as von Trips walked with Breitschwert beneath beech and spruce. The hunting grounds lay within a few miles of the Nürburgring, a racetrack built in the 1920s and refurbished to showcase the Silver Arrows, the thunderously powerful cars produced by Mercedes-Benz and its German rival, the Auto Union, with generous Nazi subsidies. They shot through the wooded hills like silver projectiles.

In 1936 Wolfgang persuaded his parents to take him to the Nürburgring to see the German drivers Bernd Rosemeyer and Rudolf Caracciola duel in the German Grand Prix. Nazi troops accompanied the cars to the starting line, and at the race's end Rosemeyer hoisted a trophy donated by Hitler. A portrait of Hitler was printed on the cover of the race program, as if the Führer himself were responsible for the strength of the Silver Arrows.

In the summer of 1936, as Hitler presided over the Berlin
Olympics, Wolfgang told his governess that he wanted to be a great German driver like the ones he had seen at the Nürburgring. Not surprisingly, Rosemeyer was Wolfgang's particular hero. He was tall and blond with buoyant charm. He was married to the tomboy aviatrix Elly Beinhorn—Germany's answer to Amelia Earhart—who had flown solo to Africa and South America. They were darlings of the German press. Hundreds of thousands of Germans came to see Rosemeyer race. Millions more listened on the radio.

On January 28, 1938, Caracciola broke the land speed record by rocketing down a stretch of Autobahn at 268.9 mph. Rosemeyer stood by, prepared to better Caracciola's time. He was clocked at 267 mph—less than 2 mph slower than Caracciola—when a gust of crosswind blew his car onto the grassy median where it hit a stone marker and broke apart in a series of cataclysmic rolls. His body was found in a grove of trees a hundred yards away. In the Nazi depiction, Rosemeyer was a Wagnerian hero slain in the dark German forest. Goering, Himmler, and Hitler sent condolences. SS troopers flanked Rosemeyer's coffin during a Berlin funeral styled and stage managed by Nazi officials.