Limit, The (23 page)

Hawthorn muscled his way into first as the pack rounded the initial turn and set off across the rolling French farmland. Musso drove with feverish aggression, desperate to close the gap. He trailed Hawthorn by just two seconds as they flashed by the pits on the tenth lap. Half a lap later Musso tried to pull even as they snaked through a little twist known as the Muizon curve. He went through that tricky stretch flat out, without braking—clearly over the limit. He lost control, appeared to recover, and overcorrected. Through his rearview mirror Hawthorn watched Musso's Ferrari jump over a white curb and somersault three times. The car was thirty feet in the air, red against blue sky, with Musso soaring above it. He hung in midair for a moment, like a toy tossed high, then landed in a wheat field, twisted and broken. When Hawthorn whizzed by the pits on the next lap, Musso was no longer trailing him.

At every race the congregation of women—wives, mistresses, girlfriends—holding clipboards and stopwatches in the pits prepared themselves for the moment when a car failed to appear. There was no way to know what might have happened on the far side of a track that wound for miles through empty forests and fields. The track announcers were no help; they dismissed accidents as “shunts” or ignored them altogether. So when Musso did not come around, the women waited,
stricken, listening for sirens or the whirring of a medical helicopter.

“No one said a word and I was scared to ask,” Musso's young girlfriend, Fiamma Breschi, later wrote in a memoir. “I started to pray, ‘please God . . . please God . . . please God.' ” An ambulance scrambled. Minutes later a medical helicopter landed, flattening the wheat with its propeller blast.

The drivers were masters of tunnel vision. Hawthorn pushed Musso from his mind as he drove on to win—he led all fifty laps—with an average speed of 126 mph, followed by Moss. Near the end Hawthorn was an entire lap ahead of Fangio and was about to pass him, but stepped on the brakes out of respect. “There was no way I was going to lap Fangio,” he told Cahier after the race. “He's the greatest and I certainly didn't want to hurt his feelings.”

Afterwards Fangio announced his retirement, ending one of racing's greatest careers. It is not known how much Musso's devastating accident influenced his decision, though he did say he was lonely. Roughly thirty of his fellow drivers had died over the course of his career. He had started in Grand Prix exactly ten years earlier on the same course. “Here I started,” he said. “Here I finish.”

As Fangio's Formula 1 career ended, Hill's had just begun. He came in seventh—the top finish by a privately owned car and an impressive showing in machinery ill-equipped to keep up with the strapping Ferraris. He was vindicated, and he uncharacteristically rubbed it in. “I can remember being so gauche and inconsiderate as to rush over to the pits afterwards,” he said, “looking for some sort of approval from Tavoni, knowing full well that they were worried sick about Musso.”

Musso was hanging on with severe head injuries when Breschi arrived at the Maison Blanche hospital in Reims. His condition was grave, doctors told her, but there was hope. “I took his hand and squeezed it,” she wrote, and felt a faint response. “He did not have one scratch. He was handsome. God how he was handsome.”

She returned to the hotel room that she had shared with Musso and waited for news with some of the other wives and girlfriends. A few hours later one of the Ferrari managers knocked on her door. Musso had died.

“I ran for the window, which was open because it was July and very hot,” she later said. “I tried to throw myself out. I was already halfway out when Beba (Fangio's girlfriend) and Lulu Trintignant (Maurice Trintignant's wife) grabbed me and pulled me back. They didn't leave me alone that night or the next day.”

Shortly after Musso died, Breschi saw Collins and Hawthorn kicking an empty can around a piazza. “For a brief moment the hate for those two was stronger than the pain I was feeling. I would have wanted them dead,” she wrote. “Why were they alive and Luigi was not? Damned Englishmen. Why were they laughing?”

Four days later, as Musso's body was flown back to Rome for burial, the Vatican asserted that the Ferrari win, like so many others, was built on the backs of the dead.
L'Osservatore Romano
, the semi-official Vatican newspaper, published a sharply worded editorial denouncing the “usurious, crazy, inhuman price” paid simply to glorify the carmakers. Racing, it said, had become “a ruthless idol that demands increasingly heavy sacrifices of blood” and compared Ferrari to Saturn, a
devourer of his own children. It was a cruel comparison given that Dino Ferrari had died barely two years earlier.

Catholic law had prevented Musso from divorcing and marrying Breschi. As a result, she inherited nothing. She was now destitute and directionless. To make matters worse, Musso's wife showed up in Rome before the funeral to retrieve the jewelry and other gifts Musso had given her. “There was an ugly scene where she literally tried to tear the jewelry given to Fiamma by Luigi from her neck and wrists,” Cahier later recalled.

A month after Musso's funeral, Breschi received a letter from Ferrari written in the violet ink he used for all correspondence. “He said I would always have friends at Maranello and that I could go back whenever I wanted,” she said. “So when I recovered, I went to see him.”

In the summer of 1959 she took a train to Modena and checked into the Albergo Reale. Tavoni picked her up and drove her to a restaurant where Ferrari sat waiting at a table. His driver Peppino was seated nearby in case Il Commendatore needed anything. “For me, the meeting with Ferrari was a sort of work interview,” she said.

She wept as she described how lost she felt without Musso. Her grief was made worse by her grandmother Elisabetta's recent suicide. Ferrari also wept as he shared the anguish of Dino's death. He told her that he relived the tragedy every time a driver died. He described what he called “his terrible joys,” a term he would use six years later as the title of a memoir.

“He was a constructor of cars and a destroyer of souls; and yet, if you entered into his orbit you would have given anything
to never leave,” she wrote. “That is how I entered into his life and he into mine.”

Ferrari set Breschi up with her own boutique, first in Bologna, then Florence. He visited her apartment every Thursday afternoon. Ferrari's liaison with Breschi became an open secret, along with the household he kept with Lina Lardi. “One day I arrived at the factory to meet with Ferrari and I was told by his personal secretary, Franco Gozzi, that he had good news and bad news,” Cahier later wrote. “The bad news was that Il Commendatore was going to be late for our meeting as he had gone to Bologna. The good news was that when he returned he would be in a very good mood, which indeed he was.”

Because Ferrari never went to the races and rarely attended practice, he needed spies as much as mistresses. It was not long before Ferrari sent Breschi to the racetrack to mingle, and possibly more, with drivers and mechanics. Ferrari, she said, “was not satisfied with the information that he would receive through official circuits. He wanted news firsthand, not only expert opinions. I lent myself to this work, I know the atmosphere well and I knew how to distinguish a champion from a good driver.”

The summer of 1958 was a season of vindication. Hill had ignored Ferrari's threats and proved himself in a borrowed Maserati. In doing so, he had shown that Formula 1 lay well within his abilities. “They built up such a mystique about Formula 1, as if one must serve a novitiate for it,” he said. “Nonsense. My skills were as ready for Formula 1 in 1955 as they ever were. All one had to do to dispel the mythic aura around
Formula 1 was to drive Formula 1.” With Musso gone, Ferrari forgot his threats and invited Hill back to fill the vacancy.

Von Trips also had reason for encouragement. He had lined up last on the starting grid for the French Grand Prix, then in typical fashion stalled his engine at the start. By the time he got under way the entire field was out of sight. From the distant back of the pack he made a lightning run to beat Fangio to third place. His through-the-pack surge was better than a win—it was an impassioned comeback that stole the day. The German magazine
Auto Motor und Sport
put von Trips on its cover, calling him “The Fastest Count in the World.”
Der Spiegel
wrote that he had “made his mark and fame right there, becoming a celebrated star.”

Peter Collins had also worked his way back into Ferrari's good graces. After his morning Formula 2 race at Reims, he finished fifth in Formula 1. On July 19 he took the British Grand Prix, steadily widening his lead while Hawthorn protected him by badgering Moss. His standing would be fully restored with a decent showing at the German Grand Prix.

Before going to the Nürburgring for the race on August 3, he and Louise spent a happy interlude on their yacht in Monte Carlo, swimming and drinking Pimm's Cups in the cockpit. They had made a £500 downpayment on a Georgian house owned by a ninety-year-old bishop in Kidderminster, a sign that Collins was thinking of retirement. “Peter was a fun-loving and happy human being,” Louise said. “We never discussed the possibility of something interrupting our perfect lives.”

Race weekends were highly social, with raucous dinners and parties thrown by local dignitaries. They were particularly
lively at the Nürburgring, where drivers stayed together at the Sporthotel built beneath the grandstand right beside the starting line. On the morning of the race Hawthorn barged into the Collinses' room for breakfast, as he usually did. Louise was up, but Collins was still asleep and snoring loudly. In his memoir,
Champion Year
, Hawthorn recalled looking down at Peter that morning and feeling happy. “He is one that won't die, I thought,” Hawthorn wrote. Hawthorn roused Collins and the three ate a late breakfast in the room. Hill showed up and helped Collins complete an elaborate wooden puzzle that he had been working on for days.

Hawthorn and Moss were deadlocked in the championship standings, and a huge crowd had turned out to see them duel for the lead. As usual, Moss bolted ahead in the early going, then dropped out with a faulty magneto. That left Collins and Hawthorn swapping first place as a cozy tandem until their countryman Tony Brooks mounted a charge. His British-made Vanwall lacked the Ferrari muscle—it was 15 mph slower on the straights—but the British brakes and suspension gave him an edge in maneuvering the twists and drops through the Eifel Mountains. By the eighth lap they had formed a three-car caravan—Brooks, Collins, Hawthorn—climbing and winding through the forest.

The red cars scrambled to keep up with Brooks as they ground into a tricky serpentine stretch known as the Pflanzgarten. All three crested a hill in third gear, then touched the brakes and shifted to second as the cars leapt momentarily into the air on the downslope. After a dip they accelerated up a short, steep rise leading to a right-hand turn. From his rear position, in third place, Hawthorn could see that Collins was entering
the bend too fast and too wide. As Collins tried to swing his car back into line, the rear wheel hit a low embankment on the left side. Hawthorn braced for a collision; he expected Collins to bounce off the embankment and spin across the road and hit him. But he didn't. Instead Collins' car flipped in the air and landed upside down in a cloud of dust. As Hawthorn passed he glanced over to see that Collins had been thrown out.

Brooks expected Collins to challenge him on the straight after the Pflanzgarten. “I had no idea what had happened and I was expecting Peter to come alongside on the straight,” he said. “When I got there I had a good look in the mirrors and was rather surprised not to see him. I realized that I had achieved my objective of getting away from the Ferraris, but I didn't know how.”

Hawthorn chose not to stop when he came to the pits three miles later. He had no concrete information to share, and he didn't want to alarm Louise, who was waiting patiently in the pits. Four miles later his transmission failed and he pulled over. He stepped from the car and asked a race official to call the pits for news of Collins. Word came that he was roughed up, but all right.

When the race was over Hawthorn got a ride back to the pits, stopping at the Pflanzgarten to retrieve Collins' helmet and gloves. There was no sign of blood.

Louise was in the pits logging her husband's lap times on a clipboard when he failed to come around. “But that had happened many times in the past,” she said. “Besides, word had gone around that he was walking back to the pits.”

She wasn't too worried, at least not until Hawthorn returned. “Mike came back to the pits and I turned around and looked at
him and he turned away from me,” she said. “That was when I knew something had happened.”

Tavoni came over and told her that the accident was more serious than originally thought. Collins had landed headfirst against a tree trunk. A helicopter was flying him to a hospital in Bonn where one of Germany's top brain surgeons was waiting to operate. Tavoni would take her in his car. It was an agonizing drive. They crawled through traffic exiting the racetrack. Tavoni spoke only a few words of English. She spoke no Italian. They sat in silence, trying not to imagine what they might face at the end of the drive.