Limit, The (27 page)

Hill had become a star in spite of himself. At one of the many cocktail parties preceding the races a pretty girl sidled up to Graham Hill, a British driver with a David Niven pencil mustache. “Oh, I'm sorry,” she said, blushing when she realized her mistake. “I thought you were the famous Mr. Hill.”

Fame gave Hill something else to stress about. In his book
Cars at Speed
, Robert Daley described a pack of shouting, excited German boys clamoring for Hill's autograph as he left a restaurant near the Nürburgring:

“I'm nobody,” Hill said.

“You're Phil Hill,” the boys chorused.

“No I'm not,” asserted Hill firmly. He slid into his car and drove off.

While Hill holed up in his hotel room listening to music on his Concertone, von Trips made a warm and likable impression as a television correspondent at the Brussels car show and appeared in advertisements for motor oil, car parts, and eyeglasses. Like President John F. Kennedy, who took office a month before Ferrari unveiled the Sharknose, von Trips had an instinct for the casual élan of the early 1960s. He was almost Edwardian in his gentlemanly bearing, but his magnetism burned bright in television interviews and magazine photos. He could talk to reporters in four languages; in all four his enthusiasm for racing was infectious.

Most team owners would have named Hill the lead driver for 1961 and ordered von Trips to stand back, or vice versa. But Ferrari refused to designate either one. He had a long history of extracting the utmost by pitting his people against one another, whether it was in the machine shop or on the racetrack. So the two men faced a gauntlet, an ordeal of one-on-one struggle that would last through the season. “The tension was excruciating and could not be relieved by a frank expression of competitiveness, not acceptably anyhow, between friends and teammates,” Hill said.

Hill and von Trips weren't smooth-faced novices anymore. They were in their mid-thirties with crow's-feet and creases earned by years of strain and hard driving. They had reached the peak of their powers. This was their moment.

Both men expected to drive hard up against the limit until a breakdown or accident decided the contest for them. They knew that death might be the arbiter.

The start of the Monaco Grand Prix, May 14, 1961. For Phil Hill and Wolfgang von Trips, it was the beginning of an agonizing summer. They knew that a fatal accident might well decide the championship. (Getty Images)

O
NE COLD NIGHT
in the first week of January 1961, Wolfgang von Trips stood at a doorway, suitcase in hand, and rang the bell. He lingered in the chill air, listening for signs of stirring within.

Three years earlier he had hired a former tax advisor named Elfriede Flossdorf to type his diary entries and manage the details of his endorsement deals and appearances. He teasingly called her “the racing secretary” because she dashed to keep up with the growing workload. Flossdorf was so busy, in fact, that von Trips installed her and her husband Willi in a small house on the entrance road to Burg Hemmersbach so that she would be close at hand. He had come to their door in the middle of the night to pick up his key. “Guess where I've been,” von Trips asked when they had roused themselves.

They looked puzzled. “Well,” she said, “in South Africa . . .”

“I was walking with the Almighty,” von Trips interrupted.

“Where?”

“I celebrated the new year in absolute heaven,” he said. “Astounding, isn't it?”

He was making a facetious reference to the Aga Khan's home in South Africa where he had spent the holiday with Gabriella, Princess of Savoy. In the coming months he faced a murderous campaign for the championship, but he began the year in the arms of a blue-eyed princess.

The next morning von Trips unwrapped a set of plates sent by Huschke von Hanstein of Porsche, a steadfast friend throughout his rise and fall and eventual redemption. Hanstein had given the plates as a Christmas gift and to show that he accepted von Trips' decision to leave Porsche and return to Ferrari at the end of the 1959 season.

“I've just unpacked your Christmas present and note to my great regret that the large plates have broken into three clean pieces,” von Trips wrote to Hanstein. “My next difficulty is to interpret what this oracle could mean. Shards can mean luck, or it could be a wink at my decision to go with the Reds.”

As von Trips noted, broken plates are considered propitious. He may have carried the luck with him to Sicily for the Targa Florio, a rugged mountain race preceding the Grand Prix season. Hill chased von Trips through the harsh countryside on rutted roads caked with dung and caught up to him on a rocky plateau 2,000 feet above the coast. He tried to pass but the road—no more than a paved track for donkey carts—was too narrow. Von Trips might have edged over to let Hill pass, but he was unaware that Hill had pulled so close; the engine howl drowned out the sound of Hill's car. Hill announced himself
with a series of bumps and shoves delivered from behind at 120 mph. One rough nudge sent both whirling off the road and into the weeds. After a heated exchange, they pulled back onto the road, with von Trips leading again. Now driving in a fit of anger, Hill muscled past von Trips and skidded his way down a long switchbacked descent to the sea, flashing by ancient stone churches and old men riding mules. At the bottom of a steep stretch he hit a blind bend and lost control, sliding through concrete guardposts and crumpling his Ferrari in a ditch. He crawled out of the wreck in time to see von Trips rumble by on his way to a win. It was a taste of the dogfight to come.

Sicily was a prelude to Monaco, the first of nine Grands Prix that would decide the championship. Von Trips glowed with confidence at the pre-race galas and the house party thrown by Bernard Cahier at his home in Villefranche-sur-Mer, six miles down the Riviera coast. He was a bit shy, as always, with a hint of sadness in his eyes, but his charm and good humor seemed to inoculate him against misfortune. He was too nice to die.

Von Trips had the winner's demeanor, but a betting line would probably have favored Hill due to his consistent record. “This is Hill's year,” Moss said. “He has the ability . . . and the car.” Though you wouldn't have known it to see Hill on practice days. As usual, he was a knot of nerves, pacing the pits with a cigarette and wiping his goggles. At every turn he exchanged sharp words—punctuated by animated Italian gestures—with the Ferrari mechanics buzzing about the cars in buff-colored coveralls. When he was not practicing, Hill burned off nervous energy and built stamina with long swims off the Monaco beachfront. The warm, wet Mediterranean was his antidote to days spent staring at blacktop.

Hill, the incessant worrier, did not accept the common view that a Ferrari championship was inevitable. “There was always an uncomfortable feeling in the team,” he later wrote, “and while the car was very competitive, I never was convinced that the championship was going to be easy or even possible to win.”

Among other things, Hill feared that Stirling Moss might steal the race, or the season, with one of his sensational dark-horse performances. Moss was flinty-eyed and muscled, with almost superhuman discipline. He once said that he abstained from sex for a week before each race so as not to soften his resolve. His eyesight was so acute that he could read newspapers from across a room and scan the crowd for pretty girls while entering a curve at 85 mph.

Moss had won fourteen Grand Prix races—more than any other active driver—but he had yet to win a championship. His shrewd, cold-blooded precision made him a perennial threat, despite his refusal to join a manufacturer's team. Aside from a stint with Mercedes, Moss relied on privately owned cars a year or so out of date. He enjoyed the underdog role, just as he relished driving cars painted British racing green, but he knew that he might never win a championship that way. In one race after another the obsolete cars broke down under his punishment.

“I like to feel the odds are against me,” he said. “That is one of the reasons why I do not drive for a factory. I want to beat the factories in a car that has no right to do so. If I had any sense I would have been driving for Ferrari all these years. Year after year Ferrari has the best car. But I want to fight against odds, and in a British car.”

Moss took particular delight in beating Ferrari. Ten years earlier, when Moss was a twenty-two-year-old sensation, Ferrari had courted him. After some negotiation Moss had agreed to race a sleek new four-cylinder Ferrari with a tapered nose in a race at Bari, a port city on the heel of the Italian boot. Moss and his father, a prosperous dentist, made the long trip from London, only to be rebuffed at the Ferrari garage. “The mechanic said, ‘Who are you and what are you doing?' ” Moss recalled. “I said I was going to drive that car. He said, ‘I'm afraid you're not.' ”

Moss telephoned Ferrari, who unapologetically explained that he had changed his mind and given the car to the veteran Piero Taruffi. Ferrari was most likely punishing Moss for taking a tough stance in their negotiations. Moss took it as a barefaced insult—to England as much as to himself—and vowed revenge on the racetrack. Indeed, the affront gave him extra incentive over the following decade. “It gave me great pleasure to beat Ferrari,” he said.

If Moss could beat Ferrari anywhere, it was Monaco. In the narrow streets winding above the blue Mediterranean, the driver counted at least as much as the car. The course contained only one straight where the Ferraris could unleash their decisive horsepower. Racing a Ferrari against Moss in Monaco, Hill said, was “similar to seeing which is quickest round a living room, a race horse or a dog.” Monaco was not considered dangerous. The cars reached only 120 mph or so as they twisted their way up and down the hilly principality. It had been nine years since a driver had died there. The circuit might not be fast, but it was demanding. One hundred laps of short bursts and tight hairpins punished the clutch—and the driver. They changed gears about once every five seconds.

Monaco was the only Grand Prix run in city streets, and the smallest slip could send a car into a storefront or streetlamp. Pedestrians stood unprotected on the curb, almost within reach of passing cars. Six years earlier Alberto Ascari had driven his Lancia into the harbor, and a driver once missed a sharp left turn and rammed his hood into the ticket office of the train station. “To go flat-out through a bend that is surrounded by level lawn is one thing,” Moss said, “but to go flat-out through a bend that has a stone wall on one side and a precipice on the other—that's an achievement.”

Race day felt like a fresh start for a sport afflicted by so many recent deaths. As the Sunday church bells tolled, tanned spectators gathered on balconies and in open-air cafés. The city was bright with lilies and bougainvillea. White yachts bobbed at their moorings with pennants fluttering and girls sunbathing in bikinis. Many of the yachts had moved a safe distance from their quayside slips. Rescue divers waited on small boats in case a driver flew off the harborfront promenade.

At 2:30 p.m. the mayor of Monte Carlo arrived at the grandstand in a chauffeured convertible, a sign that the race was about to begin. Mechanics rolled a pair of Sharknoses onto the third row of the starting grid for Hill and von Trips. They sat one row behind Richie Ginther, Hill's Santa Monica friend and a former mechanic.

At Hill's urging, Chiti had hired Ginther to test drive the Sharknose prototypes. He would now race the latest version with a new engine configured with V-shaped cylinder banks spread at 120 degrees. Ginther's cylinder banks were 55 degrees wider than those found in the other two Sharknoses, allowing the engine to sit lower in the chassis. With a lower center of
gravity, the 120-degree version should in theory handle better on Monaco's hairpins and switchbacks. Chiti wanted the new version assigned to Hill or von Trips, but Ferrari did not trust it. He insisted that it go to a second-tier driver. Hill and von Trips would drive the more thoroughly tested model. “It was a typical piece of Ferrari meddling—jealous of a possible project of which he hadn't approved,” Chiti later said. “He was almost afraid of a good result, after having said, over and over, for months, that the future didn't lie with rear engines.”

Ferrari's reservations proved unfounded. The 120-degree engine was blindingly fast over three days of practice, earning Ginther a place beside Moss on the front row.

As usual, Moss was badly handicapped by an obsolete car, though it never seemed to bother him. The year-old Lotus was 20 mph slower than the Ferraris. It had undergone a series of hasty repairs, the last of which took place on the starting line. Minutes before the start Moss noticed a crack in the chassis. He stood by calmly sipping water as a mechanic covered the fuel tanks in wet towels and welded the fracture closed.

With five minutes to go, the drivers pulled their helmets on and lowered themselves into their seats. They stretched their legs inside the hollow cars and checked the alignment of rearview mirrors. They twisted wax earplugs into place to muffle the engine noise and pulled on string-backed gloves dusted with talcum powder to absorb sweat. Up and down the starting grid drivers yawned in response to nervousness and swallowed to slake dry throats. Some spat for good luck. A helicopter buzzed overhead, ruffling palm fronds. Team managers leaned in for parting words.
Viel Glück. Bonne chance. Buona fortuna. Good luck.