Von Trips pleaded in vain with the captain to wait, then stationed himself at the railing. As the ship edged away from its berth Collins appeared on the quay, running among piles of freight and pulling his girlfriend behind. “There he stood, wondering what to do next,” von Trips wrote in his diary. “He had a shock when he saw all the water separating him from the ship.”
Collins and his companion jumped into an old skiff and inveigled the crew to cast off. “So began a wild chase,” von Trips wrote in his diary. “We were already picking up speed. All the people who were off-duty, the cooks with their tall white hats and passengers of all classes were on deck. They were desperately trying to catch us. Sailors lowered a rope ladder, but in vain. With two others I went back to the captain. ‘Slow speed ahead’ came the order, and with sweet and sour smiles both our refugees came on board. A raucous and enchanting evening followed.”
The next morning they went ashore in Buenos Aires and prepared for the Temporada, a trio of races run in the heat of the Argentine summer. Von Trips’ education in Formula 1, interrupted by his crash at Monza five months earlier, now resumed in the gray asphalt expanse of the autódromo. This was his chance to prove that the crash was an anomaly, and that he could compete at racing’s highest level. It was no sure thing.
Collins watched from a viewing platform while von Trips fumbled through practice laps, trying to find the swiftest line into turns and hit the right braking spots. With the car in a four-wheel drift, he pressed the gas to increase the angle of slide; or, conversely, he reduced the speed to straighten the car out. “Every time I tried it I either wound up on the lawn or spinning around like a carousel,” von Trips wrote. “There was a very sharp corner driving me to despair, and I began to wonder about the infinite patience of Peter Collins, who came around each time to tell me what I was doing wrong.”
Again and again von Trips sped too fast into turns and had to brake hard to prevent a spin. The trick, Collins explained, was to glide smoothly on the way in and accelerate on the way out while thinking ahead to the next turn. It required a fluid dancelike flow of shifting and braking with a lightfooted dab on the brake. The task was complicated by the heat and head-splitting racket of the unmuffled engine and the need to study engine revs on the tachometer while watching traffic in two rearview mirrors. The car shuddered whenever he braked and a blister festered on his right hand from the constant gear work. All the while he could feel the sickening centrifugal pull as he strained to go ever faster. “It took only a few laps for me to learn about the draining of strength and concentration out there,” he wrote.
When he was not driving von Trips practiced the turning techniques in his mind. “I laid my head back, closed my eyes, thought about an extreme curve and put everything there in my mind’s eye that I’d been trying to learn,” he wrote. “Run into the curve, hit the brakes, slide, not too much, hit the gas. How often did I repeat this, talking under my breath, lost in my imagination? I don’t know. At some point Mike Hawthorn poked me in the ribs: ‘What’s with you? Are you nuts?’ ”
Von Trips served as Collins’ backup in the Argentine Grand Prix on January 13, the first of the Temporada. He did not expect to drive, but halfway through the race Collins pulled into the pits and turned the car over to him. “ ‘Go on, scram,’ Collins said to me as he got out of the cockpit,” von Trips wrote. “And I jumped into the Formula 1 as I had always hoped and dreamed. And off I zipped.”
The Grand Prix went for the fourth time to the hometown hero, Juan Manuel Fangio, a stocky, balding former bus mechanic and son of an Argentine potato farmer. He was an empyrean figure, despite his humble bearing. At age forty-six, he was the sport’s elder statesman and the Grand Prix champion in four of the previous five years. The drivers called him El Maestro. They stood up when he entered a room, as if greeting a head of state.
The day after winning the Grand Prix, Fangio took von Trips and Joakim Bonnier, a tall, goateed Maserati driver from a wealthy Swedish publishing family, to Mar del Plata, a beach resort south of Buenos Aires, where passersby stopped and shouted “bravo!” as Fangio passed. In a hotel bar a guest jumped onstage with a guitar and played a song he had written about Fangio.
That kind of adulation was hard earned, as von Trips would learn thirteen days later at the 1,000-kilometer Buenos Aires, a sports car race run on one of the hottest days in memory. “When we came out of our air-conditioned hotel,” von Trips wrote, “the heat hit us like a wall.” The temperature exceeded 100 degrees in the city, and it reached 131 degrees on the track. Heat shimmered in woozy waves off the asphalt, clouding the drivers’ view.
After forty minutes von Trips peered into the pits on successive laps to see if anybody had quit. He felt lightheaded, but he hated to be the first to withdraw. “You must not give up,” he recalled in his diary. “Hell with it! You simply keep driving! One more round! God, I can’t take any more! I’m getting the heatstroke! I wish I’d never come to Argentina!”
He eventually succumbed, pulling over just before fainting. “Sheer self-preservation led me into the pits,” he wrote. “Once there, I collapsed in the car and the mechanics had to pull me from the seat.” They laid him on a bed of wet towels in a corner and rubbed his body with ice. “It was a blissful feeling,” he recalled. “After 10 or 15 minutes I came back to myself.” Meanwhile Collins took over von Trips’ car and finished ninth.
The Buenos Aires endurance race was a doubleheader. After an hour’s respite, the drivers set off in the twilight for a second round of thirty laps. This time von Trips had arranged for an Argentine-German acquaintance to stand beside a hairpin turn and pour buckets of cold water on him as he passed at 40 mph or so.
Von Trips sought out every bit of adventure and fun his new life afforded. While most drivers flew directly back to Europe or accompanied the cars by freighter, he and Bonnier went on a grand tour of Latin countries. They hunted and rode horseback as guests on an Argentine ranch, then flew to Rio de Janeiro. Fangio had telegrammed ahead on their behalf, arranging for a Brazilian racer and other friends to entertain them for three days before they left for Caracas. Along their route they drank unfamiliar Latin drinks and recounted their racing deeds for the benefit of the señoritas.
Meanwhile, Peter Collins could not evacuate Buenos Aires fast enough. He had met Eleanora Herrera, a twenty-one-year-old insurance heiress, at a pool party before the Temporada. “It was love at first sight for me and I thought Peter felt the same way,” she said. They went out frequently the week before the first race and she visited him in the pits on practice days. By her account, Collins proposed to her a week after they met. He gave her a platinum ring with a pearl set in diamonds, she said, and her family marked the engagement by inviting Buenos Aires society to a celebratory banquet. But as the racing wound down, she said, Collins withdrew. “He began to rejoin his racing friends in their exploits about town,” she told the Daily Mirror, a British tabloid. By her account, he left without a goodbye. Collins denied that they were ever formally engaged.
After detaching himself from Herrera, Collins flew to Miami. He had three weeks to kill before the Gran Premio, a 300-mile sports car race along the curving waterfront esplanade in Havana, Cuba. He planned to spend a few days in Florida, then visit a square-jawed American driver with thick eyeglasses named Masten Gregory at his home in Kansas City. He never made that trip. Stirling Moss had given him the phone number of a slender American actress with a broad incandescent smile named Louise King, who was performing in The Seven Year Itch at a theater in the Coconut Grove neighborhood of Miami. King resembled Ingrid Bergman, but with freckles and the hearty laugh of a fun-loving American girl. She had owned a British Austin-Healey sports car, one of the first in America, until crashing it in a road rally outside Baltimore. In 1955 she bought a new one in London and drove it to Paris and Monte Carlo, where she mixed with the racing crowd. She had met Collins at a party Bernard Cahier threw at his Riviera home before the Monte Carlo Grand Prix, but they apparently m
ade no impression on each other. Neither could remember meeting.
Collins called her on February 4 and arranged to join her for a drink at a bar off the theater lobby at 11 p.m., after the final curtain. Though they had met before, it was essentially a blind date. “He just sparkled,” King said. “For me it was very close to love at first sight. He must have felt the same way.”
Two days later, King was sunbathing between Gregory and Collins at the pool outside Collins’ motel. He leaned over and, whispering so Gregory would not hear, asked King to marry him. She whispered back, “Yes!”
King’s father, who was executive assistant to Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld of the United Nations, flew down from New York that Friday to talk her out of it. By the time King’s father left on Sunday he had given his blessing. The couple married the next day—exactly a week after their first date—at an old stone church in Coconut Grove. Four hours later she was back onstage.
In late February Collins and the other Ferrari drivers converged on Havana for the Gran Premio. Enzo Ferrari did not supply them with team cars. Instead he telegrammed his permission to drive whatever privately owned cars they could find—as long as it was a Ferrari.
The government of Fulgencio Batista staged the annual Grand Premio to help fill the splendid hotels and casinos with free-spending Americans. This year there was a snag. A two-week longshoreman’s strike in New York prevented a dozen sports cars from loading onto ships bound for Cuba. As a result, Havana was long on drivers and short on cars. Landing a ride for the Gran Premio became its own competition. Von Trips partied deep into the nights, chasing tips and rumors in brocaded nightclubs and cheap rum dives tucked in Havana’s dark corners. He and Bonnier promoted their cause by returning to the airport and reenacting their arrival for newspaper photographers. The resulting coverage helped him connect with an American who had flown down with an ancient Ferrari Testa Rossa. Its gearbox sprayed hot oil over von Trips’ gloves and goggles until he wrapped the transmission in cardboard.
Even in 1957 there were signs of the seismic changes to come in Cuba. Twenty-seven spectators were injured when a temporary wooden footbridge collapsed during practice runs. It was suspected that Fidel Castro’s guerrillas, who were fighting government troops in the mountains, had sabotaged the structure. In the days before the race, flyers had circulated in Havana reading, “Don’t go to automobile races. Avoid accidents. (signed) Revolutionary Movement of Twenty-sixth of July.”
On the first practice day von Trips met up with Hill, who was driving a war-weary Ferrari owned by the head of a New Jersey metal stamping company. Standing in the tropical heat, the two men compared notes on the waterfront road, known as the Malecón, which was buckled and undulated from years of tropical heat. During a warm-up run Hill chased Masten Gregory, whose heedless driving manner had earned him the nickname the Kansas City Flash. “Phil came in and said, ‘Masten has no idea what he’s doing. He’s out there going like hell on that damn road,’ ” said Denise McCluggage.
“How do you know?” she said.
“Because I was right there behind him the whole time,” Hill said.
“I started laughing,” she said, “and then he started laughing too.”
A month later, Hill and von Trips shared a year-old 3.5-liter Ferrari at a 12-hour race in Sebring, Florida. Belches of exhaust fused with Everglades humidity as von Trips stepped hard on the accelerator at the start of a practice run. The mechanics and team manager watched with concern. When von Trips pulled into the pits the Ferrari crew huddled around the cockpit to review the car’s performance. “It runs fine unless I do this,” von Trips told them. He leaned across the dashboard and flipped a switch on the far right side.
Hill, who was listening in, expressed astonishment. “That’s the fuel pump!” he said.
“Oh,” von Trips answered with his easy, sell-effacing laugh.
The car’s brakes were so anemic that Hill did deep-knee bends with a hundred-pound weight on his back for weeks beforehand to build leg strength. In the end a faulty battery proved their undoing. After they traded the wheel off and on for six and a half hours the car coughed and went cold. They were forced to withdraw.
After Florida, von Trips swung through New York, with long evenings at El Morocco and the Copacabana. He also made the obligatory visits to Sardi’s and Le Chanteclair, customary Midtown gathering spots for the racing crowd. He had by now exhausted his travel budget. His one gray suit was wrinkled and wrung out from too many parties. “With Argentine saddles, Cuban drums and American cowboy hats, I was laden with four months of the gypsy life,” he wrote. “I had a dollar in my pocket. It’s going to take my poor mother a long time to—as she puts it—make a proper gentleman out of me again.”
The news of Collins’ marriage did not sit well with Enzo Ferrari. He encouraged his drivers to take up with the tanned women in tight cashmere sweaters and oversize sunglasses who hung around the pits, and he was delighted to hear about their sexual escapades. He took these things as signs of manliness. But he discouraged serious relationships for a simple reason: he saw love as the enemy of speed.
“Ferrari didn’t like his drivers to marry,” King said, “because it sounded like they were settling down, which means slowing down.”
Ferrari had warned Eugenio Castellotti about this. “Men are creatures of their passions,” Ferrari told him, “and this makes them victims of women.” Like Collins, Castellotti ignored him.
Castellotti was an extravagantly wealthy young gentleman from Lodi who lounged in the pits with his white helmet pushed back over ink-black hair and a blue jacket pulled tight over sinewy shoulders. A cigarette dangled from lips so shapely they looked cartoonish. The Italian women called him Il Bello, the beautiful one.
When Alberto Ascari died in May 1955, Castellotti became Italy’s last great hope to overcome the British virtuoso Stirling Moss and the Argentinean maestro Juan Manuel Fangio. He lived up to their hopes, winning a string of races. Most impressive of all, he took the 1956 Mille Miglia in a persistent downpour. Robert Daley, the New York Times correspondent, wrote that Castellotti “would pass other cars on the verge in a shower of stones, grinning like a fiend.” He had shown himself to be a true garibaldino, a slang term for drivers who, in Ferrari’s words, “put courage and verve before cool calculation.”
Italy might once again have a great champion, Ferrari thought, if Castellotti could stay focused and avoid female entanglements. When the Ferrari team boarded an Alitalia flight from Milan to Argentina in January 1957, Castellotti was the only driver to sit out the poker game. His girlfriend had given him a bundle of letters at the airport with instructions to open one every hour. Castellotti had thrown himself into a blazing romance with Delia Scala, a classically trained ballerina with a flourishing career in movies and television. The couple was a gossip column staple.
Ferrari disapproved. So did Castellotti’s mother. When Signora Castellotti met Scala she said, “You look like a waitress. The kitchen is this way.”
Despite the objections, the couple became engaged in early March 1957, though they bickered often, and publicly, over whether he should quit his career to spend time with her, or vice versa.
On March 13 Castellotti was in Florence where Scala was performing in Good Night Bettina, a play about a husband who finds that his wife has an unexpected literary talent. The phone rang in their hotel bedroom. It was Ferrari angrily summoning Castellotti. Jean Behra had been circling the rectangular autodromo on the edge of Modena at terrific speeds. He threatened to break the record for fastest lap held by Ferrari for years. What galled Ferrari most was that Behra was driving a Maserati, Ferrari’s crosstown rival.
Modena was a city divided. An ancient Roman road, the Via Emilia, ran down its center. Ferrari and Maserati were encamped on opposing sides, less than a mile apart, like an automotive version of the Montagues and Capulets. Ferrari could not tolerate the prospect of Maserati stealing the local record. He considered it an affront to the natu
ral order. Castellotti must return immediately to defend it.
Castellotti roused himself from Scala’s warm bed before 5 a.m. the next morning and drove over the Apennine Mountains to Modena. Waiting for him behind the autodromo’s redbrick walls with peeling posters was a team manager, mechanics, and an untested Formula 1 Ferrari. He climbed in and blasted down a damp track at more than 100 mph. On the third lap the crew signaled to accelerate.
It would not happen today, but in the 1950s a driver going more than 115 mph could be easily jostled and lose footing on the pedals. Whether this happened to Castellotti is not known. For whatever reason, he bungled a crucial downshift coming out of a curve. The car lost traction and began to slide. After a few desperate swerves his car flipped and rolled into a concrete wall beneath a small grandstand. The autodromd rang with the sound of screeching brakes and crumpling metal.
Castellotti was thrown out and landed on the tarmac. Don Sergio Mantovani, a local parish priest who was a fixture in the pits, ran through the debris and knelt beside Castellotti. His left eye was open, but he was fading. Mantovani raised his hand and blessed him. He and Scala were to have been married twenty-five days later.
When Ferrari heard the news, he said, “What a pity. What about the car?” He later said Castellotti was probably thinking too much about Scala and not enough about driving. It was an implicit warning to the other Ferrari driver: by all means court the coquettes, but never let love interfere with the proper handling of cars at the limit.
Ferrari skipped Castellotti’s funeral, as usual. He had no use for the Catholic rituals of mourning. He did his own communing, with death. He could feel its presence in the black-and-white photographs of drivers hanging on the walls of his gloomy office and in his morning cemetery visits to speak with his son.
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