Limit, The

by Cannell, Michael

  After the race Hill sat gasping in the pits with exhaust stains smudged across his cheeks and two pairs of goggles dangling from his neck. Eraldo Sculati, the Ferrari manager, walked over and casually asked if he would like to join the Ferrari team for the rest of the season. Hill was beside himself with joy, and he showed it. Any competent driver could drive a privately owned Ferrari, but the company team—the works team, as they called it—was reserved for an elite. This was the invitation he had dreamed of since his hot-rodding days but had never fully believed he would earn. No American had ever raced on the Ferrari team.

  A few weeks later Hill traveled to Modena and checked into the Albergo Reale, a hotel across from 11 Viale Trento e Trieste, the old company workshop where Enzo Ferrari lived in a modest upstairs apartment. The hotel was a de facto Ferrari dormitory run by a bustling red-haired woman, a former brothel madam, or so it was said. The drivers met in the lobby over grappa, Campari, and Lambrusco, and they ate as a group at a long table in the simple dining room. In a city where the cathedral and other landmarks dated back eight hundred years, the drivers discussed how to shave lap times by tenths of a second. Six thousand miles from California, Hill had found a place that felt like home.

  It would not be an easy home. As he would soon discover, Modena was a Shakespearian court, full of subterfuge and friendships cut short—and lorded over by the implacable Enzo Ferrari.

  Enzo Ferrari as an Alfa Romeo driver in 1921. “One must keep working continuously. Otherwise, one thinks of death.” (Associated Press)

  5

  Pope of the North

  FOR ALL THE GLAMOUR of the Ferrari name, its founder lived a circumspect life of Old World persuasion. Enzo Ferrari parked his considerable heft in the same barber chair—the first one on the left—at 8:30 every morning for a shave. He ate lunch, salsicce cotto or tortellini alla panna, with the same consiglieri in a private room at Il Cavallino, a restaurant he set up in a farm building directly across from the factory gate in Maranello. He and his cronies talked about the blunders of Il Canarini, the local soccer team, the evening card game, and the whores who joined them for grappa.

  Ferrari was a tall, bulky man with a sweep of receding white hair and a prominent Roman nose. He was rarely seen without sunglasses and his trademark baggy suit. His pants rode high on his tub-shaped midsection, hoisted by suspenders.

  There were many women in Enzo Ferrari’s life, but none held a central place. He once said that the greatest love a man could know was the love between father and son. If so, Ferrari was doubly blessed. He had two sons: Dino by his wife, Laura, and Piero by his mistress Lina Lardi. He had dozens more, if you count the drivers.

  Dino was a tall, dark-haired boy whom Ferrari hoped would succeed him as head of the Ferrari marque. It was an unrealistic ambition. Dino was born with a rare form of muscular dystrophy and doctors warned that he would not see adulthood. To complicate matters, his congenital ailment afflicted only men. Ferrari’s wife, Laura, had been the carrier, which stirred the simmering mix of resentment and guilt in the Ferrari marriage. (In his 1991 biography of Ferrari, Brock Yates suggests that Laura may have been a prostitute when she met Ferrari, and Dino’s illness could have been syphilis transmitted in the womb.)

  Dino’s disease was easily thrust from their minds as long as he was active and strong. As a teenager he happily rode a bike from the Ferrari apartment in Modena to the factory nine miles up the road in Maranello, where he was a bright-eyed apprentice. He spent long days hunched over the drafting board as an engineering student in Modena and Switzerland, but he tired easily and returned home before completing his studies.

  “The symptoms of his illness were now perceptible,” Ferrari wrote in his memoir, “erupting dramatically” for the first time at a dinner with drivers and mechanics when Dino was nineteen. They had gathered to celebrate a win at the Mille Miglia, but Ferrari cut the dinner short when Dino was too weak to eat.

  When he wasn’t caring for Dino or meeting with engineers at the factory, Ferrari visited Lina Lardi, the mistress who lived with their son Piero in the village of Castelvitro, nine miles south of Modena. She was by all accounts a sweet-natured woman who made few demands. Her redbrick farmhouse surrounded by cherry trees was a sanctuary from the trials of Ferrari’s office and the enmity of his marriage. Like many aspects of his life, this alternate household lived in the half shadows.

  By the fall of 1955 Dino was bedridden with kidney failure. His parents hovered, attending to blankets and meals. “I had always deluded myself—a father always deludes himself—that we should be able to restore him to health,” Ferrari wrote. “I was convinced that he was like one of my cars, one of my engines.”

  Ferrari drew up daily charts to track Dino’s calories and urea in his blood, and he noted them in a log. One night, with the end in sight, he wrote, “the race is lost,” and put the log down for good. Dino died on June 30, 1956, seven months short of his twenty-fifth birthday. A troupe of factory engineers in overalls carried his coffin to a tomb in the San Cataldo cemetery on the edge of Modena.

  Ferrari did what he could to keep Dino’s memory alive. His son’s little Fiat sedan sat under a tarp outside the Modena workshop where Dino last parked it. Ferrari would not allow it to be moved. He hung a black-framed portrait of Dino in his Maranello office with votive candles burning beneath it, and embossed Dino’s name in script on the valve covers of a line of engines. Every morning, after visiting the barber, he pushed through the iron cemetery gates and perched on a bench, speaking aloud to his son about the week’s events—driver gossip, engineering advances, race results—as if they were seated at lunch.

  Without an heir, Ferrari lived only with the constancy of death. Dino’s passing shadowed him, and he relived it with the death of each successive driver. Only one thing kept the darkness at bay: the affirmative force of winning races. For Ferrari, it was an endless, insatiable need.

  Ferrari was born on the northern outskirts of Modena on February 18, 1898, the son of a blacksmith who fabricated sheds and gangways for the railroads spreading like tendrils through the Italian countryside. The household clanged with hammering in the adjacent ironworks as the old metal craftsmen tried to keep pace with the demands of industrialization.

  When Ferrari was ten his father took him and his older brother, Alfredo Jr., to see the great Italian driver Felice Nazzaro win on a 30-mile circuit of dusty public roads winding through the Bologna countryside. “It was watching races like that, being up close to those cars and those heroes, being part of the yelling crowd, that whole environment that aroused my first flicker of interest in cars,” he wrote.

  His ambition to drive race cars himself was put off when his father died of pneumonia in 1916. Alfredo Jr. died the same year of an undiagnosed illness while serving in the ground crew of a World War I air force squadron. Within a year of their deaths the Italian army drafted Ferrari and sent him to shoe mules used to pull artillery for a squadron on the mountainous Austrian front north of Bergamo. He nearly died after contracting pleurisy during the 1918 flu pandemic. He lay among other incurables relegated to a compound of wooden huts. According to Richard Williams, a Ferrari biographer, he woke each morning to the hammering of coffin makers.

  Despite all expectations, Ferrari gradually recovered. After his discharge he returned to Modena with no money or prospects. It is easy to trace the brooding, melancholy presence of the older Ferrari to this period of sorrow, guilt, and apprehension. “I was alone,” he wrote. “My father and my brother were no more. Overcome by loneliness and despair, I wept.” He considered himself an orphan, despite his mother’s presence.

  He parlayed his modest metalworking skills into a job with an outfit that turned surplus army trucks into passenger cars. His duties included driving the trucks ninety miles from Turin to Milan. In 1919, he entered the Targa Florio, a road race run annually through the Sicilian mountains. In those days getting to the race was often more demanding than the race itself. En route to Sicily
he crossed the Abruzzi Mountains, where he claimed to have driven through a blizzard and chased off wolves with an army handgun that he kept under his seat cushion. As with many episodes in Ferrari’s life, it is hard to distinguish fact from the legends he invented for himself.

  By 1923 Ferrari had joined the Alfa Romeo team. Photographs show him sitting in the high cockpit of the period, wearing a long coat and operating gear levers as long as golf clubs. He recorded his first win by holding off a snarling pack of pursuers in a 225-mile road race through pine forests fringing Ravenna. It was one of the few stirring performances of his middling driving career. The crowd carried him on their shoulders after he crossed the finish line at the steps of the local basilica. Before returning to Modena he was introduced to Count Enrico Baracca, father of Francesco Baracca, a World War I pilot who shot down thirty-four planes before crashing to his death at the front. His squadron emblem was a prancing horse, a cavallino rampante, painted on the side of his biplane. At a later meeting with Count Baracca’s wife, the Countess Paolina, she purportedly urged Ferrari to adopt the emblem. She promised that it would bring him luck.

  What happened next is a mystery of the soul. In the summer of 1924 Ferrari had a shot at joining the top ranks of drivers. He won three races in a row when he arrived in Lyon for the French Grand Prix. He took practice laps on a muddy road in his cigar-shaped Alfa Romeo, then abruptly lost his nerve. He left the track without explanation and boarded a train for Modena. His inner resolve had crumbled, leaving him unable to face the heightened expectations. Unsteady nerve was a failing he would never forgive drivers in later years.

  Ferrari entered a few more races, but by the time Dino was born, in January 1932, he had found a new calling as the shrewd and exacting manager of Scuderia Ferrari (scuderia is an Italian term for horse stable), a racing arm of Alfa Romeo that competed with the adopted emblem of the black stallion that Ferrari brought with him. Scuderia Ferrari was hugely successful, but success did not guarantee longevity. In January 1938 Alfa Romeo ran low on funds and scaled back its racing program. An Alfa Romeo truck pulled up to 11 Viale Trento e Trieste, Ferrari’s Modena workshop, and began hauling away spare parts and machine tools. Ferrari was absorbed into the main workings of the company, but he left in November to operate the scuderia independently. When Ferrari beat an Alfa Romeo for the first time, in 1951, he said, “I have killed my mother.”

  By the time Phil Hill came to Maranello in 1956, Ferrari was a national hero for producing cars that consistently beat the hated foreign marques. The low, powerful machines with distinctive Ferrari engines and long voluptuous lines had won hundreds of races on four continents. They won in the mountains of Mexico and the forests of France, on roads cut through the sands of Africa and the winding streets of Monaco. In doing so Ferrari restored a measure of pride to a country humiliated by war. When Ferrari won, Italy won.

  Ferrari came to be known as the Pope of the North. The more his cars won, the more actors, business leaders, and politicians gravitated to Maranello, as if making a pilgrimage. His clients—he always called them clients, not customers—included Nelson Rockefeller, Jimmy Stewart, Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, and King Leopold III of Belgium. “There is no finer thrill in the world than driving a Ferrari flat out,” said Roberto Rossellini, the film director and avid client who occasionally came for lunch with his girlfriend Ingrid Bergman.

  Appointments to see Ferrari were as coveted as a papal audience. The clienti entered through an archway in the low brick factory compound and sat waiting—and waiting—in a bare blue chamber outside Ferrari’s office. The delay was his passive-aggressive way of showing disdain for clients who tried to reward themselves for financial success or retrieve part of their youth. Rudeness was a way of expressing, however obliquely, that humble Italian workmen, like his father, were the equals of his moneyed customers, who in his opinion rarely deserved such exquisite cars. Ferrari was not handsome or well bred, nor did he pretend to be. But he possessed something almost incalculably desirable. In a mid-1950s culture enthralled by jets, rockets, and the prospect of space travel, he held the keys to the most glamorous expression of speed—and he was not shy about lording it over his supplicants, however well known they might be.

  “In later years I saw many instances of Ferrari’s mastery in putting even the most important visitors off balance with long heel-coolings in those dim chambers,” Hill said. After making his point, Ferrari received them in a dark, bare office dominated by the shrinelike photograph of Dino with candles lit beneath it. The most important callers got a tour of the Ferrari plant, which was considered one of the wonders of Italian industry. Ferrari walked them around a factory floor as tidy as a laboratory and bustling with craftsmen from small towns tucked in the Apennine foothills. The visitors were “nearly always accompanied by breathtaking women,” Ferrari wrote in his memoir, “who exercise a magnetic effect on every mechanic in the workshop.”

  There was an Old World aspect to the workers, with their brown coveralls and roughened hands. Somebody once observed that Ferrari seemed to like his mechanics and craftsmen more than his drivers. “I don’t think he liked anyone,” Luigi Chinetti replied.

  One day a young woman introduced herself to Hill as a friend of Enzo Ferrari. After she left Hill said to an acquaintance, “What a ridiculous thing to say. Nobody is a friend of Enzo Ferrari.”

  Maybe so, but the blacksmith’s son knew how to bond with his workers. He won their loyalty by playing up his paisano roots, patting them on the back and telling uncouth jokes in local dialect. The Modena region of northern Italy was a Communist stronghold, but Ferrari never endured a serious strike, despite his earlier membership of the Fascist Party. During the Mussolini regime Ferrari was named a Commendatore of the Kingdom of Italy. The title was rescinded after Mussolini’s death, but his staff continued to address him as Il Commendatore.

  The factory was more like an atelier than a production plant. While the Fiat factory in Turin manufactured hundreds of cars a day, Ferrari produced only five hundred or so road cars a year, each lovingly made by hand. “I am not an industrialist,” he said. “I am a costruttore—a constructor.”

  Mechanics spent more than a week machining a single crankshaft from a solid billet of steel, and they cast cylinder blocks and gearboxes from aluminum alloy produced in their own foundry. They hand-tooled every facet, right down to tiny screws and wing nuts. The precisely assembled engines were tested in special rooms that replicated the exact temperature and atmospheric pressure of racetracks around the world, from the mountains of Mexico to the deserts of North Africa. Ferrari gave his cars power, but he relied on outside coachbuilders to give them character. There was something unmistakably masculine about the hard-pounding Ferrari engine, but it was clothed in a body as unmistakably feminine as Gina Lollo-brigida, Sophia Loren, and other buxom Italian actresses.

  As a young man Ferrari aspired to sing opera, and he handled company affairs with a prima donna’s high-flown repertoire of belittling, sulks, browbeating, threats, castigations, walkouts, curses, lawsuits, and reconciliations. Somehow it worked. The Ferrari team was in a constant state of hysteria and chaos—and consistently won through it all.

  Scuderia Ferrari dominated in part because the founder was an impossibly hard-driving boss who rarely spent a day away from the factory. He worked seven days a week, even in August, when Italian industry shut down. He claimed to have never vacationed. “One must keep working continuously,” he wrote, “otherwise, one thinks of death.”

  Ferrari intimidated his drivers with extreme outbursts of temper and gratuitous displays of bullying. The first time Hill visited Modena, Ferrari took him to lunch at Oreste, a restaurant in the old district. The owner brought out a special reserve of Lambrusco and made an elaborate presentation of its uncorking. “Ferrari took a little mouthful, thoughtfully testing, and then, with a grimace, spat it on the floor,” Hill said. “He made no attempt at not making a mess of it, and said it was the worst stuff he�
��d ever tasted.” Then he laughed to show that it was a sardonic joke.

  When drivers died, Ferrari put on florid demonstrations of mourning. For days he skulked about in a bathrobe, unshaven and inconsolable. “The violins would come out,” said Denise McCluggage, one of the first woman drivers and a correspondent for the Herald Tribune. “He was a tenor, for God’s sake.” He wept with the widows and intimated that he was too heartbroken to continue racing. For a man capable of cyclonic fits of rage he could speak in a surprisingly soft register. “Will God forgive me for fabricating such fast cars?” he asked. His mourning was a one-act opera. Ferrari never went to the funerals. He sent his wife Laura in his place while he resumed brooding over engineering details.

  Ferrari never became a great driver. Nor was he an engineer or industrialist. Instead, he called himself un agitatore di uomini. An agitator of men.

  Oddly enough, Ferrari rarely saw his cars in action. He stopped attending races in the 1930s because, he said, it was too painful to see the inert material he had brought to life brutalized on the track. He preferred to listen to radio coverage (in later years he watched on a small black-and-white television) in the gloom of his office with his consiglieri. Occasionally he would telephone instructions to his team manager in the pits. His absence only amplified his authority. Automotive historian Doug Nye compared Ferrari to “a Dr. No character sitting at the center of his web with tinted glasses.”

  Ferrari was a menacing figure, but magnetic. It was natural that Hill, who felt no warmth for his father, would gravitate to Ferrari as a surrogate. Ferrari was a “man I respected, from whom I wanted more than anything affection and for him to be a good daddy to me,” Hill said.

  Winning Ferrari’s affection would prove more difficult than winning the races. For one thing, Ferrari had more sentiment for the cars than the drivers. When Robert Daley, a New York Times correspondent, asked Ferrari why he never went to the track, he said, “Because when a man has taken something, some material and, with his own two hands, transformed it into something else, has made not a machine out of it, but a soul, a living breathing soul. Well, then, he goes to a race and he hears this soul which he has created, hears it being mistreated, hears that it is not going right . . .” Ferrari placed his hand over his heart. “It makes a man suffer here. A man cannot bear such things.”