Hill’s car was so fast that it became a point of contention in the elaborate game-within-a-game that preceded each race. Von Trips groused to Tavoni that Hill had an unfair advantage. Hill knew that von Trips was right. “God, my car was clearly superior to Trips’,” he said. “I mean, my car was a full half-second, three quarters of a second faster.”
Von Trips demanded that Hill take a few laps in his car to demonstrate its slowness. If Hill also logged sluggish lap times it would prove that the problem lay with the car, not the driver. “I didn’t really want to,” Hill said. “After all, it might not be running right and they might fix it so that it would be faster than mine.”
Ferrari normally prohibited drivers from handling a teammate’s car for fear of sabotage. In this case Tavoni relented under pressure from von Trips. “Sure,” he told Hill, “take it around.” Hill only agreed because there was an oil spill at Thillois, a hairpin turn just before the pits. If he drove slower than von Trips, he figured, he could blame it on the oil. In fact, he drove three blazing laps, beating von Trips’ lap time by half a second, a generous margin by Grand Prix standards. “I really let it all hang out,” he said. “I flew. When I came into the pits, Trips was the picture of gloom. I said, ‘I’m sorry I wasn’t able to turn in a good one with all that damn oil all over, but it doesn’t feel half bad, to tell you the truth.’ ” Hill compounded the insult by winning the hundred bottles of champagne awarded to the driver with the fastest practice lap.
As if that weren’t humiliating enough, von Trips looked back on the next practice lap to see Moss riding an out-of-date Lotus in his slipstream so that the more powerful Ferrari would suck him along in its wake. Moss and other British drivers had perfected the technique during those many difficult years when their cars could not keep up with the Italians. When Tavoni waved in warning from the pits, von Trips sped up, hoping to shake Moss, but he succeeded only in pulling him along faster. Moss’s practice times were consequently much faster than they would otherwise be—the speediest among non-Italian cars by two seconds—assuring that he would start near the front. On his way back into the pits he flipped the Ferrari crew the two-fingered up-your-arse gesture.
On the morning of the race the July sun scorched the blond wheat fields like a blowtorch. The thermometer touched 102 degrees in the shade and 120 degrees on the circuit. Women clutched glasses of cold champagne beneath broad-brimmed hats. The drivers lingered in the pits, dousing their coveralls with water. Ferrari mechanics wiped the cockpits down and removed body panels to allow cooling air to flow around the drivers’ legs and bodies. Hill put a rubber bag of ice water on his floorboards with an improvised hose snaking up his shoulders. When he stepped on the bag a cold spritz trickled down his back.
The heat softened the black tarmac, loosening bean-sized pieces of gravel. It was like “driving on a spill of ball bearings,” Hill said. Two years earlier, on the same road, a bit of gravel had bloodied Hill’s nose. “I was drinking blood for about five laps and couldn’t feel a thing,” he said.
As expected, the Ferraris jumped out front with Hill leading comfortably, followed by von Trips. After eight laps Hill eased back. Five laps later von Trips pulled up and Hill let him pass. It was still early and Hill could afford to sit back and spare his engine exertion and overheating.
On the other hand, Hill may have been ordered to give way to von Trips. Denis Jenkinson, a long-bearded correspondent for the British magazine Motor Sport, wrote that Tavoni had told Hill in a pre-race meeting that he would have to step aside for von Trips, despite Hill’s faster practice times. Hill had accepted the order, according to Jenkinson, but with an eruption of anger. Hill’s frustration is understandable. For five years he had accomplished everything asked of him, only to see Ferrari repeatedly favor von Trips. Hill’s rage would only have pleased Ferrari. An angry driver, he knew, was a fast driver.
As it turned out, von Trips would not win, with or without Hill’s help. He pulled into the pits on the eighteenth lap with his engine smoking and steam spewing from his right-hand exhaust. A piece of gravel had punctured his radiator.
Spectators saw a broad smile of vindication under the tinted visor of Hill’s helmet as he reclaimed the lead. The race was now his to lose. With a 16-second lead he could afford to slow down and play it safe. He could coast home without incident. Ginther, in second, was too loyal to challenge him. Moss was laps behind. Hill was now all but assured of extending his lead in the Grand Prix tally and extinguishing some of the crushing pressure.
The race appeared locked up for Hill until he came out of a long downhill straight—among the longest and fastest on the entire Grand Prix circuit—at 160 mph and swung into the notorious Thillois hairpin expecting to drift his car around. Maybe he was too relaxed. Or maybe the heat had wilted his reflexes. Either way, he committed a rare miscue and skidded clockwise 180 degrees directly under the gaze of a grandstand. He might have quickly recovered if Moss, still struggling with his brakes, had not plowed into the Ferrari’s nose, spinning Hill another half turn. Hill then stood mid-track, cars whizzing by on either side, push-starting his car. He shoved it into motion with one hand and threw it into gear with the other. In the process the car ran over his foot. By the time the engine shook to life he had dropped to ninth place, which is where he finished.
Hill still led von Trips by a point, but he had fumbled his chance for an insurmountable lead. “My golden opportunity to make a decisive leap in the point standings was lost in one stupid move,” he said, “but perhaps a certain Calvinist notion of retribution had been satisfied.”
The charcoal skies hung low with a cold spit of rain when Phil Hill set out alone to walk the three-mile track at Aintree, site of the British Grand Prix and home of the Grand National, the country’s most famous steeplechase. He had come a week early to inspect every detail—the pebbled texture of the road, the windy stretch near Bechers Bend, the sightlines into Cottage Corner. He had come to absorb the feel of the place, to visualize it. If he learned anything from the frustrating Reims episode of the previous week, it was that anything can happen. He wanted to eliminate uncertainties.
Wolfgang von Trips, the presumptive world champion, after winning the British Grand Prix on July 15, 1961. For a divided Germany, he was a hero on the verge. (Cahier Archive)
Hill walked along a dead-flat black asphalt road separated from the steeplechase course by high hedges and white fencing. It was a grim expanse, as featureless as a pool table, overlooked by a double-decked Victorian grandstand with a deep overhang to shelter spectators from persistent drizzle. Along with bland food, the cold Lancashire rain was Aintree’s most distinctive aspect. Rain sprinkled on the practice runs and poured in sheets fifteen minutes before the start, sweeping the track with puddles. Dark roiling squall clouds mingled with factory smoke from Liverpool five miles to the south. Mechanics rushed to exchange smooth-tread tires for wet-weather versions with deep grooves for traction. Hill and von Trips stood in drenched coveralls adjusting their helmet visors.
Spectators huddling under umbrellas hoped the rain would help Moss pull off another upset. He had grown up in the damp British weather, and his wet-road skills had earned him the nickname “Rain Master.” But when the Union Jack dropped it was Hill, not Moss, who jumped out in front. He led for the first six laps with von Trips driving into a forty-foot plume of spray thrown up by his rival’s Ferrari. Hill drove with great authority, safely negotiating flooded sections at Country Corner and Valentine’s Way.
Before the race, while the track was still relatively dry, Hill had adjusted his car’s brake balance so the front wheels had more braking force. He regretted it now as his front tires began losing traction on the flooded tarmac. On the seventh lap he gained speed on the long backstretch, then braked in a tricky spot known as Melling Crossing, where a road crossed the track. He skated at 100 mph toward a massive solid oak gatepost, spinning first one way, then the other. His championship prospects seemed to vanish as he slid hopelessl
y closer to the post. He had unwillingly entered the state drivers feared most: he was a passenger without control, waiting for the slide to play itself out.
At the last second, as the gate loomed beside him, his front tires found grip through the puddle. He engaged a low gear and dodged the post by an inch. It was a near miss, but the fright played on his nerves. “A few years earlier it would have been forgotten—like a letter dropped in a mailbox—the instant the wheel caught hold,” he said, “but by 1961 it stayed with me.”
Consciously or not, Hill drove more cautiously after his close call, allowing von Trips to nip by. Then Moss came up from behind to badger Hill. On the tenth lap Moss blew by him, drawing cheers from the grandstand. Badly shaken, Hill dropped to third.
Now it was von Trips’ turn to see Moss looming in his rearview mirror, waiting to pounce like a wolf on the smallest mistake. Moss was an endlessly resourceful fighter with British veins of ice. In the past, his unnerving presence, combined with the foul conditions, might have provoked von Trips into an impetuous blunder. But by now von Trips knew how to keep his composure, and he drove a nearly flawless race through unrelenting rain. “Sometimes I lost my Ferrari at 150 kilometers an hour and we skipped through the puddles like a stone thrown flat on the water,” von Trips said.
Still, Moss kept turning up the heat. Lap after lap he hounded von Trips. By the twentieth lap Moss had closed to less than a second—an arm’s reach away. He made his move at Tatts Corner, a 90-degree turn at the far end of the backstretch, but von Trips closed the door on him.
Moss would have tried again, and might have succeeded, but he suffered his own skid at Melling Crossing, spinning an entire 360 degrees on the wet road. Five laps later he dropped out with a broken brake rod.
Half an hour later von Trips saw a tire appear through the wall of rain ahead of him. A second tire emerged along with the red body of a Ferrari. The rookie driver Giancarlo Baghetti had pulled close to another car to shield himself from the water spraying onto his windshield and goggles. When the other car unexpectedly braked, Baghetti went into a spin. “Suddenly I saw the eyes of the Italian coming out of the rain curtain toward me,” von Trips said. “It was ghostly, eerie. He came closer and closer. Finally I flicked past him. On the next lap I saw Baghetti on the edge of the track. Without a car.” Baghetti had spun five times and rammed into a wood fence.
By now the clouds had parted and the road dried. The sunlight shone on von Trips as he crossed the line in first, seven seconds ahead of Hill. More than any other, this race made von Trips look like a champion in waiting.
Minutes later the two men flanked Laura Ferrari on the podium. She smiled and linked her arms in theirs, a show of Ferrari unity. Von Trips wore a laurel wreath. He held his cup aloft and sipped champagne from it as the crowd whistled and clapped. Hill, who had led the standings until this moment, stood by in a suede windbreaker looking as if he had aged ten years.
Halfway through the Grand Prix season Hill and von Trips began wearing down. Neither could gain the upper hand, and the deadlock put added pressure on both men to crowd the limit. Von Trips called their contest “the highest test, the high wire.” Their rivalry played large on the front pages of newspapers. Everywhere they went people asked about it. Teammates stole sideways glances to see how they were holding up.
“As I had feared, Trips and I became involved in an increasingly bitter competition for championship points,” Hill later wrote. “Because the championship was at stake, I was not able to be reasonable and sensible about every race. After all these years I should have been, automatically, but there was this continual counting of points. By midseason my concentration was suffering.”
Hill joined von Trips for a midseason break at Burg Hemmersbach, where the count lightened the mood with funny stories about his upbringing in the castle and the Americans stationed there. It is not known what else they discussed, but Hill clearly made a good impression on the countess. He was the sort of earnest and articulate young man parents approved of. Most of her son’s friends cared only about speed and girls, but Hill’s inquisitive mind took in everything European culture offered—wine, architecture, and history. The castle was like a museum, and she was his personal docent. In particular he shared her interest in music. It’s easy to imagine him admiring the piano where she had played Chopin to von Trips as a boy. Hill and the countess agreed to attend the Salzburg music festival together later that month.
Back on the circuit, Hill and von Trips found it harder and harder to maintain a friendship under the strain of competition. In hotels and restaurants they were cordial, but they kept a protective distance. They greeted each other with tense smiles. “All year long it was him or me for the championship,” Hill said. “It’s not a normal situation race drivers are in: you try to beat the other guys all day, and then at night you’re supposed to forget all that.”
Their friendship was further strained by von Trips’ driving. Too often he seemed oblivious to the subtle points of protocol that safeguarded drivers, and his tolerance for risk had a infectious quality that Hill struggled against. “I was very aware of staying within my limits, but Trips was unpredictable in this regard, and in a way I feared him,” Hill said. “Racing against him, I soon learned that I was capable of being sucked into areas where I didn’t want to be, even as I was having enough trouble knowing and sticking to my own limits.”
A week before the German Grand Prix at the Nürburgring, von Trips found diversion in speed of a different magnitude. The 36th Fighter Wing of the U.S. Air Force invited him to ride in a supersonic F-100. Just before the Ferrari transporter delivered the cars for practice, he drove an hour to the Bitburg air base where he was “passed around the officers’ club like a champion cup,” said Harster, who accompanied him. A small, wiry major named Charlie Davis fitted him into the cockpit with a flight suit, oxygen, and radio. After the sickening G-force of takeoff, Major Davis gave von Trips an aerial view of the Nürburgring. “There was the track,” von Trips said. “There was the start and the finish. Charlie put the bird at an angle so I could see everything exactly. Then we were on the straightaway directly in front of the grandstand, on it at more than 900 kilometers an hour.”
“There was a green splash of color in the pits,” he added. “Probably the sleeping Lotus belonging to Stirling Moss.” (The Lotus would actually have been blue, the Scottish racing color.) “Thank goodness, no red,” he said. “I didn’t need a bad conscience. The Ferraris weren’t there yet. My car wouldn’t miss me.”
Then the F-100 shot almost vertically through the clouds and into a dark blue sky. Major Davis rolled the jet and flicked on the afterburners. “About 30 seconds later there was a light tremor through the machine,” von Trips said. “The needles with heights and speed began to dance like drunks.” They broke the sound barrier over Burg Hemmersbach. Von Trips called it “a visit with the Gods.”
He looked down from 40,000 feet at a serene and verdant countryside, but on the ground was a country in crisis. In August 1961 Germans fled East Berlin at a rate of fifteen hundred a day until Communist officials sealed the border with a barricade of barbed wire and jagged glass. Tanks patrolled the streets and police hauled thousands to detention camps. East and West faced off across the Berlin Wall, their fingers on the trigger.
Almost overnight von Trips’ ambition to be the knight of a new Germany became closer to an imperative: he now carried the weight of national expectation. Divided and demoralized, Germany needed a uniting figure.
His countrymen had every reason to believe von Trips was on the verge of a Grand Prix title. His win at Aintree gave him nine points, leapfrogging him ahead of Hill in the championship standings. He arrived at the German Grand Prix with a two-point lead. He also had the comfort of racing on familiar ground. The Nürburgring was sixty miles from Burg Hemmersbach and practically within walking distance of the family hunting lodge. He was at home with the scent of pine needles and the short, steep mountains patrolled by wild boar
and red deer. It was here that Bernd Rosemeyer had first roused his interest in racing.
Not that anyone would call the Nürburgring welcoming. On the contrary, the drivers nicknamed it the Green Hell. It was a fourteen-mile roller coaster created exclusively for racing, with narrow, winding turns without guardrails and abrupt plunges that pitched cars airborne. The road ran up and down hills that a civilian road would skirt. An atmosphere of foreboding hung over the course with Schloss Nürburg, a medieval ruin, overlooking Butcher’s Field, Pick Axe Head, Enemy’s Garden, and other hazards. When an Australian driver was told (incorrectly) that Hitler himself had designed some of the features, he said, “I guessed as much.”
Von Trips arrived for practice a few days before the race and checked into the Sporthotel tucked under the grandstand. The hotel was reserved for teams on race weeks, and it took on a clubby aspect, with drivers wandering among rooms for meals and drinks. They could stroll to the pits in minutes. The drawback for von Trips was that thousands of admirers hovered, even on practice days. They encircled him at every turn, thrusting programs for signatures and cornering him with questions. Girls lingered in the stairwell hoping to meet him.
The demands chafed on his goodwill. “I noticed that I had slowly but surely fallen into a state of nerves,” he said. “I would like to leave the Nürburgring hotel and stay somewhere else, somewhere quiet, but I’m always there because it is practical. . . This time it was simply too dangerous for me. I had to find some peace at any price.”
Von Trips had a reputation for conducting himself as a gentleman, but “sometimes it’s just too much,” he told a friend. “When I give a nice lad an autograph, I immediately have a whole tribe of people around me. So I’ll go back to using my old method—I look at the floor, three feet ahead of me, and walk through the area, try not to make eye contact with anyone. It’s the best way to get through.” He thrust his hands in his pockets and nodded to avoid shaking hands.
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