The restoration was the toil of a fastidious mind, a labor few drivers would consider. It must have cheered Hill. He felt sufficiently recovered from his ulcer, in any case, to race a boxy British Triumph TR-2 at Torrey Pines over Fourth of July weekend, winning his class but staying clear of the main event. A few weeks later he went to work on the set of The Racers, a Kirk Douglas movie based on a novel about a bus driver who enters the Grand Prix. Darryl Zanuck made it as a vehicle for his mistress, Bella Darvi, who later dumped him, racked up prodigious gambling debts at Cannes and Monte Carlo, and killed herself by sticking her head in an oven.
European racing was still relatively unknown to Americans. To show its full spectacle, Zanuck shot a wealth of widescreen CinemaScope footage during the 1954 season, including aerial views captured from an airplane trailing Juan Manuel Fangio, Alberto Ascari, and other standouts as they raced through the streets of Monaco and the Rhineland hills. Zanuck built exact replicas of the pits on the back lot at Twentieth Century Fox.
The world Hill abandoned had returned to him through the odd prism of Hollywood. His job was to maintain the three Maseratis and two Ferraris imported for the shoots, and to show Douglas and other actors how to drive them in and out of the mock pits without stalling or stripping the gears.
He also did stunt driving for the film. On a canyon road north of San Diego he and Dave Sykes, an old racing friend, were driving side by side behind a camera car when they locked wheels and spun off the road. Neither driver was hurt, but for Hill it was like a Stanislavski exercise, as if he were acting out his worst fear for the camera. (The crash footage was not used because it didn’t fit the script.)
In the fall of 1954, with the Pierce-Arrow restored and The Racers wrapped, Hill suffered what he called “the strain of inactivity.” He was twenty-six, and for the first time in his life he had nowhere to go. In October, after six idle months, he received an envelope postmarked Dallas. It contained a photo of a white Ferrari 375 MM with a shark tailfin and pronounced air vents added to the feline bodywork. Stapled to the photo was a note from Allen Guiberson: “Guaranteed not to cause ulcers.” In fact, Hill’s ulcer had improved. Becalmed and unsure what to do with himself, he accepted Guiberson’s invitation. “So despite my qualms and X-rays,” he said, “Guiberson’s temptation tipped me back over the edge.”
Years later Hill would say that he had no choice. Racing was irresistible because he excelled at it. He could not turn away from it any more than Picasso could lay down his brush. “It was so dangerous back then,” he said, “you’d have had to be crazy to do it unless it was something you had to do.”
His retirement ended at March Field, a military airport in Riverside, California, converted for racing, where Hill came second in a crowd of Ferraris, Jaguars, and Allards. Encouraged to find his skills intact, he agreed to drive Guiberson’s Ferrari in the Carrera Panamericana in December 1954, in what would be the last staging of the race. This time he stood a better chance of a top finish. For one thing, he would not have to compete with Mercedes. The company skipped the Carrera because the Gullwing’s sequel was not ready.
His main competition would be Maglioli, the rare Italian driver who was both determined and disciplined. “He is not wild,” a friend said. “He does not eat much; he drinks less than he eats. He is not crazy over women. The head rules him. For a young Italian that is odd. For an Italian race driver it is nearly impossible.”
Maglioli would drive the fastest car in Mexico, a new Ferrari 375 Plus with a 4.9-liter engine. It was a full 20 mph faster than Guiberson’s three-year-old car. With elevated speeds, the race would be even more dangerous than in previous years. “A car which goes off the road,” Maglioli said, “goes to death.”
The Carrera was the usual clash of car cultures. Maglioli and the other Europeans lined up alongside oddball entrants like Akton Miller, a Californian who had assembled a rattletrap roadster, nicknamed El Caballo de Hierro (Iron Horse), from a hodgepodge of parts. El Caballo had earned a folksy following among Mexican locals, who enjoyed seeing a homegrown car go up against contenders like Porfiro Rubirosa, a well-tanned dandy who wore a scarf, polo sweater, and kid gloves behind the wheel of his privately owned Ferrari. When the Mexican press mischievously invited him to pose for a photo in El Caballo, Rubirosa sniffed and waved them off. “Rubirosa wouldn’t even sit in El Caballo,” Miller said, “let alone have his picture taken.”
Ten miles into the first leg, Miller saw Rubirosa’s Ferrari pulled to the shoulder with a steaming radiator. As he shot past, he repaid Rubirosa’s hauteur by flipping him the finger.
Within an hour another Ferrari fell out of the race. Jack McAfee steered into a tricky right-hand turn at 120 mph and slid sideways off the road, tumbled off a thirty-foot embankment, and rolled twice in the sagebrush. He suffered no more than a few bruises, but his navigator and close friend, Ford Robinson, broke his neck and died instantly. “No blood,” a Mexican bystander told a reporter. “A clean break of the neck.” McAfee swore he would never race again, but of course he did.
Meanwhile, Hill, again joined by Ginther, thundered to the lead in the mountainous first leg from Tuxtla Gutiérrez to Oaxaca with an average speed of 94 mph—a record for the stage—with Maglioli riding his tail the whole way.
By 10:40 the next morning a crowd had gathered in the hamlet of Atlixco to watch the first cars come in. The central square buzzed with anticipation: would Hill or Maglioli appear first? A loudspeaker crackled to life: Carro a la vista, señores (car in sight, gentlemen). Moments later the whine of a Ferrari revved to 7,000 rpm echoed off the adobe walls. Maglioli’s red car flashed down the main street, pirouetted through two 90-degree turns in the central square, and vanished in a swirl of dust. Three minutes later Hill appeared, his tailfin covered in soot. For reasons Hill could not understand, the crowd threw rocks at him as he slowed for the turns and sped off.
Maglioli won the 252-mile run to Puebla by more than four minutes that morning, but Hill gained it back in the afternoon by driving like a madman down the short, down-plunging run to Mexico City. Hill knew his cumulative 45-second lead would not hold up when they left the mountains. Maglioli’s newer Ferrari would outmuscle him on the featureless straights where forty miles could pass without a turn. Hill’s only hope was to stay close and hope for mishap.
Sure enough, Maglioli ended the duel by gunning his Ferrari to 160 mph through the wide-open desert. He gained more than a three-minute advantage on the run to León, leaving Hill to follow his taillights in the fog. Maglioli padded his lead on the next day’s leg to Durango where the drivers stopped for a party on the set of a western called Robber’s Roost. Maglioli led by ten minutes after booming his way to Parral and Chihuahua over the next two days. Hill stood securely in second place, but his three-year-old Ferrari was running rough. “I’ll settle for second place,” he said in the high-walled enclosure where Ferrari bivouacked on the eve of the finish.
The Juárez desert glowed with campfires that night. Hundreds camped out and five thousand more parked along the race’s final mile the next morning. The policía guarded the road, shooing cattle and spectators to the shoulder. A dozen private planes flew over the desert looking for the finishers. By 11:40 a.m. a tiny dust cloud gathered on the southern horizon. The two cars appeared as distant specks, followed by a loudening howl. Maglioli took the checkered flag at 134 mph, three seconds ahead of Hill. Both finishes were concealed in clouds of dust.
“Road racers are like roulette players,” Maglioli told the press a few minutes later. “We who race know that it is dangerous, but once we get the fever, we are satisfied with nothing else.”
Hill lost the 1954 Carrera by twenty-four cumulative minutes, but winning three of nine legs and pressing Maglioli in an outdated Ferrari counted as a win of sorts. The Mexican press called him El Batallador, the battler.
Hill headed north with a sense of resolution and relief. For years he had agonized over what career to pursue—mechanic, driver, or something
more conventional? “I was finally able to come to terms with myself and admit that racing was the profession I wanted to follow,” he said. It was a turning point. Now the question was how far could he go, and would he survive long enough to get there?
Ambitious young drivers hoping to advance up the amateur ranks had one thing working in their favor: attrition by death. The racing squads run by European carmakers, known as works teams, needed a supply of fresh blood to replace the drivers who burned to death, snapped their necks, or catapulted into trees. All of which happened with alarming frequency in the days before seat belts, fireproof coveralls, and other safety concessions.
Drivers talked about many things while they drank burgundy in cafés or waited in airport lounges—where to eat, practical jokes played on teammates, and, of course, the long-legged girls who followed them from race to race. They rarely talked about death. Whether they discussed it or not, they were acutely aware that roughly half of them would die in the coming seasons. The odds were grimmer than those their older brothers had faced in the war.
The death rate was so high that the great Italian driver Alberto Ascari distanced himself from his two children so that they would not miss him when he died. “I don’t want them to get too fond of me,” he said. “One of these days I may not come back and they will suffer less if I have kept them a bit at arm’s length.” His only defense against death was the set of superstitions he faithfully followed.
Ascari was a self-possessed Milanese with ample cheeks and hazel-blue eyes who came to the racetrack each morning in a coat and tie, as if preparing for a day of desk work. He first sat behind the wheel at age five, on the lap of his father, Antonio Ascari, who led the Alfa Romeo team when Enzo Ferrari broke into racing in the 1920s. Like his father, Alberto became a national hero, twice winning the Grand Prix championship for Ferrari. Italians followed his career the way Americans followed Joe DiMaggio. They affectionately called him Ciccio, or Chubby.
The evening before the 1955 Monaco Grand Prix, Ascari watched a movie with Fangio and a few other drivers. Afterwards they walked a part of the circuit that zigzagged down the hilly principality overlooking the Mediterranean. When they came to a swerve leading onto the long harborfront straight, somebody said, “Whoever falters here, goes into the water.” Ascari touched wood. The next afternoon Ascari clipped a curb at that very spot, brushed an iron mooring bitt, and plunged into the harbor with a geyser of spray. Rescue divers stationed nearby dove in after him. After twenty agonizing seconds Ascari bobbed to the surface ringed by oily bubbles. When he found that he had come up without his pale blue helmet he sent a diver back down to retrieve it. The helmet was his good luck charm. He never raced without it. He was taken to the hospital with lacerations to the head, but he was otherwise unhurt.
Four days later Ascari turned up at the track in Monza, where his friend and protégé Eugenio Castellotti had completed twenty-five test laps in a new Ferrari sports car they were to share in a 1,000-kilometer race. Most of what Castellotti knew about racing he had learned from Ascari. “Be calm,” Ascari had told him on practice runs. “Slip into the car like you were going for a normal drive, instead of at 120 mph. Put your wheels where I put mine.” Ascari became not just a tutor, but a loved mentor. Castellotti bought the same string-backed driving gloves as Ascari, the same blue polo shirt, the same goggles.
Ascari had not planned on driving that day in Monza, but when Castellotti took a break he impulsively decided to take a few laps before going home for lunch with his wife. “You have to get straight back into the saddle after an accident,” he told a friend, “otherwise doubt sets in.”
He slipped behind the wheel in his street clothes and peeled out of the pits with his tie flapping over his shoulder. The chinstrap of his lucky blue helmet was being repaired, so Ascari uncharacteristically borrowed Castellotti’s white helmet. After a warm-up lap he waved, as if to confirm that he was okay. He slid his hands around on the wheel, gripping and ungripping as he always did. On the third lap Castellotti could hear Ascari change gears out of sight on the far side of the track, then the engine fell silent. Castellotti ran across and found the car upside down in a patch of bushes. Ascari had been thrown from the cockpit and landed on a stretch of grass. He was gasping faintly when Castellotti reached him. Blood trickled from a nostril. “His eyes seemed to stare at me with their usual kindness,” Castellotti said. “I knelt down next to him as if to help him, but by then my best friend had left me.”
Castellotti was inconsolable. “When I close my eyes,” he later said, “I can hear Alberto giving me advice.”
The exact cause of the crash was never determined. Two days later a horse-drawn wagon carried his black coffin through the somber streets of Milan with his blue helmet resting on top. He was buried next to his father, who had died in a similar crash while leading the French Grand Prix at Montlhéry, outside Paris, thirty years earlier. They were the same age almost to the day.
While Ascari was laid to rest at the end of May 1955, Hill and Ginther were headed to Genoa on a freighter with Allen Guiberson’s Ferrari 750 Monza in the hold for a series of races in France, Italy, and Germany. They were nearing Gibraltar when the captain told them in broken English that a famous driver had died. He had heard a bulletin on the ship’s radio, but missed the name. Hill and Ginther stood on deck, the freighter rolling and lifting beneath them, trying to guess whom the driver might be.
The next day they received a shipboard wire from Chinetti: Get off at Barcelona and go directly to Modena. Ginther slept on the all-night train up the coast of Spain and France while Hill looked out the window at the passing towns. At dawn they pulled into Modena where a rosy morning light shone on the ancient stone campanile and a piazza cluttered with market stalls. Modena was a provincial center one hundred miles southeast of Milan known for balsamic vinegar and a sweet, fizzy wine called Lambrusco. Most crucially to Hill, it was the engine capital of northern Italy—home to Ferrari, Maserati, and a supporting cast of parts manufacturers, transmission shops, body fabricators, car journalists, assorted flunkies, and a healthy population of whores.
Hill dropped his bags at a hotel and went directly to the Ferrari factory, a tidy fortress nine miles up the road in the village of Maranello. A guard opened the gate and Hill walked through an archway beneath the Ferrari name spelled out in its distinctive early modern lettering to wait bleary-eyed in a dingy cubicle. The door opened and there was Enzo Ferrari, age fifty-seven, standing over Hill in a dark suit and tie, his receding silver hair swept back and his rheumy hooded eyes hidden behind thick sunglasses. Ascari was dead, he explained, and he needed an understudy.
Ferrari led Hill to the factory floor where mechanics were readying the Ferrari 121 LM that Ascari was to have driven at Le Mans. It had a long sinuous body suggesting coiled energy, like a cat waiting to pounce. Ferrari created it to counter the experimental Mercedes 300 SLR, which had rolled out of the Stuttgart factory earlier in the year with an early version of fuel injection and magnesium alloy bodywork. Ferrari asked Hill what he thought of it. Beautiful, Hill said.
“Then how would you like to drive it at Le Mans,” Ferrari said, “with your great antagonist from Mexico, Umberto Maglioli?”
The 24 Hours of Le Mans were among the most prestigious in the world of racing, and crucial to carmakers’ fortunes. The entrants were modified showroom models or prototypes that would soon be put into commercial production. The event acted as a measure of their relative durability and the marques’ progress in developing new engine and brake technologies. Everyone wanted to know if the British, Germans, or Italians were winning the engineering race, and Le Mans gauged their relative standing. To put it another way, Le Mans was an arduous form of consumer testing. The eight-mile loop on closed country roads was an agony of acceleration and braking repeated over the length of a full day.
Among other things, Le Mans was an extreme driving test wrapped in a Gallic carnival. Every June, 300,000 revelers arrived in caravans of den
ted Deux Chevaux and Peugeots packed with poulet, baguettes, and wine. They came for the spectacle, and for the ghoulish prospect of witnessing a crash. They were rarely disappointed.
The racing fans, les fans de courses à voiture, rode the Ferris wheel, cheered professional wrestlers, packed into all-night dance halls, and whistled at girls in the burlesque tent. On Sunday, mass was held every few hours in an outdoor chapel. The cars whizzed by hour after hour as French carnival music blared. The drivers could tell when dawn was near by the smell of bacon. “I hate Le Mans,” said Stirling Moss, the golden boy of British racing who had recently joined the Mercedes team. “It’s not a race but a circus.”
It was a circus, to be sure, and more dangerous than ever with the bigger, more powerful Mercedes, Ferraris, and Jaguars sharing the roads with swarms of puny MGs and Gordinis. Alfred Neubauer, the Mercedes team manager, complained to French officials that the road was too narrow, particularly around the pits where drivers slowed and veered before they pulled in. The new Mercedes SLR, which could reach 185 mph, would jostle wheel to wheel with little MGs on a track no wider than a two-lane road. “Just imagine, a driver realizes a fraction of a second too late that he’s been told to slow down,” Neubauer said. “He tends to brake suddenly. On a narrow track like this it could have disastrous consequences.” We have been organizing the race since 1923, sniffed French officials. Nothing like that has ever happened.
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