Limit, The

by Cannell, Michael

  “I am considered quite an expert on the subject of going off the road,” Portago acknowledged in an article for Sports Illustrated published in May 1957. He died while that issue was still on the newsstands.

  For all his thrill-seeking, Portago never wanted to race in the Mille Miglia. He dreaded it for the same reasons as other drivers—the debilitating length, the erratic amateurs in souped-up Renaults and Fiats, the spectators spilling onto the road, the uncertainly about what lay around each hill, hummock, and swerve. “Unless you’re Italian you can’t hope to know the roads,” Portago said, “and as Fangio says, if you have a conscience you can’t drive fast anyway. There are too many places where a car can go off the road and kill a dozen people.”

  But Portago had no choice. By 1957 Enzo Ferrari had finally hired him, and Ferrari needed Portago to fill out a sports car team left shorthanded by Castellotti’s death two months earlier. Ferrari had won all but two Mille Miglia since the war. Enzo Ferrari was determined to win another. Nothing was sweeter than winning before his countrymen.

  In her memoir, Linda Christian described a premonition she had while vacationing with Portago in Spain before the Mille Miglia. His car was number 531, which adds up to nine—a numeral that she believed foretold tragedy. “If you go into this race,” she told him, “you’ll be brought back here and put in the grave with your father.” Portago had his own presentiments. “My early death,” he wrote to Dorian Leigh, “may well come next Sunday.”

  In the week leading up to the race, while the mechanics prepped the cars, Ferrari gathered Portago, von Trips, and the rest in a hotel in Manerbio, a town just south of the starting point in Brescia. For Ferrari, it was a chance to play on their insecurities and pit them against one another. Over a series of meals he goaded Portago, saying he expected Portago’s 355S to finish behind his teammate Olivier Gendebien, even though Gendebien would drive a less powerful 250 GT. Portago formed an implacable resolve to beat Gendebien, no matter what. He would prove Ferrari wrong.

  Portago and von Trips spent most of the last day together talking about how racing heightened their sense of life and fulfilled an inborn need for physical tests. Their philosophy, hashed out over cigarettes and coffee, held that fighting ennobled the spirit and helped strengthen a new generation of leaders to tackle the dangers of the nuclear era. Racing, they agreed, was “beautiful and necessary.”

  “We philosophized until we were over the moon,” von Trips said. “In discussing these things I found confirmation of what I always felt but was never able to clearly express.”

  No doubt their chivalric ancestors would have endorsed their brand of bravery, but it was unfashionable in the Europe of the 1950s where wariness and conciliation were the order of the day. Progressive Europeans tended to reject physical courage as backward, even barbaric. It was considered a vestige of a discredited old order that had led to two world wars. In the Cold War culture of long-range ballistics and biological warheads, daring was a liability. Risk was in disrepute.

  That night a group that included Portago, von Trips, Collins, Louise King, and a handful of others pushed two restaurant tables together for a group dinner in Brescia. It was noted that they totaled thirteen, an unlucky number.

  “Life has to be lived to the full,” Portago said that night. “It is better to be wholly alive for thirty years than half-dead for sixty.”

  Shortly before midnight the first cars took off in one-minute intervals from the Viale Venezia. At 5:30 a.m. Portago and Edmund Nelson heard their names announced over the public address system. They rolled down the floodlit starting ramp, past a flag-draped grandstand, and into the night. Spectators stood behind hay bales and wooden barricades on both sides of the street, leaning in to touch the car as it passed. They skittered down cobblestone streets and jounced over tram rails while peering through a thin ground fog for red taillights ahead.

  By the time they reached Verona the sky was brightening, and the mists hanging over the fields began to burn off. In the half-light they could see broken-down cars smoldering by the roadside. They blazed east at 150 mph through the flat countryside of Vicenza and Padova, then south over the bridges of Rimini to Pesaro. Now they could see white sand beaches and the sparkle of the Adriatic to the left as they wove through Ancona and Pescara. Portago was in fourth place and moving up fast. He was running less than two minutes behind the leader as he turned inland and thrashed his car back and forth through the switchbacks leading up and over the Apennine Mountains.

  Linda Christian was waiting in Rome when Portago pulled in at late morning for refueling and to have his card stamped by race officials certifying his position. Dirt and sweat streaked his face beneath his goggles. She passed him a note: Te quiero mucho. I love you very much. She obliged the paparazzi by leaning in for a kiss. “I had to lean to touch him,” she later wrote, “and I had a strange sensation with that kiss; it was cold. And it caused me to look for the first time at Edmund Nelson seated beside him. He seemed to be like a mummy, gray, ashen, as if mesmerized. He had the eyes of someone who had suffered an enormous shock.”

  “I’ll see you tomorrow night in Milan,” Portago said. They planned to meet von Trips for dinner. They would drink to the next win, in Monte Carlo, he promised. Champagne for Christian, milk for Portago.

  He then roared off and Christian headed for the airport to catch her flight to Milan. She asked the driver to stop at the Church of Santa Francesca Romana, where she and Tyrone Power had married eight years earlier. Beneath the altar was a crypt containing the body of Santa Francesca, the patron saint of drivers. She lit a candle. “As I prayed, a sharp pain seared through me, almost more than I could bear,” she wrote. “Then it subsided into a dull, throbbing ache that was to stay with me for days.”

  A crowd was waiting at the foot of the passenger stair when Christian stepped from the plane in Milan. Flashbulbs crackled. A reporter from a Milan newspaper climbed the steps to speak with her. “Miss Christian,” he said. “Have you heard yet?”

  He led her into a small private room inside the airport and told her. They got in his car and drove through a hard rain to the crash site. A policeman described how they had found half of Portago’s body on the left side of the road, the other half pinned under the car on the right. The crushed hulk of the car still sat in the ditch surrounded by shreds of clothing and shoes.

  Hours earlier, at the final checkpoint in Bologna, mechanics had warned Portago that a broken shock absorber was causing the front left tire to rub against the bodywork. He waved them off. He was in fourth place with Gendebien muscling up from behind. If he paused for a tire change Gendebien would pass him, as Ferrari had predicted.

  After driving for thirteen and a half hours Portago set off on the final run to Brescia, a stretch through the Po Valley sometimes called the Death Road. This, wrote the French journalist Olivier Merlin, was “where the fastest cars in the Mille Miglia, scenting their stables after 900 miles journeying, rose to speeds of over 160 mph.”

  With thirty miles to go, Portago flew down a flat, narrow road toward the stone village of Guidizzolo. The villagers had stood all afternoon near a farmhouse on the outskirts of town listening for the sound of approaching cars. They cheered as he came into view. Children watched from their fathers’ shoulders or from between their legs. “Ferrari, Ferrari,” they shouted.

  On the edge of town Portago swerved, probably because the abrading tire blew. The rear of his car fishtailed to the left, toppling a stone kilometer marker and snapping a telegraph pole. The impact drove the hood backward, slicing Portago in two. The car then spun fifteen feet into the air and severed the overhead wires. It caromed into a crowd on the right side of the road, coming to a rest in a drainage ditch half filled with water. Nine spectators died, including five children.

  Von Trips was in the lead, miles ahead and unaware of his friend’s crash. He had raced into the lead with an average speed of 119 mph over the first two hours. After 250 miles he gradually fell back as his b
lood sugar crashed. He was so feeble that he could barely push in the clutch and work the brake pedal, which in those days required some manhandling. He retrieved a sandwich stashed in the cockpit and recovered.

  It was a familiar pattern. “At first I drive well, but then suddenly I can’t do it anymore and I fall back,” he said. “I’m then simply worn down, and must very quickly have something to eat. Somehow the energy goes through me too quickly. When racing I always have a decent sandwich with me, because food is my biggest problem.”

  The final stretch through the Po Valley was a duel between von Trips and his teammate Piero Taruffi, a prematurely white-haired Italian known as the Silver Fox. At age fifty-one, Taruffi had entered his country’s most prestigious race twelve times without winning. He had come out of semiretirement for one last try. He almost dropped out at the midway point when his transmission failed, making it difficult to switch out of fifth gear. “I had intended to give up because the car didn’t seem very safe to me, in its crippled condition,” Taruffi said. “But I had promised my wife that I would give up racing if I won a Mille Miglia. So I took a chance.”

  Taruffi and von Trips came into Brescia side by side. The spectators congregated on both sides of the road screamed when the two Ferraris barreled into town. With the finish line in view, Taruffi pointed to his rear axle, signaling to von Trips that he had a transmission problem. Then, Hermann Harster wrote, “he put his hand on the steering wheel for a moment, as if in prayer.” In response von Trips pulled back to let Taruffi win. It was an act of sportsmanship and respect for a grizzled teammate. Finishing second behind Taruffi, von Trips told reporters, was the same as winning.

  For Taruffi, it was a win of the sweetest satisfaction. He stood on the podium in black coveralls and silver helmet smiling and waving half a dollar bill. Before the race Bernard Cahier had ripped the bill in two, saying they would reunite the halves in Brescia to buy a celebratory glass of champagne.

  Ferrari took first, second, and third, but its sweep was overshadowed by recriminations. Two days after the race, the bishop of Mantua stood in Guidizzolo’s small parish church imparting absolution at a funeral for the nine bystanders killed in the Portago accident. A row of hearses stretched down the street, some waiting to carry the miniature coffins of the children struck down by the spinning car. For once Ferrari had shown up. He sat in the front row flanked by women in black and enveloped in incense. As always, his countenance was impenetrable behind his dark sunglasses.

  Ferrari probably would have stayed in Modena if not for the public outcry. Italian politicians called him a murderer and several national newspapers printed editorials urging the government to abolish the Mille Miglia. The government complied, banishing Italy’s premier race thirty-one years after it started. (It resumed in 1977 as a vintage car event.) Manslaughter charges were filed against Ferrari. In court hearings Ferrari acted indignant and hurt. He raced to ennoble Italy, he said, and this was how the government repaid him. The charges were eventually dropped, but Ferrari’s sulk lasted for years.

  As the outcry subsided the Ferrari drivers returned to the demands of the upcoming season. The rhythms of Modena resumed. “When Castellotti and de Portago died it was because they were trying to be great drivers and going beyond their limits,” Louise King said. “Life went on.”

  With Portago’s death, Hill and von Trips moved up a rung on the Ferrari ladder. It was a dubious promotion considering what befell their predecessors. It was only a matter of time before they led the lineup—if they lived long enough.

  The question of survival applied to von Trips more than Hill. He was the more erratic of the two, alternating head-turning performances with the kind of maddening mistakes that had plagued him from his earliest days. If he were to succeed on the Ferrari team he would have to break the pattern of accidents and mount a winning streak that would dispel his reputation as Count von Crash.

  If there was a perfect place for von Trips to solidify his credibility as a frontline driver it was the Nürburgring, where he would race in the familiar Eifel Mountains surrounded by cheering Germans. Two weeks after his second-place finish in the Mille Miglia he was there, warming up for a 1,000-kilometer race in a Ferrari 250 GT. Like most sports cars configured for racing, its accelerator sat on the floor between the clutch and the brake. He drove a few laps, then, at the request of a team manager, switched to a showroom model, which had the clutch on the right. It was an arrangement he was familiar with, since he owned a showroom Ferrari for private use. He wound through the steep forested hills, tapping and pumping the brakes as he made his way through seventy-two turns per lap on the longest racecourse in Europe. At the Breitscheid curve, an abrupt drop obscured by a bridge, he became momentarily confused by the pedal configuration and hit the gas instead of the brake. He missed a turn and shot through a hedge. His car rolled down a hill and crumpled against a wall.

  Von Trips was unconscious when ambulance workers pulled him from the car. Doctors at the local hospital treated him for a broken nose, bruised breastbone, and two broken vertebrae in his lower back. He was moved to a Cologne hospital and fitted with a body cast that extended from his chin to his backside. For three weeks he lay immobilized, reliving the mistake in his mind and worrying that Ferrari would lose faith in him. He could feel himself falling from grace.

  Mike Hawthorn (left) and Peter Collins, the mon ami mates, after Collins won the British Grand Prix in 1958. It was his redemptive race after falling out of favor with Enzo Ferrari. (© 2011 LAT Photographic)

  8

  Ten-Tenths

  EVERY MORNING for more than a month von Trips woke in his hospital room to face another day spent flat on his back, his torso encased in plaster. He passed the hours opening mail and receiving well wishers with feigned cheer. All of June and into July they marched down the bright hallways of the Cologne hospital—school friends, girlfriends, family. They deposited flowers and food packages on his bedside radio and handed him newspapers in three languages that he flipped open to the motor racing pages. Among other things he read that Hill had come in second at a 12-hour race in Reims, France, and would soon be competing in Sweden, Venezuela, and the Bahamas. The season was continuing without him.

  In addition to shooting back pain, von Trips bore the agony of uncertainty. He had no way of knowing if he would race again. And if he did, could he muster the nerve for the scrum and tussle of competition? The margin between winning and losing was so thin, particularly at the elevated speeds of Grand Prix, that the slightest flinch would eliminate him from competition.

  Drivers measured their proximity to the limit in tenths. A manager might order his team to practice at no more than eight-tenths of the limit, meaning fast but not reckless. If they accelerated to nine-tenths they were pushing the edge of control. At ten-tenths they were on the limit, where even the most stoic drivers trembled and perspired. Too often von Trips had transgressed to eleven-tenths and flipped or spun off the road. He would now have to prove that he could reliably drive at ten-tenths, and that he could overcome his crash habit.

  In late July 1957 doctors released von Trips from his cast. A few days later he walked out of the hospital to begin his comeback, his second within a year. It would be a slower recovery than expected. When he returned a month later for a check-up, an X-ray showed that the fractures in his vertebrae had not fully healed. He went back into a body cast for three more weeks.

  On August 4, friends helped relieve his boredom by pushing him in a wheelchair to watch the German Grand Prix at the Nürburgring. They propped him up on a low wall overlooking the backstretch, not far from where he had gone off the road two months earlier. His teammates Hawthorn and Collins had given him a set of yellow, blue, and white flags so that he could signal the location of Fangio, their most lethal opponent. “I had my job to do,” von Trips wrote in his diary. “So I signaled them. ‘There he is!’ ”

  From the sidelines von Trips observed a master class. Fangio had filled his red Maserati’s
fuel tank only half full so that he could take the turns faster than the heavy Ferraris, which were fueled to brimming so that they could go the distance without stopping. It was a gamble: Fangio’s lightened car leapt out front, but it was unclear if his lead could withstand an early fuel stop. Fangio coasted into the pits with a 30-second lead. His crew struggled to replace his tires, costing him more than a minute. By the time he returned to the road he was 45 seconds behind Collins and Hawthorn. Everyone assumed Fangio could not make up the deficit, but he broke and rebroke the course record nine times as he closed the gap. He crossed the finish line 150 yards ahead of Hawthorn, clinching his fifth world championship. Afterwards Fangio said that he never wanted to drive like that again.

  If there was something humiliating about waving flags from the sideline, von Trips didn’t show it. Days later his cast came off and he began physical therapy and a regimen of massage and electric impulses designed to relieve pain. He was driving again too, achieving second place in a hillclimb through the highest stretches of the Italian and Swiss Alps. He was eager to prove that he had not lost his edge, and he asked Ferrari if there might be a car for him at the Italian Grand Prix at Monza in early September.

  Romolo Tavoni, the team manager, confirmed by letter that a car had already been reserved for him. “As long as you have an interest, you drive,” Tavoni wrote. “This car is only for you. Just watch out if you get tired.” Von Trips did not tire. On the contrary, he drove doggedly, chasing the leaders, Fangio and Moss, to a third-place finish. He was the first Ferrari across the line. More importantly, he appeared unaffected by his crash four months earlier. It is easy to imagine Ferrari smiling to himself as he listened to the radio coverage in his dimly lit office. Like the prodigal son, von Trips was back.