Limit, The (25 page)

Hill didn't win in Formula 1 that year either, but he played a key role in Hawthorn's push to succeed Fangio as world champion. According to the complicated calculus of Grand Prix, Hawthorn could claim the championship by finishing first or second in the Moroccan Grand Prix. Otherwise Moss would win. The British press called it the “showdown in the sun.”

Hawthorn eluded the press by arriving in Casablanca on a separate flight from his girlfriend, a twenty-one-year-old model named Jean Howarth. His first stop was to inspect the Ferraris covered in tarps at a rented garage. The car assigned to him had the number 2 painted on it, the same number Collins and Musso had when they died. Hawthorn would not race with it, he said. Gendebien agreed to switch with him.

Once again, Hill's job was to induce Moss to damage or wear down his car by setting a fast pace. Moss bolted fast from the starting line, as always, and took off down a sun-baked road that ran by turbaned Arabs and white minarets on the sandy outskirts of Casablanca. Hill pecked at Moss from behind while Hawthorn hung back to preserve his engine. On the fortieth lap Hill eased back so that Hawthorn could finish second
and beat Moss by a single point in the season tally. Moss led the race from beginning to end and recorded the fastest lap, but Hawthorn became the first British world champion.

When Hawthorn rolled into the pits after his cool-down lap, Tavoni rushed to congratulate him.
Bravissimo, bravissimo!
Before stepping from the car, Hawthorn told Tavoni that he was retiring. He was done. He made a perfunctory showing at the post-race ceremonies, then whisked Howarth to the hotel. At the age of twenty-nine, Hawthorn had resolved that he would be the one Ferrari driver to escape alive. He would marry Howarth and move back to Farnham to run the family garage.

In leaving, Hawthorn turned the team's hopes over to Hill, with the caveat that Hill had to stay alive long enough to fulfill them. “Let me make a prediction,” Hawthorn told the press in a farewell statement. “The combination of Phil Hill and Ferrari will be heard from over the coming seasons. I think Phil has an excellent chance of becoming world champion—if his luck doesn't run out.”

The first months of retirement went much as Hawthorn planned. He and Howarth were engaged and were to marry the following year. At Christmas he gave her a boxer dog named Ferrari. On January 22, 1959, he set off for London to attend to some business and meet Louise Collins, who had just completed a run in a traveling production of
Romanoff and Juliet
, a Cold War version of the Shakespeare play written by Peter Ustinov. A few days later Hawthorn would go to Paris to meet with lawyers about making provisions for an illegitimate son he had fathered in France. It was a complication that he had to resolve before finalizing his marriage to Howarth.

He left Farnham in his highly tuned Jaguar Mark 1 on a wet winter morning with squalling winds, heading northeast through
the rolling Surrey countryside. As he drove along a ridge known as the Hog's Back he caught up with a Gullwing Mercedes driven by Rob Walker, heir to the Johnnie Walker whiskey fortune and owner of a stable of Grand Prix cars. Hawthorn pulled alongside and waved. For all his talk of retirement and marriage, he could not resist a tussle—especially with a Mercedes.

The two cars plunged neck-and-neck down a long hill slick with rain. They went flat out, each driver working his way up the gears to a speed of about 100 mph. Easing into a righthand turn at the bottom, Hawthorn slid and smacked the curb. The impact spun his Jaguar 180 degrees. Now he was going backwards at 100 mph. The drivers were still traveling side by side, but facing opposite directions. Their eyes met for an instant before Hawthorn's car careered across the carriageway, mounted the verge on the far side of the road and wrapped itself around a tree. Walker reached him in time to see his eyes glaze over and go still. Hawthorn had escaped death in a Ferrari only to find it on a Guildford bypass three months into retirement. It didn't take long for news of Hawthorn's death to reach Burg Hemmersbach, where von Trips waited in exile. Within nineteen months, four of his former teammates had died: Portago, Musso, Collins, and now Hawthorn.

“We drivers of the Scuderia family were always a small family,” he wrote to Ferrari, “and if we quarreled sometimes, so also do we have steadfast ties and an awareness that to drive for Ferrari is something that keeps us together. Even when someone like me is no longer a team member, the memory is still very much alive. It was a time when I was in your cars and in the company of many dear friends, no longer living, racing on tracks around the world.”

His wistful tone suggests that he did not expect to race again, at least not for Ferrari. Drivers who came close to dying, like those who married, were no use to Ferrari. They rarely mustered the nerve to face the limit.

For the moment, von Trips found a measure of peace walking on crutches under the chestnut trees and tending to his flowers. Once again his parents pressured him to stay home. His mother in particular voiced her hope that the accident—his second serious crash at Monza—would sway him to retire from racing and take up his long-deferred agricultural duties. Supervising the farmlands was a full-time job, and his parents were getting too old to manage.

Besides, he was an only child and the last son of the Trips dynasty. Hawthorn's death was a reminder that the ancient bloodline would expire with von Trips if he died. The other branches of the family had long since withered away. Von Trips was fond of saying, half jokingly, that his ancestors were all robber-knights who came to violent deaths.

There was no shortage of women hoping to settle down with him, many from the network of aristocracy spread across Europe like an extended family. He had a long casual affair with Princess Maria Gabriella of Savoy, the tall blonde daughter of Italy's last king. He met her through Juan Carlos, the future king of Spain and a pupil in the driving clinics von Trips occasionally conducted. He and the princess saw a lot of each other in Paris, where she was studying painting with Oskar Kokoschka, an Austrian expressionist known for swirling psychedelic portraits and landscapes. She was a genteel bohemian and the kind of free spirit that would be called a hippie few years later. She avidly pursued von Trips—avidly enough to
give him a nude watercolor self-portrait. In the end, he decided that she was too far above his station.

Besides, von Trips was uncomfortable with the prospect of a marriage founded on the perpetuation of his noble pedigree. His mother came from a bourgeois family, and he had grown up with an awareness of slights and subtle condescension from those who considered him a half-blood count (though the aristocracy was only too happy to claim him when the press christened him “the fastest count on earth”). Racing had always appealed to him as an escape from the issues of birthright and entitlements. It was a meritocracy where Fangio, the son of a potato farmer, rose to the top and any number of titled pretenders failed. “The racetrack had its own aristocracy,” said Taki Theodoracopulos, the journalist who was then an amateur tennis player and a frequent companion on evening excursions. “You couldn't tell the difference between the highborn and the lowborn.”

Von Trips spent his recuperative months in his study, a private hideaway tucked beneath the mansard roof, writing letters and listening to George Gershwin and Stan Getz. He sat on the floor and recorded ruminations into an audio diary and for fun dubbed the roar of engines onto the soundtrack.

He also listened to an LP recording of an interview with his friend Alfonso de Portago. Like a voice from the grave, the soft-spoken Portago made the case for racing as the invigorating pursuit of a modern nobility. It was a philosophy borrowed equally from Jack Kerouac and their knightly ancestors. “The racer is happier, luckier than other men,” Portago said, “because he lives through a stronger sense of the nearness of death. The racer is in a world that only a few understand.”

It looked as if von Trips might be forever becalmed in his
castle when his early supporter, Huschke von Hanstein, wrote with an invitation to join Porsche for the 1959 season, just as he had when von Trips was bereft two years earlier. “If your daredevil spirit knows no end,” von Hanstein wrote, “I'll again extend my offer to you to satisfy it.”

The letter landed like a hand grenade at Burg Hemmersbach, where von Trips was just beginning to resign himself to a life spent fussing over the potato and turnip harvests.

With von Hanstein's backing, he went to the Monaco Grand Prix on May 10, where he did little to redeem himself. Within the first five minutes he lost control in a bend where the road climbs steeply to a hillside casino. As von Trips spun out the British driver Cliff Allison rammed him with his Ferrari. The silver Porsche 718 crumpled against a wall. Von Trips exited the race before the first lap ended, just as he had at Monza in 1958. “The young ladies can rest assured,” a radio broadcaster said, in a nod to von Trips' female following. “Nothing's happened to him.”

Von Trips nursed a badly gashed cheek on the roadside as Hill whisked by on his way to a fourth-place finish. Von Trips' abysmal showing could easily have been the concluding episode of his career. “We've seen a lot of great moments from the Count,”
Der Spiegel
wrote, “but we've repeatedly learned that in the decisive moment he does not have the necessary perspective. It's not the first time that failure's come by hasty, even reckless action.”

While von Trips tried to resuscitate himself with Porsche, the ranks of Ferrari drivers continued to thin. Jean Behra, a short, stout Frenchman hired by Ferrari for the 1959 season, became paranoid and surly as he strained to meet Ferrari's expectations. At thirty-eight, he had survived a dozen crashes. His body was
laced with scars. A French magazine published a full-page photograph of him with a dense display of arrows identifying his broken bones. A collision three years earlier had torn off his right ear. Behra endured it all with a Gallic shrug. “Only those who do not move do not die,” he said. “But are they not already dead?”

Nobody doubted Behra's toughness, but he was temperamentally unsuited for Ferrari. He fried his clutch at the 1959 French Grand Prix, then overstrained the car until smoke billowed from the engine. At a party held in a restaurant after the race, he accused Tavoni of assigning him cars that were mechanically unsound. Tavoni responded by saying that Behra himself had trashed the engines with sloppy driving. Behra slapped Tavoni, and would have pummeled him if his wife had not pulled him off. When Ferrari heard about the scrap he immediately fired Behra. Behra then tried to buy a Ferrari to race independently, but Ferrari refused to even see him.

Desperate to prove that he could still compete, Behra entered his own Porsche Spyder RSK in a sports car race run on a 2.5-mile stretch of West Berlin road known as AVUS. Two long parallel straights ended in a thirty-foot banked hairpin surfaced in a rough layer of brick. The race carried no real importance; it was staged only to rouse local interest in the German Grand Prix held the next day. Behra was in third place when his car skidded on the wet hairpin turn at 110 mph. He entered the turn on the proper line, but the tail of his car slid higher and higher on the banking until it flew off the edge backwards and crumpled against an old anti-aircraft bunker. Behra was thrown clear. For a moment spectators could see him writhing in midair, his arms outstretched as if swimming to safety. He struck a flagpole and rolled down a slope, coming to a stop
near a street where drivers were practicing for the next day's race. He died of a skull fracture.

Even by Ferrari standards, it was a cruel ending. “We abandoned this man to his despair,” the Ferrari engineer Carlo Chiti said. “We had obliged him to take refuge in his own desperation.”

At a wake held in Berlin, von Trips laid his hand on Behra's forehead inside the open casket. It was a tender parting gesture captured by a gaggle of press photographers. Behra was buried a few days later with his checkered helmet placed on his coffin.

Behra's final race marked the beginning of von Trips' latest comeback. Moments after Behra died, Hanstein held out a chalkboard with an “X” by Behra's name. He intended the signal as a warning: von Trips had better slow down on the wet course. But von Trips held his speed and won. It was an insignificant race but it helped restore his confidence.

“I remain best of friends with the House of Ferrari, but after my accident in Monza '58 and the many fatal crashes on the Ferrari team I was not in the mood to be on the Formula 1 circuit this year,” he wrote to an acquaintance. “It simply takes a little time before the wounds delivered by blows of fate—for which the death of an entire racing team certainly qualifies—heal on their own. Still, I believe I've found the old form and strength again.”

Enzo Ferrari agreed. Following the races from his Modena stronghold, he could tell that von Trips' instincts had returned, along with signs of a new maturity: he had finally learned how to keep his impetuousness and overreach in check. It had taken a crisis of confidence for Von Trips to understand what Hill had known all along: going faster sometimes required slowing down.