Limit, The

by Cannell, Michael

  “You mean you suffer too much for the car, not the driver?” Daley asked.

  “Oh, the driver too, of course,” he added.

  Hill arranged the interview for Daley and sat in during the discussion. Afterwards he said, “I never thought [Ferrari] would say such a thing in front of a driver. I guess we like to think he loves us because we are all so brave and drive so fast. But deep down I suppose all of us knew he cares more about his cars than he does about us.”

  The drivers were naturally more concerned with their own welfare. They talked constantly among themselves about how fast they could go without losing control. They believed that every curve had a theoretical maximum speed, known as the limit, beyond which a car’s four wheels lost adhesion to the road and the car would spin or flip. “If you go into a 100 mph corner at 101, that’s too fast and 99 is too slow,” said Stirling Moss. “You’d better be able to feel the difference in the seat of your pants.” Depending on the car, course, and conditions, the limit could lie anywhere from 65 to 180 mph. The trick was to identify it and stay close for as many laps as possible—but not too close. Moss said that he and the other drivers spent so much time in intimate contact with the limit that they had a “nodding acquaintance with death.”

  As much as any driver, Hill knew how to respect the limit. He was shrewd enough to recognize it and disciplined enough to stay within its confines. Not that self-control curried any favor with his boss. On the contrary, Ferrari discouraged drivers from letting lifesaving calculations deter them from speed’s mystic calling. “Racing is a great mania,” he said, “to which one must sacrifice everything, without reticence, without hesitation. No reasoning is valid. For no matter how logical the argument, when the race begins it is less than useless.”

  There was a rookie Ferrari driver who captured this spirit of abandon, but it wasn’t Hill. It was a handsome young German, Count Wolfgang von Trips. Shortly after Hill joined Ferrari, von Trips had shown up in Modena with a playful smile and a driving style that bordered on a death wish.

  Burg Hemmersbach, a forty-five-room stronghold surrounded by a moat and prodigious farmlands—a vestige of feudal Germany. It would pass to the young count someday, or so his parents hoped. (Gräflich Berghe von Trips’sche Sportstiftung zu Burg Hemmersbach)

  6

  Count von Crash

  COUNT WOLFGANG VON TRIPS was heir to a seven-hundred-year-old dynasty of German knights and the only child of Eduard Reichsgraf Berghe von Trips and his wife, Thessa, the daughter of a Bonn city official. In the early part of the twentieth century, Germany society still clung to a feudal code. Marrying below one’s station was considered scandalous; Eduard’s family spurned him for sullying the bloodline. When his father died, Eduard received no money or inheritance, only the family castle and land granted by law to the oldest son.

  In 1932, when Wolfgang was four, his parents moved into Burg Hemmersbach, a moated compound eleven miles west of Cologne that his family had owned for nearly two hundred years. At its center stood a forty-five-room manor house built incongruously on the remains of a Gothic stronghold burned by Austrian soldiers in 1793. The result was a layer cake of historical styles, with symmetrical windows and cornices capped by a mansard roof and a domed turret overlooking a grassy U-shaped forecourt enclosed by redbrick farm buildings. The high-ceilinged rooms contained ancestral portraits and antlers of animals collected on family hunting trips. Lest anyone forget the von Trips pedigree, a family tree was painted on a parlor wall dating back to the feudal robber barons who tyrannized the Rhineland with taxes and tolls. Beyond the compound lay hundreds of acres of farmland—a vestige of feudal Germany. It was an imposing layout, but charmingly attuned to its wooded setting with stone walls, rustic studded doors, and the sound of gurgling water.

  Wolfchen (Little Wolf), as his parents called him, bridled against the formalities of his highborn home—the ceremonious greetings to guests, the Old World table manners, the leggings and ruffled shirts forced on him for social outings. “The days of my youth when I had to go to those parties and was not allowed to get dirty, those are dark memories,” he later wrote in his diary.

  Left to himself, von Trips ran wild through the apple orchard and paddled a flat-bottomed boat along the moats that wound among the grounds. He walked the fields with plow horses and rode harvest wagons. When his parents found his secret tree-house, the little count sat defiantly on a high branch ignoring their pleas for him to come down.

  It was a rambunctious childhood, but rarefied and isolated by privilege. He had little contact with other children until he went to a local elementary school where he mixed with the sons of farm laborers and coal workers. “The village boys were rather rude to me at first,” he said. “I got many a beating because of the way I dressed. At first I didn’t know how to protect myself.”

  When his new school friends came to the castle he led them in pranks. “My friends and I did the cruelest things to stir up the grown-ups,” he later wrote in his diary. “We pushed again and again, and sometimes went a bit too far.” One early summer day they capsized his canoe in the moat and hid beneath it to scare his grandmother and nanny.

  Von Trips’ first car crush was the family Opel Super 6, a boxy German sedan polished and cared for by a chauffeur named Arnold. At age eight von Trips was too short to reach the pedals, so he directed a friend to sit on the floorboards and push the clutch while he steered around the cobbled driveway inside the courtyard. His father allowed them to muck about with the car as long as they stayed under Arnold’s watchful eye.

  When von Trips was ten he snuck the car out when his parents and Arnold were gone. His friends sat on the hood and stood on the running boards. “We drove the car through the gates, careful that nobody saw, and out into the park,” he said. “Then we raged around like savages. Branches whistled past. The Opel got its first scratch. A few tumbled down and sprained ankles, and whatever else you can sprain. Then we put the car back in the garage. Of course, everything was found out. There was a murderous row. I couldn’t touch the car for weeks.”

  Von Trips was also a horseman, a fast one, galloping across potato fields and through oak forests on his stallion Rialto. He often rode the castle grounds with his father, who had raced horses and fought with the Düsseldorfer Cavalry in World War I.

  Despite his own intrepid history, Eduard urged his son to curb his wild streak. As if to dramatize his warning, Eduard took a harrowing fall one Sunday when Bianca, his beautiful giant mare, bucked him over its head. Eduard landed head first on the cobblestones. He crawled to the curb with blood streaming down his face and asked his son to fetch the car.

  In 1939, when von Trips was eleven, he joined his father on holiday trips to the family hunting lodge in the Eifel, a low mountain range with rushing trout streams and steep valleys wreathed in mist. For weeks they chased boar, red deer, and rabbits accompanied by Breitschwert, a quiet gamekeeper and guide who patiently answered the young count’s questions about the mysteries of the natural world: Where do the forces of nature come from? How do trees know where to grow? How far away are the stars?

  A distant engine drone sometimes broke the silence of the woods as von Trips walked with Breitschwert beneath beech and spruce. The hunting grounds lay within a few miles of the Nürburgring, a racetrack built in the 1920s and refurbished to showcase the Silver Arrows, the thunderously powerful cars produced by Mercedes-Benz and its German rival, the Auto Union, with generous Nazi subsidies. They shot through the wooded hills like silver projectiles.

  In 1936 Wolfgang persuaded his parents to take him to the Nürburgring to see the German drivers Bernd Rosemeyer and Rudolf Caracciola duel in the German Grand Prix. Nazi troops accompanied the cars to the starting line, and at the race’s end Rosemeyer hoisted a trophy donated by Hitler. A portrait of Hitler was printed on the cover of the race program, as if the Führer himself were responsible for the strength of the Silver Arrows.

  In the summer of 1936, as Hitler presided over the
Berlin Olympics, Wolfgang told his governess that he wanted to be a great German driver like the ones he had seen at the Nürburgring. Not surprisingly, Rosemeyer was Wolfgang’s particular hero. He was tall and blond with buoyant charm. He was married to the tomboy aviatrix Elly Beinhorn—Germany’s answer to Amelia Earhart—who had flown solo to Africa and South America. They were darlings of the German press. Hundreds of thousands of Germans came to see Rosemeyer race. Millions more listened on the radio.

  On January 28, 1938, Caracciola broke the land speed record by rocketing down a stretch of Autobahn at 268.9 mph. Rosemeyer stood by, prepared to better Caracciola’s time. He was clocked at 267 mph—less than 2 mph slower than Caracciola—when a gust of crosswind blew his car onto the grassy median where it hit a stone marker and broke apart in a series of cataclysmic rolls. His body was found in a grove of trees a hundred yards away. In the Nazi depiction, Rosemeyer was a Wagnerian hero slain in the dark German forest. Goering, Himmler, and Hitler sent condolences. SS troopers flanked Rosemeyer’s coffin during a Berlin funeral styled and stage managed by Nazi officials.

  Three months after Rosemeyer died, German schoolchildren, including von Trips, received a handout printed with a poem about Rosemeyer written by Ernst Hornickel, the editor of a car journal:

  Let the weakling, fearful, dither;

  Who fights for higher things must dare,

  He must choose ’twixt life and death.

  Let the roaring breakers thunder,

  Should you safely land or founder,

  Always hold the wheel yourself!

  In September 1940, as the Luftwaffe bombed British ports and factories, von Trips suffered the first in a series of illnesses that would afflict him during the war years, starting with an ear infection that required surgery and kept him home from school for a month. A second sickness, probably meningitis, caused intolerance to light. He spent six months recovering in a darkened room. By the summer of 1942 he was well enough to vacation with family friends on the Walchensee, an Alpine lake, when he lost feeling in his face. He was sent to a Munich hospital where doctors diagnosed polio. Within days he had lost all sensation in his lips and cheeks. He could no longer blink. Nurses refreshed his eyes with drops of saline solution.

  By the time von Trips returned to the castle the alarm of war had intruded on the fairytale setting. The neighboring village of Horrem lay on a strategic rail line connecting Cologne and Düren, a manufacturing center. Night after night the air raid sirens sounded and the family scurried to a bomb shelter.

  It is not known how the von Trips family felt about Hitler. There is no indication that they supported the Führer, but the German aristocracy tended to back him, however reluctantly, in hopes that he would strengthen the fatherland and hold off the Bolsheviks. Whatever the case, the count and countess sent their son for paramilitary training with the Hitler Youth. Wearing the Hitlerjugend uniform of black shorts and khaki shirts, he hiked, drilled with air guns, and sang songs glorifying Nazi martyrdom. After suffering three serious illnesses in as many years, he left for winter defense training at Ordensburg Sonthofen, a military school in the Bavarian Alps, where he took an eight-week course in mountaineering and igloo building. He was recalled to Sonthofen later that year, but he missed several weeks when, with his propensity for mishap, he broke his foot skiing down the Nebelhorn, a 7,300-foot peak. “Nobody had seen me fall,” he said. “I poked my way down to the valley in horrible pain.”

  By late 1944 the Rhineland had become a crumbling front. As the Allies swept east from France and Belgium, bombers spared the seven-hundred-year-old cathedral in central Cologne. But beneath its Gothic spires lay a city in flames and ruins. Virtually every building was damaged or destroyed. Rubble and broken glass choked the streets, starving families camped in basements, and corpses floated down the Rhine.

  At age sixteen, Wolfgang was drafted to search through air raid debris. Working alongside other teenage boys, he sifted among the shattered remains of apartment buildings, schools, offices, theaters, and stores. “I can’t remember how many corpses we carried out of cellars and picked off streets,” he said. “I saw the whole of human suffering firsthand.”

  The horrors glimpsed in the rubble would stay with him—families killed in an instant, bodies of children charred beyond recognition, men weeping, women who had lost their minds, the elderly expending last breaths asking after loved ones. “I experienced hell for the first time,” he said.

  In October 1944, as Allied forces attacked the nearby town of Aachen, von Trips rode his bike into Horrem and climbed a mountainous coal stockpile for an unobstructed view of the air raids. “From there you can follow the battle,” a friend had told him, “like Blücher on the general’s hill.” It wasn’t long before he scrambled down and ran for shelter. “The planes were literally flying around my ears,” he said. “It was wide-open there, up on a hill. I got such a fright. . . From then on I was always first in the cellar when the sirens wailed.”

  In the final desperate months of the war the Hitler Youth deployed von Trips to the Belgian front for combat training. After learning to handle machine guns and shoulder-mounted antitank rockets he suffered what was called a nervous breakdown. It would be understandable if he collapsed at his impressionable age after his nightmarish air raid duties. It might also be excusable if he exaggerated his condition to escape an odious mission in a failed cause. Either way he was dismissed—only to be recruited along with his father by a citizen militia, the Volkssturm, to dig foxholes as Horrem braced for a last-ditch defense against American battalions fighting their way east from the Roer River.

  With the outcome no longer in doubt, von Trips, now seventeen, and his father decided to skip out on the digging and evacuate their home. They packed von Trips’ mother and grandmother into the Opel and went into hiding. As the U.S. troops closed on Horrem, the family drove southwest, crossing the Old Rhine Bridge at Bonn minutes before German troops dynamited it to slow the American advance.

  A farmer agreed to hide them at his home near the village of Rederscheid. Even there, tucked among the forested hills, they were not safe from the oncoming storm. Shortly after arriving they heard the drone of Allied aircraft, followed by dozens of bombs exploding with concussive blasts of light on the surrounding fields. Their host led them through the darkness to a damp cave entered from a hillside. They crouched inside with the Opel camouflaged under a layer of leaves until the bombing subsided.

  U.S. First Army tanks and infantry entered the cobbled streets of Horrem on the morning of March 1, 1945, after killing or capturing groups of German soldiers firing down on them from quarries and low hills east of the village. The Americans paused at Burg Hemmersbach before the final push into Cologne. Any bivouac with running water and flushing toilets was a luxury. Before moving out, the GIs burned and looted art and heirlooms, and they jimmied open a private compartment in the count’s desk filled with souvenirs—Nazi propaganda and leaflets dropped by Allied aircraft showing broad fields filled with German graves. One soldier plundered the countess’s boudoir, then left a sarcastic note promising to repay her after the German surrender.

  The von Trips returned in May to find a second wave of Americans camped in their parlors. These troops had fought their way from Normandy and overcome a stiff German counteroffensive at the Battle of the Bulge during Christmas 1944. They were in no mood for charity to German nobles. The soldiers gave the family half an hour to collect what was left of their belongings, and allowed them to stay in one of the brick courtyard buildings used for farm work.

  The family reclaimed silver utensils stashed in the castle and rounded up horse and cattle. “We were really down, had nothing left, had nothing to eat,” von Trips said. “Everything was destroyed. We had just enough not to starve. Even so—it was one of the best times I can remember with my family. Our fear of death was gone. We were able to stay warm. We had a place to sleep. We were back on our own land.”

  Wolfgang von Trips around 1945, after
his family returned from hiding to find Burg Hemmersbach occupied by American soldiers. (Gräflich Berghe von Trips’sche Sportstiftung zu Burg Hemmersbach)

  The von Trips family still owned the castle and property, but they had lost practically everything else. They were forced to sell some parcels of land to survive. Wolfgang scrounged pocket money as the operator of his own miniature black market. If the British soldiers encamped nearby wanted whiskey or cigarettes, he bought them from the Americans and marked them up, or vice versa, traversing between camps in the battered Opel.

  Within a few weeks the initial occupiers were replaced by a black unit, which acted more sympathetically. We were the black slaves in our country, they said. Now you are white slaves in your own home.

  Like Jim, the British boy in J. G. Ballard’s novel Empire of the Sun, von Trips came to identify with the enemy. He tagged along with the black soldiers, listening to jazz on the radio and learning their slang. He went about the castle grounds in lederhosen, cast-off U.S. fatigues, and army boots. For the rest of his life he would speak nearly flawless Americanized English with the slight singsongy uptilt of German cadence.

  The soldiers whooped when they saw his improvised repairs to the clapped-out Opel, which had been converted to run on charcoal and wood. The carburetor was attached to the side with an inner tube and the accelerator operated with a wire strung through the window. The radiator was connected to the engine with an American gas mask instead of a water hose. The soldiers gave von Trips his first lessons in car handling, and they donated oil, gas, and spare parts.