Limit, The (5 page)

Ferrari had built a small factory in the nearby town of Maranello, where he fabricated machine tools and other munitions for the German and Italian armies. An American
bombing raid in November 1944 put an end to production. He spent three months digging out. The Allies pounded him again in February 1945.

All around him was death and destruction. A year earlier Mussolini had been shot and hung by his ankles from the roof of a Milan gas station. On the same day Ugo Gobbato, an Alfa Romeo director and an advocate of Fascist-style efficiency, was shot dead as he left the Alfa factory. Advancing and retreating armies had blown up bridges, hampering even the simplest travel. Fighting between Fascists and the Resistance ravaged the countryside. Villagers settled old scores with seizures and executions.

Ferrari's personal life was no better. He had fathered a son out of wedlock with a fair-haired girl who worked in his factory during the war. The baby arrived as Ferrari's thirteen-year-old son, his only child with his wife, Laura, fell ill with muscular dystrophy.

Before the war Ferrari had directed Alfa Romeo's almost unbeatable racing team. By 1946 he was in the early stages of building sports cars under his own name, but in his weary condition he told Chinetti that he could not imagine much demand for them anytime soon. He might concentrate instead on making machine tools.

Chinetti responded that as a tool fabricator Ferrari would amount to no more than a cog in northern Italy's industrial machinery, but as a carmaker he could be triumphant. Chinetti promised that he could find plenty of buyers in America, an acquisitive country that had emerged from the war with half the world's wealth. Within a few years it would own 60 percent of the world's cars. In the early hours of Christmas morning
Chinetti made Ferrari a promise: if you make them, he said, I will sell them.

Three months later Ferrari, dressed in his customary dark suit, white shirt, and tie, seated himself behind the wheel of a Tipo 125, the first car to bear the Ferrari name. It was still unfinished. Bodywork was missing and wires dangled from the dashboard. But it was complete enough for a test drive. With mechanics and engineers standing by in coats and overalls, Ferrari nosed across the cobblestone forecourt of the Maranello factory and out onto the Abetone Road for a ten-mile shakedown.

Six weeks later two Ferraris debuted at a street race in Piacenza, seventy miles from Maranello. Ferrari did not attend. He stayed home and waited for a report by phone, as he would throughout his life. Neither car finished, but Ferrari declared it “a promising failure.” The Italian press was not convinced. One newspaper called the cars “small, red and ugly.”

Ugly or not, they had a mighty asset beneath the hood: a lovingly assembled V12 engine with two banks of six cylinders. Ferrari called it “an ambitious dream” to build the complex twelve-cylinder engine, though it was hardly a first. Packard had built them as early as 1916. (Ferrari claimed to have fallen in love with “the song of the twelve cylinders” when he heard U.S. Army officers driving Packards across Italy during World War I.)

It may not have been new, but the V12 nonetheless made a statement: Ferraris would be built on power. The engine came first. Everything else was secondary. Winning, Ferrari believed, was 80 percent engine strength. “I build an engine,” he told
Der Spiegel
years later, “and attach wheels to it.”

To build the first V12 Ferrari had recruited Gioacchino
Colombo, his former assistant, who was on leave from Alfa Romeo while a trade union committee investigated his role in the Fascist Party. During Ferragosto, a mid-August feast day, Colombo slipped away from his sister's dinner table. Seated under a tree in her garden, he sketched a V12 engine with pistons shorter than the diameter of the cylinder bore, allowing the engine unusually high revs. It would have the quickened heartbeat of an adrenalized animal. Ferrari built three cars with Colombo's engine in 1947, and nine more in 1948. Meanwhile, Chinetti opened a Ferrari dealership on the Avenue d'léna in Paris, and he elevated the new Ferrari brand by easily winning a 12-hour race in Paris in a 166 Spyder, an open two-seater with a grille like a gaping beetle. All unnecessary hardware had been removed. The result was a rounded red aluminum torpedo. The Italian press nicknamed it the
bar-chetta
, or “little boat.”

The Paris race was the first long-distance victory for a Ferrari outside Italy and a boost to its growing reputation. After the race Chinetti shipped the car to America and sold it to Briggs Cunningham, the son of a Cincinnati financier. Cunningham in turn drove it to a second-place finish at Watkins Glen, in upstate New York, which helped introduce the Ferrari name to America.

Le Mans, known simply as the 24 Hours, was one of the few European races that Americans noted. Chinetti won it for the third time in 1949—its first running after the war—in a Ferrari
barchetta.
It is a race of withering duration, lasting from 4 p.m. Saturday to 4 p.m. Sunday. Normally a pair of drivers trade shifts at the wheel. Peter Mitchell-Thomson, the second Baron Selsdon, Chinetti's co-driver, was ill (reportedly with a
hangover), so at the advanced age of forty-seven, Chinetti drove for all but thirty minutes of the 24-hour race, a demonstration of grit that added to his stature when he met customers in Manhattan.

Ferrari could not have hoped for a more masterful point man. Chinetti romanced the brand as an electrifying alternative to Jaguars, Lincoln Continentals, and Cadillacs. With racecar handling and a speedometer that swung thrillingly up to 180 mph, it was not a car for ferrying the family to country clubs. Ferraris contained almost no luggage room. They were concerned only with horsepower. “I don't care if the door gaps are straight,” Ferrari reportedly said. “When the driver steps on the gas I want him to shit his pants.” Chinetti's customers, affluent young lawyers and account executives, could imagine how that rumbling horsepower might affect a girlfriend.

Max Hoffman, an Austrian-born dealer, sold Porsches from a Park Avenue showroom with a circular ramp designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Chinetti took the opposite tack. His customers had to venture to the far West Side of Manhattan, in those days still a gritty industrial backwater. His first two locations, on West 55th Street and West 19th Street, hardly even qualified as showrooms. They were more like ordinary garages identified only by a discreet decal of a prancing horse. The setting was a powerfully understated sales pitch: Ferrari was only about the car, and the car was only about speed.

With the manner of an imperious maître d', Chinetti acted as if he were doing customers a favor by allowing them in for a look. “He used his position as purveyor of new Ferraris much as ancient popes once granted indulgences for rich noblemen,” Mike Covello wrote in a catalog of Ferrari models. If a
prospective customer seemed worthy, Chinetti granted a test drive. If they handled the car reasonably well he might consent to an actual sale. Even then it could take as much as a year for the car to arrive from Italy. Sometimes it never came. The Ferrari factory kept scant inventory, and customer service was not a priority. Most carmakers raced in order to sell. Ferrari sold only to pay for the racing.

The Carrera Panamericana was a 1,933-mile survival test. Drivers raced the length of Mexico in the fastest sports cars made, dodging armadillos and burros along the way. (The Collier Collection)

C
HINETTI SOLD
H
ILL
a
barchetta
painted blue, the French racing color, for $6,000, or about half what he would have charged other customers. He slashed the price because it benefited Ferrari to get cars into the hands of young racing talent like Hill, and because the car had a history. Earlier that year a French driver named Jean Larivière had failed to make a 90-degree turn at Le Mans and landed in a garden. The car took a beating and a strand of fence wire neatly sliced Larivière's head off. Hill found a hole in the floor drilled to drain Larivière's blood. Damaged goods or not, the car came to Hill with the graceful Ferrari fender lines and a small badge with the company's logo, the black stallion rearing against a yellow background.

All the cars Hill had driven made variations on the same sound: a mild
blat-blat-blat
, the rhythmic hum of a lamb. The
Ferrari had the vocal cords of a lion. With its short stroke and twelve cylinders it roared out a commanding song as it came up through the gears. “It sounded like a factory,” said Tim Considine, an automotive historian. “At 8,000 rpm it is just the sweetest sound. It's smooth, but a big sound. Like an orchestra, like thunder.”

The
barchetta
had some foibles, including a side-to-side roll, which made it hard to steer. Hill corrected that, and he reworked the shock absorbers. “The 12-inch finned aluminum brakes were fantastically good though, and showed no signs of fade, so I knew I could really punish them . . . if I had to,” he said. “No car I had driven had pleased me as much in this regard.”

Hill now drove with extravagant horsepower under his toe. “With Ferrari you not have to worry,” Chinetti told him. “You get in. You drive. You win.” He was right. Three months after buying the
barchetta
Hill finished first at Torrey Pines, a makeshift racetrack on a 2.7-mile loop of blacktop service road on a disused army base north of San Diego. Spectators could hear him coming like a wall of sound, a high-pitched whine amplifying to a full-throated scream as he hove into view. They glimpsed him in the leather cockpit as he passed at 112 mph, his head cocked to one side as he downshifted into turns.

Hill belonged to Chinetti's coast-to-coast network of drivers, mechanics, patrons, and friends. At regional racetracks in places like Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin, and Madera, California, he drove cars provided by wealthy backers, or by Chinetti himself. In return, he helped place the Ferrari name before prospective buyers. In one town after another he appeared in local newspapers cradling a trophy and wearing windbreakers, biking shoes, and polo shirts dark with sweat. His face was slack
with exhaustion, his hair tousled. In every case he had just sustained terrible road poundings with lungfuls of fumes and pebbles bouncing off his goggles. The camera caught him depleted and half-smiling, as if winning provided only the tiniest respite.

In 1952, a year after they met, Chinetti invited Hill to drive a Ferrari in his first international race, a weeklong odyssey that jounced 1,933 miles over the jagged spine of Mexico. The racing calendar was sprinkled with long-distance sports car events, known as “endurance races,” lasting twelve hours or more. The Carrera Panamericana was the longest by far, unfolding in nine legs over five days. The course stretched all the way from the Guatemala border to Texas. The drivers took off each morning at one-minute intervals with the shortest cumulative time determining the winner. The fastest cars in the world tore through backcountry where some locals had never before seen a car. Mexican newspapers called it “the race of death.”

The Carrera was started in 1950 to mark the completion of the Mexican portion of the Pan-American Highway (nicknamed “Langley Turnpike” by CIA operatives), which extends from the southern tip of South America to Prudhoe Bay, Alaska. Mexican officials hoped the race would persuade American business leaders and tourists that Mexico was no longer a backwater of burros and shanties. Captain Eddie Rickenbacker, the World War I flying ace, donated a trophy.

The inaugural race was mostly an amateur escapade. The Carrera's 132 entries included Mexican taxi drivers and a British actress named Jacqueline Evans who had married a Mexican bullfighter. A bra manufacturer sponsored Mrs. H. R. Lammons of Jacksonville, Texas; illustrations of their products festooned the side of her Buick.

In following years some of the big European carmakers—Lancia, Mercedes, Ferrari—signed up. The Carrera lacked the prestige of endurance races like Le Mans or the Mille Miglia, but it offered carmakers a chance to prove their durability on the world's roughest road and promote themselves to the insatiable American market.

The Carrera started as a showdown between American and European car brands, or marques, both of which advanced rapidly in the postwar years but rarely faced each other. The strapping Chryslers and Studebakers were expected to muscle their way to the fore, but they maneuvered sluggishly on the mountain roads while the lighter European sports cars scurried through the climbs and turns as adroitly as cutting horses. Before the 1952 Carrera, the Americans lobbied for, and received, a split between the two-seat sports cars sent from Europe and the big production sedans from Detroit. They would share the same dusty roads, but the box score would no longer compare them. The race was a face-off no longer, but it was still an important proving ground.

In November 1952, Hill flew south with Arnold Stubbs, a fellow Californian who would act as navigator and help with repairs. They stayed a few days in Mexico City, practicing on a twisty canyon road just outside the city. “One day we were chasing this idiot Pontiac station wagon that was all arms and elbows,” Hill said. “It was sliding all around the road.” The two idiots, it turned out, were Alberto Ascari and Luigi Villoresi, two of Europe's most revered drivers.