Limit, The (16 page)

Von Trips, by contrast, had an unquestioning Germanic faith in machinery. He drove the car as it was prepared for him, just as his father rode a stallion brought by his groom. “Anyone as intense as I was at that time,” Hill said, “was a bit skeptical of those like von Trips who seemed, at least on the surface, a bit lackadaisical.” His habit of wrecking within the first lap or so earned him the nickname Count von Crash, a joke he accepted with customary good humor.

Von Trips may not have grasped the engineering subtleties, as Hill did, but he had something arguably more valuable: an instinctive mastery of speed and cat-quick reflexes. He was brilliant at the sheer physical aspect of racing—the coordination of hand and feet, the smooth procession of gearshifts, the long pause before breaking in a turn. “You don't need a mechanical knowledge,” Stirling Moss said. “What you need most is a certain feel. Von Trips had that feel.”

He also had a talent that lived in his guts. He was capable of driving with a fury that verged on desperation. More than most, he was willing to hang it all out. “He is the type who does not gingerly taste the limit, but goes straight after it,” said Richard von Frankenberg, a German driver and journalist. “If he goes slightly over the frontier, well, he has such fast reactions that he can catch the car again with almost absolute certainty.”

For all their differences, Hill and von Trips shared something fundamental. Each came to racing from traumatic upbringings. Each was trying to make the world right.

“Most racers I know had unhappy childhoods,” Hill said. “They try to put order into their lives by taking something dangerous, potentially chaotic, and imposing their order on it. It gives them worth. A racer believes he can make his deadly machine safe. He is playing God.”

By 1957, Phil Hill (at center) and Wolfgang von Trips (to Hill's left, in a polo shirt) had joined the Grand Prix, an international fraternity with a grisly mortality rate. (Klemantaski Collection)

F
ERRARI DRIVERS
led an itinerant life—a movable feast by way of
la dolce vita
. They traveled among four continents in roguish packs, picking up girls in hotel bars and biding time in airport lounges, as rock stars would a decade later. They laughed easily and often, but they were deadly serious on the topic of driving. “They live in their own country,” wrote Ken Purdy, a journalist who covered the circuit for
Playboy
, “and only the natives understand their language.”

The drivers spent their days negotiating the limit, their evenings in laughter with wives and girlfriends jangling bracelets and calling for Campari and soda or vermouth cassis. They sat around long group tables in Milan trattorias and Buenos Aires dives, tossing wisecracks in Italian, French, and English. Their one mealtime rule: the first to mention cars paid for the wine.

Phil Hill and Wolfgang von Trips took their places at these
gatherings alongside their new teammates, a cast of international all-stars signed by Enzo Ferrari for the 1957 season: Mike Hawthorn and Peter Collins of England, Eugenio Castellotti and Luigi Musso of Italy, the Marquis Alfonso de Portago of Spain, Olivier Gendebien of Belgium, and Maurice Trintignant of France. The Italian press called them
la squadra primavera
, the spring team.

Von Trips had spent part of his adolescence dodging bombs and pulling bodies from rubble. For all his gentlemanly reserve, he was not about to miss out on life's recompenses. When it came to boozy nights with women wearing pale pink lipstick and tossing blonde curls, he was all in.

Hill, on the other hand, was just as happy to retire to his hotel room after dinner and soothe his nerves with Bartók's string quartets or Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony played on a Concertone reel-to-reel stereo that he traveled with. He also used the Concertone to record long audio letters that he mailed to his brother and sister in Santa Monica. He was friendly enough, but removed. He seemed content with the company of machinery and music. As he traveled through Europe he collected vintage music players and more than four thousand player piano rolls. More than anything he liked to drive his Volkswagen into Milan to sit in the
loggione
of La Scala, the gingerbread opera house. Surrounded by clapping, whistling Milanese, he heard Maria Callas sing arias of jealousy, treachery, and martyrdom. She could easily have been singing about Ferrari. More than any other marque, it roiled with intrigue and death.

On December 13, 1956, von Trips lugged a suitcase through the crowded Genoa dockyards and walked up a gangplank to
the
Conte Grande
, a midsized passenger ship bound for Buenos Aires with a fleet of Ferraris stowed in the hold. He was joined onboard by a handful of mechanics and his English teammate Peter Collins, the lean twenty-six-year-old son of a wealthy car dealer in the Worcestershire town of Kidderminster. With his blue eyes and radiant smile, Collins had the classic well-scrubbed looks of a British public school boy. He had a habit of brushing back a sandy-blond forelock. “Peter was remarkably good looking, but somehow he had a vulnerable quality that made you fear for him,” said Sir Peter Ustinov, the actor and filmmaker, who was friendly with the British drivers. “One somehow knew he wasn't going to survive.”

Von Trips could not have hoped for a better guide to his new way of life than Collins. “Peter was a fantastic companion,” von Trips wrote in an account of the trip. “We sat on deck for hours, with the equator approaching, weather getting warmer. Peter told stories about the legendary cars, the perils of the track and the intrigues, struggles, all going on behind the scenes.”

After the two-week Atlantic crossing their ship stopped in Montevideo for two days. Collins vanished into the city with a young Brazilian woman he had met on shipboard. They had not returned when the steamer prepared to disembark. “The ship's horn sounded,” von Trips wrote in his diary. “We looked everywhere onboard. . . It was horrible. Would he be left behind? How would he make it with no luggage and no money?”

Von Trips pleaded in vain with the captain to wait, then stationed himself at the railing. As the ship edged away from its berth Collins appeared on the quay, running among piles of freight and pulling his girlfriend behind. “There he stood,
wondering what to do next,” von Trips wrote in his diary. “He had a shock when he saw all the water separating him from the ship.”

Collins and his companion jumped into an old skiff and inveigled the crew to cast off. “So began a wild chase,” von Trips wrote in his diary. “We were already picking up speed. All the people who were off-duty, the cooks with their tall white hats and passengers of all classes were on deck. They were desperately trying to catch us. Sailors lowered a rope ladder, but in vain. With two others I went back to the captain. ‘Slow speed ahead' came the order, and with sweet and sour smiles both our refugees came on board. A raucous and enchanting evening followed.”

The next morning they went ashore in Buenos Aires and prepared for the Temporada, a trio of races run in the heat of the Argentine summer. Von Trips' education in Formula 1, interrupted by his crash at Monza five months earlier, now resumed in the gray asphalt expanse of the
autódromo
. This was his chance to prove that the crash was an anomaly, and that he could compete at racing's highest level. It was no sure thing.

Collins watched from a viewing platform while von Trips fumbled through practice laps, trying to find the swiftest line into turns and hit the right braking spots. With the car in a four-wheel drift, he pressed the gas to increase the angle of slide; or, conversely, he reduced the speed to straighten the car out. “Every time I tried it I either wound up on the lawn or spinning around like a carousel,” von Trips wrote. “There was a very sharp corner driving me to despair, and I began to wonder about the infinite patience of Peter Collins, who came around each time to tell me what I was doing wrong.”

Again and again von Trips sped too fast into turns and had to brake hard to prevent a spin. The trick, Collins explained, was to glide smoothly on the way in and accelerate on the way out while thinking ahead to the next turn. It required a fluid dancelike flow of shifting and braking with a lightfooted dab on the brake. The task was complicated by the heat and head-splitting racket of the unmuffled engine and the need to study engine revs on the tachometer while watching traffic in two rearview mirrors. The car shuddered whenever he braked and a blister festered on his right hand from the constant gear work. All the while he could feel the sickening centrifugal pull as he strained to go ever faster. “It took only a few laps for me to learn about the draining of strength and concentration out there,” he wrote.

When he was not driving von Trips practiced the turning techniques in his mind. “I laid my head back, closed my eyes, thought about an extreme curve and put everything there in my mind's eye that I'd been trying to learn,” he wrote. “Run into the curve, hit the brakes, slide, not too much, hit the gas. How often did I repeat this, talking under my breath, lost in my imagination? I don't know. At some point Mike Hawthorn poked me in the ribs: ‘What's with you? Are you nuts?' ”

Von Trips served as Collins' backup in the Argentine Grand Prix on January 13, the first of the Temporada. He did not expect to drive, but halfway through the race Collins pulled into the pits and turned the car over to him. “ ‘Go on, scram,' Collins said to me as he got out of the cockpit,” von Trips wrote. “And I jumped into the Formula 1 as I had always hoped and dreamed. And off I zipped.”

The Grand Prix went for the fourth time to the hometown
hero, Juan Manuel Fangio, a stocky, balding former bus mechanic and son of an Argentine potato farmer. He was an empyrean figure, despite his humble bearing. At age forty-six, he was the sport's elder statesman and the Grand Prix champion in four of the previous five years. The drivers called him El Maestro. They stood up when he entered a room, as if greeting a head of state.

The day after winning the Grand Prix, Fangio took von Trips and Joakim Bonnier, a tall, goateed Maserati driver from a wealthy Swedish publishing family, to Mar del Plata, a beach resort south of Buenos Aires, where passersby stopped and shouted “bravo!” as Fangio passed. In a hotel bar a guest jumped onstage with a guitar and played a song he had written about Fangio.

That kind of adulation was hard earned, as von Trips would learn thirteen days later at the 1,000-kilometer Buenos Aires, a sports car race run on one of the hottest days in memory. “When we came out of our air-conditioned hotel,” von Trips wrote, “the heat hit us like a wall.” The temperature exceeded 100 degrees in the city, and it reached 131 degrees on the track. Heat shimmered in woozy waves off the asphalt, clouding the drivers' view.

After forty minutes von Trips peered into the pits on successive laps to see if anybody had quit. He felt lightheaded, but he hated to be the first to withdraw. “You must not give up,” he recalled in his diary. “Hell with it! You simply keep driving! One more round! God, I can't take any more! I'm getting the heatstroke! I wish I'd never come to Argentina!”

He eventually succumbed, pulling over just before fainting. “Sheer self-preservation led me into the pits,” he wrote. “Once
there, I collapsed in the car and the mechanics had to pull me from the seat.” They laid him on a bed of wet towels in a corner and rubbed his body with ice. “It was a blissful feeling,” he recalled. “After 10 or 15 minutes I came back to myself.” Meanwhile Collins took over von Trips' car and finished ninth.

The Buenos Aires endurance race was a doubleheader. After an hour's respite, the drivers set off in the twilight for a second round of thirty laps. This time von Trips had arranged for an Argentine-German acquaintance to stand beside a hairpin turn and pour buckets of cold water on him as he passed at 40 mph or so.

Von Trips sought out every bit of adventure and fun his new life afforded. While most drivers flew directly back to Europe or accompanied the cars by freighter, he and Bonnier went on a grand tour of Latin countries. They hunted and rode horseback as guests on an Argentine ranch, then flew to Rio de Janeiro. Fangio had telegrammed ahead on their behalf, arranging for a Brazilian racer and other friends to entertain them for three days before they left for Caracas. Along their route they drank unfamiliar Latin drinks and recounted their racing deeds for the benefit of the señoritas.