Limit, The

by Cannell, Michael

  For the first time the Ferraris themselves looked old-fashioned. In the 1960 Belgian Grand Prix, Hill chased Jack Brabham, the 1959 world champion, for lap after lap as they snaked through the Ardennes Forest at 150 mph. Brabham flicked periodic glances over his shoulder to see Hill crowding his tail. In the end, the pace was too much for Hill’s Ferrari. On lap 29 the engine ignited. Hill jumped out, patted down his singed coveralls, and doused the engine fire with a tiny extinguisher. The flames fed the impression that the Ferraris were straining to keep up. And they were.

  It was a startling reversal. For years Ferrari had dominated with a succession of bullying, bellowing engines. The British marques had seemed alarmingly fragile by comparison. British racing was practically a cottage industry with homegrown production shops scattered across the Southeast and Midlands. British Racing Motors, known as BRM, was set up behind the founder’s Lincolnshire home. Lotus operated from an old stable behind a London hotel. Chassis were stacked outside under a tarpaulin.

  By 1959 the tables had turned. The British answered the Italian hysteria for speed with a cool and calculated efficiency. The engineers at Cooper and BRM had produced a new species of Grand Prix cars with the engine positioned in the rear. By 1960 Lotus followed. With the weight centered just behind the driver, the cars were more balanced and agile as they slipped around corners. They also had an aerodynamic advantage: without an engine up front to see over, the driver could sit lower, greatly reducing the car’s wind resistance.

  The Ferraris still rocked the grandstands with their banshee blare. They still looked like felines poised for the pounce. But they now seemed comparatively heavy and ungainly, like woozy heavyweights. With weight positioned way up front, they waddled around turns and labored to keep up with the lighter, nimbler British cars, even on tracks that favored a wealth of horsepower.

  Ferrari brushed off foreign innovations. He dismissed Cooper and the other British outfits as garagistas. No, he told friends over grappa, the red cars would always house beastly, gut-pounding engines up front. “It’s always been the ox that pulls the cart,” he said.

  The ox might have pulled the Ferrari cart forever had the Ferrari engineer Andrea Fraschetti not spun and flipped while testing a prototype at the Modena autodromo in August 1957. He died the next day. In his place Ferrari hired a rotund Alfa Romeo engineer with thick-framed glasses named Carlo Chiti. He moved into an apartment next to Ferrari’s above the old Modena workshop at 11 Viale Trento e Trieste. Together they looked like an Italian version of Tweedledum and Tweedledee. The craftsmen joked that Ferrari and Chiti wore glasses because their protruding stomachs required them to stand at a distance.

  The provincial Ferrari circle received Chiti with suspicion. He came from Florence, just sixty-four miles from Modena, but it might just as well have been Moscow. Mechanics muttered an old Modenese proverb under their breath: “Better to die in bed than to have a Tuscan at the door.” Nor did they welcome Chiti’s progressive ideas about suspension geometry, weight distribution, and aerodynamics. Ferrari had its set way of doing things, and it did not welcome change.

  Chiti brought an artist’s disposition to the drafting table, working extravagant hours and erupting into volcanic fits when his new methods met resistance. Not surprisingly, he favored moving the engines aft, and he bought a Cooper chassis to demonstrate how it might be done. Ferrari was unimpressed. “He was unwilling for us to try, even at the level of a mere project,” Chiti said, “because he believed this would be a betrayal of the technical philosophy of his firm.”

  Ferrari might have curbed Chiti’s experiment once and for all if not for an unexpected change in the Grand Prix specifications. On October 29, 1959, the Royal Automobile Club threw a formal party at its 258-room clubhouse in the St. James’s neighborhood of London to honor Vanwall, a British manufacturer that had won six Grands Prix that season. After years of chasing red cars, the British had dominated. This was their victory party.

  At evening’s end, after the awards had been handed out, Augustin Pérouse, president of racing’s governing body, stepped to the microphone. The room went silent as his announcement sank in. New regulations for Formula 1 would limit engine capacity to 1.5 liters, a reduction of 40 percent. To discourage the construction of fragile cars, a weight minimum of 450 kilograms would be imposed.

  The British racing establishment had drunk rounds of toasts that night, and the hall was syrupy with patriotism. It came as a shock to learn that now, with British racing green finally dominant, the ground rules would be upended. The British jeered.

  In one sense their indignation was puzzling. The new rules, to go into effect in 1961, were roughly equivalent to those governing Formula 2, where the British had thrived. It might well benefit the British to extend the rules to Formula 1. But the reaction was based more on nationalism than logic: delegates from Monaco, Holland, France, Germany, and Belgium had voted for the change. Italy alone had joined Britain in opposition. The British felt that their European neighbors had ganged up on them in their moment of triumph. They objected, as well, to the prospect of Pérouse, a Frenchman, imposing a gutless reduction of power and spectacle.

  Over the next year the garagistas drafted a series of complaints to the sport’s governing body, the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile in Paris. The federation’s “structure is slow and cumbersome even as your sport is fast and alive,” said Moss, who must have felt doubly frustrated. A London judge had just revoked his license for a speeding violation. The arresting constable asked him, “Who do you think you are, Stirling Moss?”

  The British were in no position to rush new machines into production, even if they wanted to. Their budgets and workshops were too small. As the months passed the British delegation offered counterproposals and compromises and huffy condemnations—all the while assuming that they would prevail.

  But the federation held firm. By September 1960 it was clear that they would not rescind the new 1.5-liter rules. Cooper and Lotus gave up and began work on new engines and cars, knowing that they could not produce them in time for the 1961 season.

  While the British were arguing, Ferrari was quietly plotting a surprise. As soon as Pérouse announced the new regulations, Ferrari had sequestered Chiti in a secret Modena workshop, away from the Maranello factory, to develop a rear-engine car that complied with the new rules, giving him a six-month head start over the British. “Ferrari had agreed to try,” Chiti said, “even though he wasn’t really in agreement.”

  In February 1961 the automotive press came to Maranello to see Chiti’s secret weapon. The Ferrari 156 was a stripped-down screamer with tapered torpedo lines and wide-splayed wire wheels. It descended from earlier Formula 1 models, but with a more modern aspect: its physiognomy expressed a sinister form of Space Age speed. The 156 possessed the beauty of a design reduced to its essence. Beneath the polished red skin a 400-horsepower V6 engine nestled behind the driver. Chiti sank the engine deep, near the middle of the chassis, so the car would have a lower center of gravity and handle more deftly than its precursors. The result was a harmonic convergence of power and weight. The reporters standing in the factory’s cobbled forecourt nodded. Bellissima, bellissima. This was a car to carry Ferrari back to the podiums.

  Chiti shaped the 156 with the aid of a wind tunnel, a new technique for Ferrari. It consequently had a swept-back jet age profile with drivers reclining like Mercury astronauts behind a low wrap of windscreen. It was a new look for a new era of technological advance. The 156 looked dazzlingly fast, and it was. In test runs von Trips touched 180 mph. It would take its nickname from the twin intake nostrils fitted on either side of its sinister snout: the Sharknose.

  Chiti had engineered not just a car, but a reversal of fortune. The Sharknose all but assured that Ferrari’s dominion would be restored for the 1961 season. He had won the race for horsepower and handling before the first starting flag dropped.

  The only remaining question was which Ferrari driver would ride the S
harknose to the championship. The coming season shaped up as a two-man race: Hill versus von Trips.

  In March 1959, Sports Illustrated put Hill on its cover with the tagline “Sports Car Driver of the Year.” He was photographed leaning against the hood of a 250 Testa Rossa with his legs crossed and a smile on his tanned face. After years of anguish he looked happy and confident. “I’m always afraid when I race,” he told the magazine, but he persisted “because I do it well.” That was Hill’s career in distillate—a debilitating apprehension overcome by the draw of automotive distinction. He was ready for a summer-long push to prove that an American, an outsider and misfit once relegated to sports cars, could earn the highest laurel of a European sport.

  Hill had become a star in spite of himself. At one of the many cocktail parties preceding the races a pretty girl sidled up to Graham Hill, a British driver with a David Niven pencil mustache. “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said, blushing when she realized her mistake. “I thought you were the famous Mr. Hill.”

  Fame gave Hill something else to stress about. In his book Cars at Speed, Robert Daley described a pack of shouting, excited German boys clamoring for Hill’s autograph as he left a restaurant near the Nürburgring:

  “I’m nobody,” Hill said.

  “You’re Phil Hill,” the boys chorused.

  “No I’m not,” asserted Hill firmly. He slid into his car and drove off.

  While Hill holed up in his hotel room listening to music on his Concertone, von Trips made a warm and likable impression as a television correspondent at the Brussels car show and appeared in advertisements for motor oil, car parts, and eyeglasses. Like President John F. Kennedy, who took office a month before Ferrari unveiled the Sharknose, von Trips had an instinct for the casual élan of the early 1960s. He was almost Edwardian in his gentlemanly bearing, but his magnetism burned bright in television interviews and magazine photos. He could talk to reporters in four languages; in all four his enthusiasm for racing was infectious.

  Most team owners would have named Hill the lead driver for 1961 and ordered von Trips to stand back, or vice versa. But Ferrari refused to designate either one. He had a long history of extracting the utmost by pitting his people against one another, whether it was in the machine shop or on the racetrack. So the two men faced a gauntlet, an ordeal of one-on-one struggle that would last through the season. “The tension was excruciating and could not be relieved by a frank expression of competitiveness, not acceptably anyhow, between friends and teammates,” Hill said.

  Hill and von Trips weren’t smooth-faced novices anymore. They were in their mid-thirties with crow’s-feet and creases earned by years of strain and hard driving. They had reached the peak of their powers. This was their moment.

  Both men expected to drive hard up against the limit until a breakdown or accident decided the contest for them. They knew that death might be the arbiter.

  The start of the Monaco Grand Prix, May 14, 1961. For Phil Hill and Wolfgang von Trips, it was the beginning of an agonizing summer. They knew that a fatal accident might well decide the championship. (Getty Images)

  10

  1961

  ONE COLD NIGHT in the first week of January 1961, Wolfgang von Trips stood at a doorway, suitcase in hand, and rang the bell. He lingered in the chill air, listening for signs of stirring within.

  Three years earlier he had hired a former tax advisor named Elfriede Flossdorf to type his diary entries and manage the details of his endorsement deals and appearances. He teasingly called her “the racing secretary” because she dashed to keep up with the growing workload. Flossdorf was so busy, in fact, that von Trips installed her and her husband Willi in a small house on the entrance road to Burg Hemmersbach so that she would be close at hand. He had come to their door in the middle of the night to pick up his key. “Guess where I’ve been,” von Trips asked when they had roused themselves.

  They looked puzzled. “Well,” she said, “in South Africa . . .”

  “I was walking with the Almighty,” von Trips interrupted.

  “Where?”

  “I celebrated the new year in absolute heaven,” he said. “Astounding, isn’t it?”

  He was making a facetious reference to the Aga Khan’s home in South Africa where he had spent the holiday with Gabriella, Princess of Savoy. In the coming months he faced a murderous campaign for the championship, but he began the year in the arms of a blue-eyed princess.

  The next morning von Trips unwrapped a set of plates sent by Huschke von Hanstein of Porsche, a steadfast friend throughout his rise and fall and eventual redemption. Hanstein had given the plates as a Christmas gift and to show that he accepted von Trips’ decision to leave Porsche and return to Ferrari at the end of the 1959 season.

  “I’ve just unpacked your Christmas present and note to my great regret that the large plates have broken into three clean pieces,” von Trips wrote to Hanstein. “My next difficulty is to interpret what this oracle could mean. Shards can mean luck, or it could be a wink at my decision to go with the Reds.”

  As von Trips noted, broken plates are considered propitious. He may have carried the luck with him to Sicily for the Targa Florio, a rugged mountain race preceding the Grand Prix season. Hill chased von Trips through the harsh countryside on rutted roads caked with dung and caught up to him on a rocky plateau 2,000 feet above the coast. He tried to pass but the road—no more than a paved track for donkey carts—was too narrow. Von Trips might have edged over to let Hill pass, but he was unaware that Hill had pulled so close; the engine howl drowned out the sound of Hill’s car. Hill announced himself with a series of bumps and shoves delivered from behind at 120 mph. One rough nudge sent both whirling off the road and into the weeds. After a heated exchange, they pulled back onto the road, with von Trips leading again. Now driving in a fit of anger, Hill muscled past von Trips and skidded his way down a long switchbacked descent to the sea, flashing by ancient stone churches and old men riding mules. At the bottom of a steep stretch he hit a blind bend and lost control, sliding through concrete guardposts and crumpling his Ferrari in a ditch. He crawled out of the wreck in time to see von Trips rumble by on his way to a win. It was a taste of the dogfight to come.

  Sicily was a prelude to Monaco, the first of nine Grands Prix that would decide the championship. Von Trips glowed with confidence at the pre-race galas and the house party thrown by Bernard Cahier at his home in Villefranche-sur-Mer, six miles down the Riviera coast. He was a bit shy, as always, with a hint of sadness in his eyes, but his charm and good humor seemed to inoculate him against misfortune. He was too nice to die.

  Von Trips had the winner’s demeanor, but a betting line would probably have favored Hill due to his consistent record. “This is Hill’s year,” Moss said. “He has the ability . . . and the car.” Though you wouldn’t have known it to see Hill on practice days. As usual, he was a knot of nerves, pacing the pits with a cigarette and wiping his goggles. At every turn he exchanged sharp words—punctuated by animated Italian gestures—with the Ferrari mechanics buzzing about the cars in buff-colored coveralls. When he was not practicing, Hill burned off nervous energy and built stamina with long swims off the Monaco beachfront. The warm, wet Mediterranean was his antidote to days spent staring at blacktop.

  Hill, the incessant worrier, did not accept the common view that a Ferrari championship was inevitable. “There was always an uncomfortable feeling in the team,” he later wrote, “and while the car was very competitive, I never was convinced that the championship was going to be easy or even possible to win.”

  Among other things, Hill feared that Stirling Moss might steal the race, or the season, with one of his sensational dark-horse performances. Moss was flinty-eyed and muscled, with almost superhuman discipline. He once said that he abstained from sex for a week before each race so as not to soften his resolve. His eyesight was so acute that he could read newspapers from across a room and scan the crowd for pretty girls while entering a curve at 85 mph.

&n
bsp; Moss had won fourteen Grand Prix races—more than any other active driver—but he had yet to win a championship. His shrewd, cold-blooded precision made him a perennial threat, despite his refusal to join a manufacturer’s team. Aside from a stint with Mercedes, Moss relied on privately owned cars a year or so out of date. He enjoyed the underdog role, just as he relished driving cars painted British racing green, but he knew that he might never win a championship that way. In one race after another the obsolete cars broke down under his punishment.

  “I like to feel the odds are against me,” he said. “That is one of the reasons why I do not drive for a factory. I want to beat the factories in a car that has no right to do so. If I had any sense I would have been driving for Ferrari all these years. Year after year Ferrari has the best car. But I want to fight against odds, and in a British car.”

  Moss took particular delight in beating Ferrari. Ten years earlier, when Moss was a twenty-two-year-old sensation, Ferrari had courted him. After some negotiation Moss had agreed to race a sleek new four-cylinder Ferrari with a tapered nose in a race at Bari, a port city on the heel of the Italian boot. Moss and his father, a prosperous dentist, made the long trip from London, only to be rebuffed at the Ferrari garage. “The mechanic said, ‘Who are you and what are you doing?’ ” Moss recalled. “I said I was going to drive that car. He said, ‘I’m afraid you’re not.’ ”

  Moss telephoned Ferrari, who unapologetically explained that he had changed his mind and given the car to the veteran Piero Taruffi. Ferrari was most likely punishing Moss for taking a tough stance in their negotiations. Moss took it as a barefaced insult—to England as much as to himself—and vowed revenge on the racetrack. Indeed, the affront gave him extra incentive over the following decade. “It gave me great pleasure to beat Ferrari,” he said.