Limit, The (21 page)

The mechanics spoke only Italian, which complicated matters. By 1958 Hill was fairly fluent, but he hid his proficiency so that he could listen in when the mechanics discussed team politics. “Whether my open eavesdropping really made any difference or not, it at least gave me a sense of being one-up, a confidence builder that I needed,” he said.

Hill gradually came to understand that much of the communication at Ferrari was conducted in a baffling code language. When he arrived, he was continually urged to go slow—
piano, piano
—so as not to damage the car. But when he eased off, Tavoni and the engineers looked displeased. He eventually decided to ignore them and follow his instincts. “I understood now that although they said ‘
piano, piano
' they meant let it all hang out.”

As the 1958 season got under way, Hill would use all his mechanical mastery to prove that he was qualified for Grand Prix—and to prove Ferrari wrong. He recorded the fastest practice time for the 1,000-kilometer sports car race in Buenos Aires in mid-January, beating Fangio, the perennial winner, who had the advantage of driving on his home course. He and Peter Collins won the race, with Hill twice breaking the course record.

Hill not only won, but he helped von Trips and Gendebien secure second place. “During the closing stage,” Hill said, “having lapped the other cars, I held off Moss who was trying to pass Gendebien into second, thus assuring our team of a few more points. That was a very successful afternoon for us.”

Ferrari agreed to let Hill practice in Formula 1 for the Buenos Aires Grand Prix, which took place a week later. On consecutive mornings Hill lowered his body into a half-reclining position inside the low fuselage of the single-seat Ferrari Dino 246. It was “a cute little thing with a terrific pull,” he told the British magazine
Autosport
, “and I just loved to drive it.”

“Cute little things can get you into trouble,” he added.

It was an unnerving adjustment to a flyweight car with lightning-quick responses, as it had been for von Trips a year earlier. “The turns rushed up at a far greater rate than I was accustomed to, and it required a new kind of perspective to deal with this,” he said. “I was spinning around, sliding off the road and so forth.”

By the end of the week Hill had cut his Formula 1 lap times by more than three seconds, tying him with von Trips. Seizing on these practice runs as proof of his proficiency, Hill convinced Tavoni to let him take over von Trips' car for the second of the two heats.

Unfortunately for Hill, von Trips never got that far. He attacked Fangio in the early going and edged by him. Von Trips was so surprised to pass the world champion that he glanced back to see if Fangio was in trouble. That split-second distraction caused him to fishtail off the track and crash through a barrier. “That was the end of my Formula 1 introduction,” Hill said.

Things didn't go any better for them in Cuba, where
political unrest again disrupted the Gran Premio. Shortly before dinnertime on the eve of the race, three Castro rebels with scruffy beards stepped up to Fangio, the heavy favorite, as he chatted with a group of men in the lobby of the Lincoln Hotel in downtown Havana. They called his name. When he looked over they identified themselves as members of the July 26 Movement. One man pressed a .45 Colt revolver to Fangio's back and hustled him into a Pontiac idling around the corner. The rebels assured Fangio that he was safe. The abduction was meant only to embarrass the Batista regime. No ransom was demanded. They deposited him in a house with a woman and crying child.

That night von Trips led a group of drivers on a tour of Havana's seamy side, visiting clubs where drag queens performed and couples had sex onstage. “He knew where every sex club was,” said Bruce Kessler, a young American driver, “including the gay bars.”

The next day President Batista sat rigidly in the grandstand with his family while police searched frantically for Fangio. Hill, von Trips, and the rest waited for ninety minutes at the start area after an announcer excitedly reported that Fangio had been released and was on his way. When Fangio failed to appear the drivers were ordered to their cars. Fifteen minutes into the race a privately owned yellow-and-black Ferrari driven by Armando Garcia Cifuentes, an inexperienced twenty-seven-year-old Cuban, skidded on a patch of oil as he was coming out of a turn. He sailed into a grandstand outside the U.S. embassy, killing seven spectators. “It seemed only an instant,” Hill said, “and bodies were being mowed down.” A cloud of dust went up and curious spectators rushed in to ogle the skid marks streaked
across the sidewalk and pools of clotted blood drying on the grass.

The bloodshed was too much even for Ernest Hemingway, who was then living in Cuba. “A matador bears only his own risk,” he told a reporter. “But these ne'er-do-wells are always tearing into one another.”

That evening the rebels turned Fangio over to the Argentine ambassador. Once freed, he made a point of saying that his captors had treated him well. They fed him steak and potatoes and invited him to watch the race on television. Nonetheless, it was an unnerving reminder that racing and politics were entangled in a changing world. “I think we were all glad to get out of there,” Hill said.

In late April 1958 von Trips taught a three-day racing class in Germany. He was by now a leading figure in German sports, and he felt a responsibility to help restore the country's racing culture with a series of clinics. His students included Juan Carlos, the future king of Spain, and Bernd Rosemeyer Jr., the son of von Trips' childhood hero. They paid 240 deutsche marks to learn basic sports car handling—how to accelerate through a turn, how to match revs while upshifting, how to pass cars on the inside of an oval track. The course's motto was, “Fast driving is not only a pleasure, but an art, and only the few can master it.”

Von Trips must have wondered if he could master it himself. He qualified eleventh at the Monaco Grand Prix on May 18, 1958, but his engine gave out in the last few minutes. He performed well in long-distance races in Sicily (despite hitting a dog) and the Nürburgring. But he was unsure if he could
overcome his inconsistency, and he worried that Ferrari would give up on him. On June 6 he wrote Il Commendatore to ask if he should expect to drive Ferraris in the remaining Grands Prix of the 1958 season. If not, he would like permission to speak with Porsche and Maserati. “I've had a lot of bad luck with Grand Prix cars,” he acknowledged.

Ferrari was a master at letting his people stew in their own uncertainties, and he took his time writing back to say that, yes, he would provide von Trips with cars—but it was a wan endorsement.

While von Trips' confidence dwindled, Hill was hitting his stride with wins in Buenos Aires and Sebring, the latter with brakes so worn that they would hardly have stopped a bicycle. Ferrari was known for innovation, but he was conservative by nature and slow to abandon the fragile and ineffective drum brakes for the newer disc technology developed in England. On the straights Hill continuously pumped the brakes with his left foot, hoping to keep the brake shoes near the wheel drums without boiling the brake fluid or tearing the brake lining.

A day after the Sebring race, Hill left for New York in his 1939 Packard Twelve, one of a handful of cars that he had restored for his own use. Finding himself stuck behind a plodding truck, he dropped back, considered his timing, and shot around the truck, missing an oncoming car by half a second. He had no way of knowing that an off-duty policeman drove the approaching car. The cop made a U-turn, pulled Hill over, and handed him a $15 ticket. In typical fashion, Hill thought a logical explanation would absolve him. “This car develops astronomical torque right off of its idling,” he explained to the cop.

“If you want to speed,” the cop answered, “why don't you go down to Sebring with the rest of those nuts.”

Each win on the sports car circuit made it harder for Enzo Ferrari to deny Hill a shot at the Grand Prix. If he won at Le Mans on June 20, Ferrari would surely relent, or so Hill thought. He was well positioned for a top finish at Le Mans, but it was a hard race to predict. Too many things could go wrong as the race ground on through the heat of a June afternoon and the gloom of night, particularly with the dubious Ferrari drum brakes facing a 2,500-mile test at speeds approaching 200 mph.

The drums may have been suspect, but the car was formidable. Hill and Olivier Gendebien shared a 250 Testa Rossa, one of the most beautiful sports cars ever made. It was named Testa Rossa, or redhead, for the red valve covers on the 3-liter V12 engine, but it was most noticeable for its curvaceous pontoon-shaped fenders and generous cockpit with leather upholstery.

Even before the race Hill and Gendebien found a brake problem. A scrap of metal had found its way into the drum, the cylindrical housing for the brake mechanism. “We could feel the problem,” Hill said, “and knew when the brake was damaging itself.” The scrap might disable the brake long before it had a chance to wear down on its own.

At 4 p.m. Gendebien ran the short footrace across the track to the car, the traditional mode for a Le Mans start, and set off on the rectangular course unsure how long the brakes would last. Stirling Moss charged to the front in his green Aston Martin, trailed by Hawthorn and von Trips in their Ferraris. Gendebien hung back in fifth place, nursing his brakes. “Little by little we manipulated the errant brake so that it wasn't
destroying itself,” Hill said. “In the meantime, most of the front runners broke or crashed.”

Moss's Aston Martin consumed itself trying to set an impossible pace and gave out after two hours. With a top contender gone, von Trips stepped up to challenge for the lead with Gendebien trailing. Hill replaced Gendebien after two and a half hours and took off after the front pack.

Shortly before sunset a blanket of clouds darkened the summer sky and a squall wind whipped the fairgrounds. Flags snapped. Tents shuddered. A sheeting rain flooded the track and cars skidded their way through the dusk, kicking up mud and spray.

The rain would pour down hard for the next sixteen hours. Nothing is more hair-raising than sliding and slipping on a wet road in the dark, but the rain helped Hill in one respect: the slower pace put less strain on his doubtful brakes. Stepping gingerly on the pedals, he caught up to von Trips by the third hour, after 103 laps, and passed him to take the lead.

With twenty-one hours to go, Hill steeled himself for a hellish night spent squinting into the rain from his open cockpit and glancing over his shoulder at von Trips' headlights. The rearview mirrors were useless in the deluge. Headlights and taillights blurred to a fuzzy glow or blinked out altogether. “The volume of rain was amazing,” he said, “but I discovered that if I sat on the tool roll to prop myself up—no, we didn't use the seatbelts—and then tilted my head back and looked just over the tip of the windshield and under the bottom of my visor, the view wasn't too bad.”

At times, Hill was forced to navigate by sound alone. He
sped down the long Mulsanne Straight at 150 mph listening for the grind of downshifting gears. Like a foghorn in the night, it was a signal that he was approaching the 300-degree turn. Through the shrouds of rain he could occasionally see a friend's car wrecked by the roadside. He drove on without knowing their fate.

At 10:40 p.m., after more than six hours of racing, von Trips made a right-hand turn at the end of a long straightaway. He saw a flash of light and car parts scattered by the roadside. A French driver named Jean Hébert had rolled his Alfa Romeo and was lying unconscious on the road. Von Trips pulled over. In a letter to Hébert written later that summer he described what happened next:

I saw you half-lying on the road, and then moved you, with some effort, a few meters over on the grass. You seemed to be unconscious and groaning—at least you were not responding to questions I was asking. You lay on your back and did not seem to have any external injuries except to your face, at least as far as I could see it by the glow of your burning car. I moved the largest parts of the car from the racetrack. I couldn't see any other drivers (I thought there might be another car involved) and when I saw people with lanterns—and help for you—I drove off again.

A dozen other cars crashed that night, including a Jaguar D-Type driven by the Frenchman Jean-Marie Brousselet. He lost control entering the first turn after the pits and died when his car hit the banking. Bruce Kessler, an American in
a privately owned Ferrari Testa Rossa, swerved to avoid the wreckage. He jumped from his car moments before it hit a retaining wall at more than 100 mph and exploded. Kessler landed at the top of a low roadside hill with a collapsed lung, a pair of ugly hematomas, and a severed nerve at the base of his back. With the ambulances already in use, spectators carried him away on an old door and drove him to a hospital in the back of a pickup truck. “That was worse than the accident because the road was so rough,” Kessler said. “That was a painful ride.”