Limit, The (15 page)

Neubauer was working on his own miracle. In 1946 the Mercedes plant in Stuttgart was 70 percent ruined. Six years later the company was racing with overwhelming force, as they had in the 1930s. In doing so Mercedes faced a delicate proposition. Could it restore German pride without stirring up bitter memories? They were, after all, trying to sell cars to the same foreigners they had strafed and bombed a decade earlier. Von Trips might have provided part of the solution: he was a fearless driver with the friendly, handsome face of a new Germany.

Hill and von Trips would have raced against each other for the first time at the 1955 Le Mans, but Neubauer chose Levegh, the more experienced endurance driver, instead of von Trips, with tragic results. Von Trips was sitting in the grandstand when Levegh hurtled off the road, sending the deadly spray of parts and burning gas through the crowd, ending the Mercedes revival just as von Trips was solidifying his place on the team.

At Burg Hemmersbach, von Trips' parents pressured him to quit racing and assume more responsibility for the farmlands. He was their only child, they argued, and the seven-century family tree would end with him if he died on the racetrack. Von Trips did not dismiss their pleas out of hand. If anything, the quiet of the castle grounds, enveloped by a thick shroud of trees, had grown more enchanting after the travel and stress of competition. “I notice how the big races stay with you. They carve a little out of you,” he said. “Inwardly, I'm at a pretty low ebb. No close friends, no girlfriend.”

The castle had almost no modern comforts. The family lived in conditions that Americans would consider semipoverty, with a handful of rooms heated by fireplaces. Von Trips spent a lot of time staring into the embers that winter, as if studying a crystal ball. In the end, he resolved to continue racing, though he had no immediate prospects since Mercedes had quit the circuit. Throughout December and January he sat at the big oak desk in his top-floor study writing a ream of polite queries. “It would be very kind of you,” he wrote to Stirling Moss, “to let me know if you hear of anywhere I might have a chance to race.”

In February of 1956 he drove to Munich through a snowfall to meet with Huschke von Hanstein of Porsche, who had given
him his big break two years earlier. “Can you do anything for me?” von Trips asked, sounding a little desperate.

“Let's see,” von Hanstein said as they strolled the Theatin-erstrasse, one of Germany's most fashionable avenues. “Maybe you can come practice with us across the pond.”

A month later von Trips was in Sebring, a track laid out on a disused bomber base in a drowsy central Florida town. Von Hanstein paired him with Hans Hermann, a driver so boyish that he was nicknamed Sonny Boy Hans, in a 12-hour sports car race. They finished sixth—twelve places ahead of Phil Hill. Von Trips returned home to find that Neubauer had scrounged a Mercedes 300SL for him to race at the 1956 Mille Miglia.

Von Trips cut a dashing figure wherever he appeared on the circuit, even by the glamorous standards of European racing. At a press event in Brescia before the Mille Miglia he posed in his car with a relaxed smile. He had a thick head of dark blond hair to go with expressive blue eyes and a hawk nose. His resemblance to the young Robert Redford has been noted more than once.

The next day he flew down the slippery roads along the Adriatic in a persistent downpour, dueling for the lead with Eugenio Castellotti before going off the road in the coastal town of Pescara. He was unhurt, but unable to continue. In May he and Umberto Maglioli co-drove a Porsche to a fourth-place finish in a 1,000-kilometer race at the Nürburgring, almost within sight of the woods where he had walked with Breitschwert. In June he was back at Le Mans, finishing fifth in a Porsche.

Von Trips had made the most of these freelance outings, grinding out a string of finishes that showed him to be
determined and unafraid of edging up to, and over, the limit. “The race leaders directed their gaze at Wolfgang like butterfly collectors observing a particularly rare specimen,” wrote Hermann Harster, a German newspaper reporter who later collaborated with von Trips on a biography. “Unknown drivers are more commonly treated like aphids.”

Aggressive drivers inevitably caught Enzo Ferrari's eye. In August he teamed von Trips with Peter Collins, a British driver, for a 621-mile race in the Swedish city of Kristianstad where they finished second, less than a minute behind Hill. That night the Ferrari drivers stole a crate of whiskey from the hotel bar. Luigi Musso deliberately knocked over a table, and in the confusion Hawthorn passed the crate back to teammates who smuggled it down a hallway to a sitting room. At 4 a.m. they each dropped a contribution into the empty crate and returned it to the bar.

In September Ferrari offered von Trips a car for the 1956 Italian Grand Prix at Monza, Italy's premier racetrack. It was an important audition for a rookie who had barely proved himself in the lower ranks. For the first time he would race a Formula 1 car, a stripped-down single-seat racing machine built to specifications set by the sport's governing body specifically for a series of races known as Grand Prix—racing's highest tier. “To climb into the cockpit of a Formula 1 car,” Harster wrote, “takes more effort than to climb the steps to a royal throne.”

Unlike sports cars, which were modified showroom models, Formula 1 vehicles were made exclusively for racing. They looked like wicked ground-hugging torpedoes with open
cockpits, wraparound windscreens, and outrigger wheels. Stripped of nonessential hardware, they were lighter, faster, and far less forgiving than anything von Trips had previously driven. The smallest error could remove a driver from a race, or kill him. A Formula 1 car, von Trips said, “was a fencing foil, a sports car a heavier saber.”

The first thing von Trips noticed was the piercing high-pitched whine. “When the engine began to howl for the first time,” he said, “I thought my eardrums would break.” Next came the sickening G-force of acceleration, pulling and distorting his cheeks as he rounded turns.

Formula 1 cars were gorgeous, but tricky. The gas pedal sat between the clutch and brake, obliging drivers to downshift with a little dancing maneuver known as “heel and toe.” The steering wheel was so sensitive that von Trips found himself swerving all over the track in his first day of practice. “My arms were completely stiff,” he said, “so tensely had I been holding the steering wheel.”

He was coming out of a curve at 125 mph when he saw “the right front wheel flutter, as if it were drunk,” he said. “There was no control over the wheel.” His car careened off the track like a skipping stone and veered into a forest, heading for a group of stout trees. Every driver feared these few seconds of helplessness. There was nothing to do but wait for the impact.

“I saw the tree coming at me and I said to myself: ‘you're dead, Trips.' ” Wham. The tree unpeeled paneling from one side of the Ferrari. Whack. A second tree scraped away the other side. Stripped of wheels and body, the naked chassis dug nose first into the soil. It flipped end over end eight times and landed in a bush. Along the way von Trips flew from the
cockpit. “I lay on the ground,” he said, “and then I realized I was smelling the dirt, and I said to myself: ‘Trips, you're not dead.' ” He limped back to the pits with a badly injured arm and a leg placed in a splint by the track doctor. Castellotti went pale when he saw him. “He looked at me like I was a ghost,” von Trips said.

Castellotti was troubled less by von Trips' narrow escape than by what it would provoke: Ferrari was enraged, as he always was at news of a car trucked away in pieces. Von Trips insisted that he had made no mistake. In any case, the injury prevented him from racing. “The next day I could barely move,” he said. “Dressing was an ordeal.” He was vindicated two days later when Luigi Musso, driving the same model in the lead of the Grand Prix race, also lost control. Forensics revealed that the cars shared a metallurgical defect: both steering arms had snapped under stress.

As if to redeem himself, von Trips won a pair of races in Berlin two weeks later in a Porsche and a Mercedes, in spite of his injuries. “I wanted to prove that my double somersault in Monza left no lasting shock,” he said. He nearly blacked out from the pain of shifting gears with his right hand, so he somehow reached across his body and shifted with his left hand. “Ferrari decided that if I wanted to drive that badly,” he said, “I could drive for him.”

Von Trips could not stay in Ferrari's bad graces for long. He had what Ferrari called “a noble spirit.”

“He was very fast,” Ferrari wrote in his memoirs, “and capable of the most daring feats, always with that slightly melancholic little smile on his aristocratic face.”

A week after the Italian Grand Prix, Ferrari wrote von Trips
a conciliatory note saying that he was holding his prize money from the Swedish race for him, and that a guard had retrieved his helmet after the Monza crash. Ferrari followed these niceties with a bombshell: he offered von Trips a contract for the 1957 season.

When Ferrari offered Hill a position eight months earlier, he practically jitterbugged in the pits, and understandably so. A Ferrari contract was an invitation to join racing's most exalted circle. But von Trips at first demurred. Racing for a German marque had always been central to his ambitions. He had dreamed of inheriting the mantle of the smiling, warm-hearted German hero from his childhood idol Bernd Rosemeyer. His assertive driving reflected his urgent desire to restore honor to a country disgraced by Nazism and split by Cold War borders. Germany needed a hero. He was determined that it would be him. Besides, von Hanstein of Porsche had been a supportive, avuncular figure. Von Trips knew that he could not expect the same from Ferrari. He asked for time to consider the offer.

In the end he could not resist the siren call of the Ferrari engine. The prospect of winning, and winning big, out-weighed his allegiance to Porsche. Just before Chrismas von Trips signed on. He would go to Modena as the first German to race for Ferrari. The unforgiving V12, in all its power, could either propel him to a championship or feed his propensity for mishap.

Von Trips gave off none of the grandiosity or self-regard you might expect from a handsome count. “He conducted himself
as an ordinary guy,” said Stirling Moss. “He was an aristocrat without being haughty.” For example, when a reporter came to Burg Hemmersbach to interview von Trips, he was directed to a group of farmhands laboring in a field. “The dirtiest one there,” an employee said. “That's the count.”

On the race circuit, he was unfailingly cordial, even a little shy. As he laughed a trace of sadness showed in his soft eyes. “His voice did not sound as if it were coming from the hatch of a tank, as it so often does with seemingly tough guys,” Hermann Harster wrote. “He was a different kind of man with quick eyes, lips and hands, a man who loved stillness, despite all the victories.”

As junior members of the Ferrari team, Hill and von Trips naturally fell into friendship. Both were single men living in the quiet provincial town of Modena in the years before handlers and flacks isolated drivers from one another. They spent a great deal of time together—testing, talking, traveling, eating, and drinking. Von Trips teasingly Italianized Hill's name, calling him “Philee Hillee.” Hill called von Trips “Taffy,” a nickname he had acquired for reasons nobody could recall.

But their temperaments and backgrounds could not have differed more. Put in the starkest terms, Hill drove with his head and von Trips drove with his nerves.

Hill was sensitive to every flaw and frailty of the machine. It was as if he could train his musician's ear on the engine song, listening for telltale pings, clunks, or grinding that signaled a weak part or balky transmission. He fussed to the point of obsession over the springs, shocks, and camber changes. It was not uncommon for him to slow down to preserve an ailing
engine, even if it meant dropping back a few spots. In the pits he was known as “Professor Piston.”