Limit, The

by Cannell, Michael

  In the summer of 1959 she took a train to Modena and checked into the Albergo Reale. Tavoni picked her up and drove her to a restaurant where Ferrari sat waiting at a table. His driver Peppino was seated nearby in case Il Commendatore needed anything. “For me, the meeting with Ferrari was a sort of work interview,” she said.

  She wept as she described how lost she felt without Musso. Her grief was made worse by her grandmother Elisabetta’s recent suicide. Ferrari also wept as he shared the anguish of Dino’s death. He told her that he relived the tragedy every time a driver died. He described what he called “his terrible joys,” a term he would use six years later as the title of a memoir.

  “He was a constructor of cars and a destroyer of souls; and yet, if you entered into his orbit you would have given anything to never leave,” she wrote. “That is how I entered into his life and he into mine.”

  Ferrari set Breschi up with her own boutique, first in Bologna, then Florence. He visited her apartment every Thursday afternoon. Ferrari’s liaison with Breschi became an open secret, along with the household he kept with Lina Lardi. “One day I arrived at the factory to meet with Ferrari and I was told by his personal secretary, Franco Gozzi, that he had good news and bad news,” Cahier later wrote. “The bad news was that Il Commendatore was going to be late for our meeting as he had gone to Bologna. The good news was that when he returned he would be in a very good mood, which indeed he was.”

  Because Ferrari never went to the races and rarely attended practice, he needed spies as much as mistresses. It was not long before Ferrari sent Breschi to the racetrack to mingle, and possibly more, with drivers and mechanics. Ferrari, she said, “was not satisfied with the information that he would receive through official circuits. He wanted news firsthand, not only expert opinions. I lent myself to this work, I know the atmosphere well and I knew how to distinguish a champion from a good driver.”

  The summer of 1958 was a season of vindication. Hill had ignored Ferrari’s threats and proved himself in a borrowed Maserati. In doing so, he had shown that Formula 1 lay well within his abilities. “They built up such a mystique about Formula 1, as if one must serve a novitiate for it,” he said. “Nonsense. My skills were as ready for Formula 1 in 1955 as they ever were. All one had to do to dispel the mythic aura around Formula 1 was to drive Formula 1.” With Musso gone, Ferrari forgot his threats and invited Hill back to fill the vacancy.

  Von Trips also had reason for encouragement. He had lined up last on the starting grid for the French Grand Prix, then in typical fashion stalled his engine at the start. By the time he got under way the entire field was out of sight. From the distant back of the pack he made a lightning run to beat Fangio to third place. His through-the-pack surge was better than a win—it was an impassioned comeback that stole the day. The German magazine Auto Motor und Sport put von Trips on its cover, calling him “The Fastest Count in the World.” Der Spiegel wrote that he had “made his mark and fame right there, becoming a celebrated star.”

  Peter Collins had also worked his way back into Ferrari’s good graces. After his morning Formula 2 race at Reims, he finished fifth in Formula 1. On July 19 he took the British Grand Prix, steadily widening his lead while Hawthorn protected him by badgering Moss. His standing would be fully restored with a decent showing at the German Grand Prix.

  Before going to the Nürburgring for the race on August 3, he and Louise spent a happy interlude on their yacht in Monte Carlo, swimming and drinking Pimm’s Cups in the cockpit. They had made a £500 downpayment on a Georgian house owned by a ninety-year-old bishop in Kidderminster, a sign that Collins was thinking of retirement. “Peter was a fun-loving and happy human being,” Louise said. “We never discussed the possibility of something interrupting our perfect lives.”

  Race weekends were highly social, with raucous dinners and parties thrown by local dignitaries. They were particularly lively at the Nürburgring, where drivers stayed together at the Sporthotel built beneath the grandstand right beside the starting line. On the morning of the race Hawthorn barged into the Collinses’ room for breakfast, as he usually did. Louise was up, but Collins was still asleep and snoring loudly. In his memoir, Champion Year, Hawthorn recalled looking down at Peter that morning and feeling happy. “He is one that won’t die, I thought,” Hawthorn wrote. Hawthorn roused Collins and the three ate a late breakfast in the room. Hill showed up and helped Collins complete an elaborate wooden puzzle that he had been working on for days.

  Hawthorn and Moss were deadlocked in the championship standings, and a huge crowd had turned out to see them duel for the lead. As usual, Moss bolted ahead in the early going, then dropped out with a faulty magneto. That left Collins and Hawthorn swapping first place as a cozy tandem until their countryman Tony Brooks mounted a charge. His British-made Vanwall lacked the Ferrari muscle—it was 15 mph slower on the straights—but the British brakes and suspension gave him an edge in maneuvering the twists and drops through the Eifel Mountains. By the eighth lap they had formed a three-car caravan—Brooks, Collins, Hawthorn—climbing and winding through the forest.

  The red cars scrambled to keep up with Brooks as they ground into a tricky serpentine stretch known as the Pflanzgarten. All three crested a hill in third gear, then touched the brakes and shifted to second as the cars leapt momentarily into the air on the downslope. After a dip they accelerated up a short, steep rise leading to a right-hand turn. From his rear position, in third place, Hawthorn could see that Collins was entering the bend too fast and too wide. As Collins tried to swing his car back into line, the rear wheel hit a low embankment on the left side. Hawthorn braced for a collision; he expected Collins to bounce off the embankment and spin across the road and hit him. But he didn’t. Instead Collins’ car flipped in the air and landed upside down in a cloud of dust. As Hawthorn passed he glanced over to see that Collins had been thrown out.

  Brooks expected Collins to challenge him on the straight after the Pflanzgarten. “I had no idea what had happened and I was expecting Peter to come alongside on the straight,” he said. “When I got there I had a good look in the mirrors and was rather surprised not to see him. I realized that I had achieved my objective of getting away from the Ferraris, but I didn’t know how.”

  Hawthorn chose not to stop when he came to the pits three miles later. He had no concrete information to share, and he didn’t want to alarm Louise, who was waiting patiently in the pits. Four miles later his transmission failed and he pulled over. He stepped from the car and asked a race official to call the pits for news of Collins. Word came that he was roughed up, but all right.

  When the race was over Hawthorn got a ride back to the pits, stopping at the Pflanzgarten to retrieve Collins’ helmet and gloves. There was no sign of blood.

  Louise was in the pits logging her husband’s lap times on a clipboard when he failed to come around. “But that had happened many times in the past,” she said. “Besides, word had gone around that he was walking back to the pits.”

  She wasn’t too worried, at least not until Hawthorn returned. “Mike came back to the pits and I turned around and looked at him and he turned away from me,” she said. “That was when I knew something had happened.”

  Tavoni came over and told her that the accident was more serious than originally thought. Collins had landed headfirst against a tree trunk. A helicopter was flying him to a hospital in Bonn where one of Germany’s top brain surgeons was waiting to operate. Tavoni would take her in his car. It was an agonizing drive. They crawled through traffic exiting the racetrack. Tavoni spoke only a few words of English. She spoke no Italian. They sat in silence, trying not to imagine what they might face at the end of the drive.

  When they reached the hospital, a doctor told Louise that her father was on the phone from New York. He had learned of the accident from a UN contact. He wanted to be the one to tell his daughter that Collins had died in the helicopter.

  When the awful fact had sunk in she asked to see him. “I wante
d to see Peter but everybody said no, you don’t want to do that.” She insisted. A receptionist took them down to a basement morgue. Louise could see a bluish-white foot sticking out from under a white sheet. “I said that’s enough. I knew Peter was gone,” she said. “I’m glad I turned around then.” They had been married for eighteen months.

  Hawthorn also asked to see the body when he arrived at the hospital. “The doctor pulled back the sheet,” Tavoni said, “and there was Peter, like he was asleep. Mike took one look, turned and went out into the corridor and slid down to the floor. He just sat there, saying nothing.”

  Back at the Nürburgring, Brooks had won, but nobody celebrated. Ten or so drivers and friends gathered in a hotel room at the Sporthotel to await word on Collins’ condition. There was subdued talk interrupted by bursts of anxious laughter. Denise McCluggage cut Bonnier’s hair. It was, McCluggage later wrote, “an understood but unacknowledged waiting.” They expected the worst, but it was still a shock when the news came. “I do remember sitting on my bed that night,” she later wrote, “holding in my hand the one shoe I had just removed, and then finding myself exactly like that 45 minutes later, stiff and bone chilled.”

  The Pflanzgarten was not a particularly dangerous curve, and Collins was known as a safe driver. Had the continuing pressure to redeem himself caused him to exceed the limit in his pursuit of Brooks, or was it a simple mechanical failure?

  German authorities concluded that driving error caused the crash, but Hill suspected the brakes gave out. Ferrari was so obsessed with building powerful engines that other components were often discounted. As every Ferrari driver knew, the outdated drum brakes had a tendency to wear out, or “fade,” as the drivers termed it. As friction heated the saucer-shaped drums they expanded and edged away from a corresponding piece known as the brake shoe. The driver consequently had to stomp successively harder on the brake pedal to bring drum and shoe together.

  It didn’t take long for the brakes to lose their bite altogether. Von Trips had pulled in with fading brakes after just two laps. The mechanics threw up their hands. He managed to finish fourth by downshifting as he approached each turn, using the braking power of the engine itself to slow the car. He went ten laps without touching his brake pedal at all.

  Hill’s brakes also died, causing a near accident at the steep descent to the Adenau Bridge. “I had to throw the car sideways and slide it through,” Hill said, “and from then on I was finished. I had no brakes.”

  Five days after Collins died, Horst Peets, one of Germany’s most prominent sports commentators, published an article headlined “Peter Collins: For What?” in Die Welt, a leading newspaper. It was once accepted that advances in race technology directly contributed to safer, better-engineered cars for the public. By the late 1950s, Peets argued, the improvements no longer justified the deaths:

  A number of motor sport experts—mostly men who are in offices, or men who represent a particular sphere of this industry—make it sound like horsepower and cylinder pressure go together with death on the racetrack the way a collar-button fastens to the collar. They take this kind of death as a function: someone must be ready to die in order for us to live a little bit better. . . . Collins was a fine young man, as are basically all his peers. We should convince them, however, that there are quiet things that make chivalry and manhood.

  In the 1930s the great Italian driver Tazio Nuvolari, known as the Flying Mantuan, said that “death will catch us all.” Since then, Peets wrote, “almost every big-time driver, young or old, has died in one gruesome way or another. Something drove each man up to that diabolical point where he finally overestimated himself.”

  Four days later Peets followed up with an appeal for safer, stronger cars: “This is not a sport but a show, where you wait see who dies. . . So vulnerable and exposed is the driver, so helpless in the moment where something goes wrong, so incredibly naked in the whirlpool of death.”

  He quoted from a letter Countess von Trips had sent him in response to his first article: “I hope that your article helps me to get my son to quit this cruel sport.”

  It would take more than a pair of newspaper columns to dissuade von Trips. Two weeks later he rebutted Peets in a letter to Bild, a popular German tabloid, arguing that even in the modern world physical courage was an important virtue and a corrective for a culture grown soft on suburbs, television, frozen food, and other postwar comforts. He espoused a Nietzschean view of racing as an expression of man’s drive to excel, even if it cost a driver’s life. The editors splashed his letter across eight columns below the headline “Therefore I Must Race On!”:

  That we race cannot be explained by the necessity of sports for industry, but by the indefinite urge in men to compete and succeed in doing perilous things. Things that really serve no purpose, but still require the entire dedication and force of his personality. . . Danger and fear have become anonymous and invisible—radioactive clouds floating around us. That doesn’t change the fact that there are people who thirst for action, to overcome risk and danger by force of will, who are born to fight. These are the characteristics of the man who will help build our contemporary worldview.

  A few days after this public exchange, Louise Collins returned to Modena to sort out her affairs. She stopped to see Ferrari, as widows often did. Speaking through an interpreter, he told her that Collins had been like a son to him. He could not continue the racing program without him, he said. The Italian Grand Prix on September 7, 1958, would be the last race for Ferrari. After that, finito. He never attended the races, as she knew, but he would join her for this one last race if she would accompany him.

  Ferrari and Louise together visited Hill, who was being treated for a kidney ailment in a Milan hospital. “Ferrari wept at my bedside,” Hill recalled years later. “He told me he was going to watch the race and that Louise would be by his side. It all sounded very melodramatic and I used to believe—and tell people—that he faked it all. Now I don’t think he did. I think it was a sort of drama he created in his mind and believed it.”

  Whatever Ferrari believed, he failed to show up at Monza, leaving Louise to attend the race alone. Years later she would see his absence as a benign form of manipulation, Ferrari’s way of thrusting her back among old friends one last time before she resumed her acting career. Seated in the grandstand for the first time since Collins died, Louise watched as Mike Hawthorn, her husband’s “mon ami mate,” lined up on the front row of the starting grid, the lone Ferrari among three Vanwalls. As always, he was wearing a bow tie and green jacket. But he was not the same person. Collins’ death had erased Hawthorn’s schoolboy smirk. In the weeks before the race he had sat with friends weeping and broken.

  At noon on race day he had languished in bed at the Palace Hotel in Milan, trying to pull himself together for the midafternoon start. He and Collins had made a pact that if one died the other would keep racing. In honor of their agreement he squeezed himself into the car. He may also have been encouraged to return by his position in the Grand Prix standings. If he could hold off Moss he would win the championship.

  Von Trips and Hill lined up in the second row with orders to protect Hawthorn. With Collins gone and Hawthorn shaken, it was becoming clear that they would inherit the Ferrari mantle, but for now they played supporting roles.

  Hill exploded out of the start to an early lead—the first time an American had led a Grand Prix race. His maneuver was a deliberate provocation to Moss, who had a tendency to run his cars down with aggressive starts. The rabbit act worked: Moss flashed ahead to ride Hill’s tailpipe and withdrew seventeen laps later with a busted gearbox. His departure left the way open for Hawthorn to finish second, giving him an edge over Moss in the season tally. Meanwhile von Trips had tried to power his way to the fore in a car muscled up with a robust new engine but he didn’t last a lap. As the lead pack rumbled down the opening stretch at 125 mph, von Trips drifted to the left looking for a way to pass the green Vanwall driven by Tony Brooks b
efore they braked and swung right into a bend known as the Lesmo Curve. “The Vanwalls are built really high,” von Trips wrote in his diary. “So beside me was a really high green wall. We were barely centimeters apart.”

  Von Trips slid safely ahead of Brooks, only to collide with Harry Schell, who was passing Brooks on the other side. “Schell passed the Vanwall, lost control in the curve on the left side and I immediately started going up his backside,” von Trips wrote. While Brooks followed the Lesmo curve to the right, Schell and von Trips skittered off the left side of the track, their cars locked together. As they slid into the underbrush Schell looked over, aghast that von Trips had rammed him. “Von Trips must have been totally crazy,” he later said.

  Schell was unhurt, but von Trips flew from his car and landed in a rose bush. “I felt something like a funny bone in my left calf. I couldn’t see the car but it couldn’t be far. Because I wouldn’t be able to save myself if there was a tank explosion, I yelled. Then a paramedic pulled me out of the rose bush.”

  The “funny bone” turned out to be a severely torn and stretched knee cartilage. His car didn’t fare much better: its chassis had snapped in two. Von Trips spent two months in hospital, first in Milan and then Cologne. For the second time in as many years he faced a long and complicated convalescence, relieved by teasing from friends. “What are you thinking?” a former schoolmate wrote from Berlin. “A car is not a tank or a snowplow. It is intended strictly for roads and not for test drives through ditches and trees!”

  While lying in the hospital he wrote a long soul-searching letter to an old girlfriend in Munich revealing loneliness and self-doubt. He confessed that he had begun to question whether his campaign for a championship was worth the isolation and emotional sacrifice. Almost none of the drivers had a family life, and he understood why. Racing made it almost impossible to cultivate real relationships. She wrote back to say that he must accept that he was human, and not a superman: