Limit, The

THE

LIMIT

MICHAEL CANNELL

First published in hardback and export trade paperback in Great Britain in 2011 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Michael Cannell, 2011

The moral right of Michael Cannell to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 978 184887 222 6
Export and Airside trade paperback ISBN: 978 184887 223 3
E-book ISBN: 978 085789 419 9

Printed in Great Britain

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For Evie and Cricket

Prologue

1. An Air of Truth

2. A Song of Twelve Cylinders

3. This Race Will Kill Us All

4. The Road to Modena

5. Pope of the North

6. Count von Crash

7. Garibaldini

8. Ten-Tenths

9. Birth of the Sharknose

10. 1961

11. Pista Magica

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Speed provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.

 

 

Phil Hill leads a procession of Ferraris on the notorious banking at Monza, site of the 1961 Italian Grand Prix. “This was a duel in the sun,” a correspondent wrote, “and the pace was too hot to last.” (Cahier Archive)

T
HEY BEGAN ARRIVING
a day in advance. The loyal Ferrari following—the
tifosi
—rolled up in caravans of Fiats and battered motorbikes to camp among the chestnut groves that spread more than six hundred acres around the boomerang-shaped racetrack in Monza, Italy. By the glow of evening campfires they raised cups of grappa to the great drivers, the
piloti
who once thundered around the terrible banked turns of the Autodromo Nazionale looming at the edge of the woods like a concrete cathedral.

Most of those
piloti
were gone now. Between 1957 and 1961 twenty Grand Prix drivers died. Many more suffered terrible injuries. By some estimates, drivers had a 33 percent chance of surviving. In the days before seat belts and roll bars, they were crushed, burned, and beheaded with unnerving regularity. One driver retired after winning the championship
only to die three months later in an ordinary car accident near his home.

The survivors raced on, in spite of the ominously long death roll. Inside the
autodromo
half a dozen teams and thirty-two drivers warmed up for the 267-mile Italian Grand Prix, the climactic race of the 1961 season, with the spotlight focused squarely on Ferrari teammates Phil Hill and Count Wolfgang von Trips. The next afternoon, on Sunday, September 10, they would settle their long fight for the Grand Prix title, racing's highest laurel. One last race remained, the U.S. Grand Prix at Watkins Glen, New York, but Monza was expected to decide the back-and-forth battle between the two men.

Von Trips held a four-point edge, and he had earned the advantageous pole position with the fastest practice laps. His easy, agreeable manner gave him the air of an inevitable winner. He had the comportment of a champion. On the other hand, he had crashed twice at Monza over the previous five years. Either could have ended his career—or killed him. He had recovered, but the accidents clung to him like a curse. By comparison, Hill had won at Monza a year earlier, and he had set several lap records. If von Trips was the erratic star, Hill was his rock-steady complement. Like any great sports story, it was a pairing of opposites.

The two men had traded checkered flags all summer as the Grand Prix made its way through six European countries. Their contest reached manic proportions, just as Borg vs. McEnroe and Ali vs. Frazier would in the following decades. It played large on the front pages of European newspapers. “This was a duel in the sun,” the
Times
of London wrote on the eve of the race, “and the pace was too hot to last.”

Neither man was Italian, which suited Enzo Ferrari, the reclusive white-haired
padrone
of the Ferrari empire. Every time an Italian driver died the government launched a meddlesome investigation and the Vatican made thunderous condemnations.

The rivalry was made vivid by their polar personalities—the American technician versus the German nobleman, loner versus bon vivant, backstreet hot rodder versus Rhineland count. Each would be the first from his country to earn the title after the war. Each considered himself a nose faster.

The location only heightened the suspense. The Italians called Monza the Death Circuit, in part because the banked turns catapulted errant cars like cannonballs. The sloped surface was coarse and pockmarked, and it exerted a centrifugal pull the fragile Formula 1 cars were not designed to handle. (The British teams had boycotted Monza in 1960 because they judged the banking too perilous.) More dangerous still, the long straights allowed drivers to touch 180 mph, and to slipstream inches apart. A series of tight curves, known as
chicanes
, had been installed to slow the cars, but it was still a track to be driven flat out. As much as any racetrack in the world, it conjured racing's heroics and horrors. To the north, it curved into a silent forest that was haunted by its many victims (or so went the legend).

The sun rose on a perfect cloudless Sunday with pennants snapping in a brisk breeze. The racetrack was bathed in soft September light. The pale outline of the Alps was visible to the north, glimpsed between a pair of Pirelli scoreboard towers. By afternoon the
tifosi
had gathered thirty deep at trackside railings, singing and drinking Chianti. They were jubilant in
the promise of seeing the Italian cars humble the British—the hated Brits who had dominated the podiums over the previous few years with a new breed of lightweight, agile cars. Now the Italians were again ascendant, the British in retrograde. The anticipation was exceptional, even by the feverish standards of Grand Prix.

Down below, in the pits, mechanics clenching spanner wrenches and screwdrivers scurried around a fleet of low-slung single-seat cars painted national racing colors—red for Italian teams, green for Great Britain, silver for Germany—with no corporate logos to obscure them. Within a few years media handlers and sponsorship deals would inundate Grand Prix, setting it on its course to becoming the formidable business it is today, but in 1961 racing was more about nationalism than money. Though never stated explicitly, it was animated by dark, hawkish undercurrents. Ancient grudges were avenged with checkered flags. Young men died in the most advanced machinery their countries could devise, as they had in World War II.

The memories of the war, now sixteen years past, were increasingly overtaken by Cold War apprehension. Two weeks before the Monza race, Communist officials had sealed the border between East and West Berlin with concrete and barbed wire. Almost overnight it became a hair-trigger world fraught with spy planes and satellites, intercontinental H-bombs, and an emergent space race. Phil Hill recognized the sport's ominous undercurrent. He and von Trips were, he said, gladiators in “an age of anxiety.” For his part, von Trips knew that the pageantry of a Grand Prix title would provide a unifying lift for his fellow
Germans. Countries have a way of creating the hero they need, and von Trips fit the part.

The two men cleared their minds as mechanics rolled their red cars into formation. They lowered themselves into reclined seats made to their specifications, their legs reaching through the fuselage for pedals. Their shoulders pressed tightly against wraparound windscreens and their gloved hands clenched and unclenched small leather-padded steering wheels. Gauges jumped to life as the engines fired. Finely wrought Italian cylinders thrummed in staccato and a hornet shriek of exhaust resounded off the heaving grandstands. Smoke billowed behind them. They were alone now, each in their own world. If they went too slow they'd lose, too fast and they'd die. Within moments they would be engaged in a solitary pursuit of the sweet spot drivers called the limit.

THE LIMIT