Limit, The (32 page)

Before breaking away for final preparations von Trips slipped a few dextrose tablets in the pocket of his coveralls to boost his blood sugar. He smiled graciously, as he always did, and spoke with the racing press gathered around him in the pits. Had he become a better driver since crashing here in 1956, and again in 1958?

“No, only luckier,” he said.

Why was he not married?

“I'm married to one of these,” he said, gesturing to a Ferrari.

Was he looking forward to the race that afternoon?

“I love motor racing, where one has to fight to win,” he said. “To do this you must drive close to the limit, which I am always prepared to do. There is a very thin line between winning and crashing; you have to walk it like a tightrope.”

Hill, meanwhile, was as twitchy and overwrought as ever. His Sharknose had developed a glitch on the first day of practice. He could shift from first to second gear, but when he went for third it slid back to first. “Worse yet, nobody would believe me,” he said. “I was throwing fits.”

The mechanics eyed Hill with suspicion. They were not convinced the bug was real until one of them drove the car around the paddock. Afterwards, with Hill leaning over their shoulders, they uncovered a faulty gearbox. Hill missed practice while they replaced it. Even with the new gearbox the car was
inexplicably sluggish. Hill was only fourth fastest in practice, placing him behind von Trips on the second row of the starting grid.

Hill was beside himself as the engineers probed the engine for answers. He paced around muttering to himself and waving away reporters. “Everything's gone wrong with my car,” he said. “I can't talk. I can't even be civil.”

After Hill complained that he couldn't compete in the car, Enzo Ferrari said, “Are you sure there isn't something wrong with your foot?”

Hill would have to dominate if he was to get back into contention with von Trips, and that would be impossible in a car he mistrusted. In desperation, he issued an ultimatum: he would not race at all unless the Ferrari engineers replaced the engine altogether. “Just change the damn engine,” he said. Unable to come up with a better solution, they reluctantly agreed.

Hill returned to the Ferrari garage at 6 a.m. to find the mechanics bleary-eyed and slathered in grease. They sheepishly acknowledged finding a broken inner valve spring during their all-nighter. Hill had been right to insist on an overhaul. The racetrack was not yet open, so Hill furiously put the new engine through its paces on the streets near the quiet country inn where the Ferrari team was lodging. Over and over he accelerated from a dead stop, trying to break in the engine within a few hours—clutch thrown in, foot down, revs climbing to a falsetto shriek.

The sun rose on a mild and clear mid-September day. The drivers went through their pre-race routine wearing polo shirts and sunglasses. Hill asked a mechanic to splash a bucket of water on the back of his coveralls to keep him cool. Von Trips
was as relaxed as ever, napping on a bench in the corner of the pits. He roused himself and ate a pear as the crew rolled his car into the pole position—the inside slot on the front row—marked with a white line on the gray asphalt. It was the only time that von Trips had earned the top spot. Before stepping into his car, he did something uncharacteristic: he slipped off his signet ring inscribed with the family coat of arms and handed it to a friend for safekeeping. “We may be teammates,” he said of Hill as he adjusted his silver helmet, “but one has to fight. I love fighting.”

Everything but the fight faded in the closing moments before the start. The notoriously officious Monza
polizia
chased off photographers and reporters milling around the start area. Mechanics darted about, shouting at one another in four languages. A heaving crowd of 50,000 packed the grandstands and bleachers. They pressed against wire fences at the edge of the 6.2-mile course, drinking wine and singing. Some hammered spikes into trees and clambered up for a better view. It was their moment to see a Ferrari renaissance. The drivers emerged from the pits in Dunlop coveralls and lowered themselves one by one into their cars.

Five, four, three, two, one. The Italian flag swung down and the cars leapt. Hill's car still had “a stumble to it,” he said, “but when the flag dropped I was gone.”

Von Trips had a history of early faltering. It often took him a lap or so to shed his jitters and find his rhythm. True to form, he missed a few beats at the start and mired himself in a pack of six cars following Hill in tight formation, moving inches apart through the broad Curva Grande and the two sharp rights at the Curva di Lesmo. Von Trips was in fourth as the group
charged down the long backstretch and around the big south curve to finish the first lap.

With Hill pulling away, von Trips surely felt an urgency to maneuver his way up through the tightly bunched field. It was still early, but if he got trapped in traffic he might forfeit his chance for a top finish, and with it his edge over Hill. With teeth bared he passed Jack Brabham and Jim Clark in two powerful blasts of acceleration.

On the second lap, von Trips sped out of the forest and through a bend in the backstretch with Clark trailing behind and slightly to his left. The bend slowed them only slightly as they rolled into the fastest stretch, a straight where drivers could press the accelerator for nearly 30 full seconds. Moving at 150 mph, von Trips watched for his chance to pass Rodriguez directly in front of him.

Four hundred feet before the next turn von Trips swerved left to make his move. In his haste to catch Hill, he was unaware that Clark had stayed close. He may have assumed that Clark was slipstreaming directly behind him. In any case, von Trips “shifted sideways,” Clark later said, “so that my front wheels collided with his back wheels. It was the fatal moment.”

Von Trips committed a tiny miscalculation, a miscue of no more than an inch, but at 150 mph it was enough to sling him onto a grassy shoulder to the left. His wheels plowed the soft earth as the car rode up a five-foot slope where spectators stood two deep behind a chest-high chicken-wire fence. In an instant of explosive violence, the Ferrari slashed along the fence for about ten feet, shredding spectators like a big red razor, then bounced end-over-end back onto the track. The mauled car came to rest right side up with its wheels collapsed inward.

Five spectators standing along the fence died instantly, their skulls crushed by the threshing car. The survivors screamed in reaction to the death all around them. Bodies lay in scattered clumps. Ten more would die later. More than fifty were injured.

Meanwhile, Clark's car spun and struck the embankment several times before coming to a rest in the grassy stretch beside the road. The car was crushed, but Clark squirmed out unscathed.

The man who was supposed to be champion lay facedown on the track in bloodied coveralls, alone and motionless. His car had rolled on top of him, then, on the next bounce, flung him like a rag doll. His distinctive silver helmet had not saved him, nor had the flimsy roll bar.

Clark jumped from his Lotus and helped a race marshal drag von Trips' car to the shoulder. He glanced at von Trips, but could not bring himself to check on him. “I didn't really want to go over to where he lay,” Clark said. With his helmet tucked under his arm, Clark went back to the pits, where he all but collapsed.

Von Trips had died of skull fractures by the time an ambulance arrived. In a few savage seconds, no more than a few heartbeats, all his charm and promise, all the hope he offered to a troubled nation, came to a violent end.

A paramedic spread a sheet over the body. A bloodied forearm dangled from the shroud as von Trips was carried to the ambulance on a stretcher. It was the public's last glimpse of him. Laura Ferrari sobbed in the pits and asked to be taken to the hospital. There was nothing to be done, but she felt compelled to accompany the body.

All over Germany people had gathered in living rooms and
bars with intent to celebrate. Now they froze over their coffee or pilsner as the radio sportscaster waited for a messenger from the Ferrari pit to explain why the count had not come around on the last lap. He broke the news in a wavering voice. With a choke of apology he said that he could not continue his coverage:

Ladies and gentlemen, dear listeners in Germany, I don't have to tell you how this event in all its elemental tragedy is affecting us and you'll understand that we have very little interest in current positions and lap times. Please forgive us if we do not wait for the end of the race. Please don't blame us if we sign off from the Grand Prix of Italy with the news about Wolfgang Graf Berghe von Trips, and in his memory and with thoughts of him, send you back to your home station in Germany.

In Horrem, Elfriede Flossdorf rushed from her home, but turned back before reaching the castle. She couldn't bear to tell the countess. A delegation of family friends, including Rolff and a local priest, broke the news instead. At first the countess refused to believe them. Wolfgang would recover, she said, just as he had overcome so many other accidents and illnesses.

At the hospital Laura Ferrari and Carlo Chiti lingered, as if in vigil, outside a long narrow room where bodies lay on a row of cots. Tony Helling, a newspaper correspondent, entered the room and found von Trips, his hands resting on a blanket. There was no sign of injury aside from drops of blood staining the pillow. “He lay there,” she later said, “with eyes closed, with an incredibly relaxed expression—no smile, but
even so I felt he could not have suffered, he could not have felt pain, and a deep calm came over me.”

Meanwhile, the race flowed on with Hill leading Moss by 18 seconds. Drivers wove through the smoke and debris, slowed by a marshal waving a flag of caution while the bloodied bodies were laid out on the roadside covered in tent canvas and newspapers. No announcement was made to the crowd.

Hill passed the scene forty-one more times that afternoon. On each lap he glimpsed the crumpled remains of the car, but he was uncertain whose it was until he saw von Trips' name removed from a scoreboard listing the order of drivers on the track.

After von Trips crashed, three other Ferraris dropped out. Watching on television in Modena, Enzo Ferrari said,
Abbiamo perduto.
We have lost. It was a curious reaction given that a Ferrari would win. Hill drove a nearly perfect race, a masterpiece of precision and pacing. Less than two hours after von Trips crashed, he raised his hand as he whipped by the checkered flag in first place, the only one of five Ferraris to finish. Moss, who started the race with a long shot at the title, dropped out with a collapsed wheel bearing.

The win gave Hill nine points, clinching the championship. He had overcome waves of obstacles—Ferrari's partisanship, a late-summer deficit in points, an eleventh-hour engine failure—to become the first American to win racing's greatest prize. Among other things, the win resolved the tug-of-war between anguish and ambition that had gripped him for more than a decade. It affirmed a pursuit that he had so often doubted.

Hill had arrived at the triumphant moment that had drawn
him since childhood like a distant light. The realization that he had prevailed—the wondrous reality of it—came over him as “a warming relief, a soaring feeling. But it was to be a short flight.”

Hill walked to the victory podium in a throng of pushing, swaying well-wishers. Sweat matted his hair and goggles dangled from his neck. He sipped from a bottle of mineral water. Chiti pushed through the crowd and hugged him.
Bravo, bravo.
Hill asked Chiti about von Trips. “He muttered something but I could tell from his face that it was not the truth,” Hill said. “I suspected the worst, but it was not until after champagne and congratulations on the victory stand that I was told.”

Sports Illustrated
reported that Hill sobbed and dashed away as the flashbulbs popped. That was not the case. He was too inured for that. (According to one report, it was Wolfgang Seidel, a German driver, who wept.) Hill may have sagged. He may have paled beneath his sooty cheeks. But his face betrayed nothing but stony acceptance. “At the risk of seeming to be callous I can only say that my emotional defenses are pretty strong,” he later wrote. “I can be stoical when I have to be.”

Von Trips claimed all the morning headlines. The newspapers buried Hill, if they mentioned him at all. The insinuation was that von Trips was the rightful winner. Hill was merely an understudy, despite two first-place finishes, two seconds, and two thirds. The
New York Times
printed Daley's account of von Trips' death on its front page. Mention of the new champion waited until after the story jumped to page thirty-three. “He knows that his victory has been so submerged in the press under the death toll,” Daley wrote, “that few people even realize he is champion.”

On the day after von Trips died, undertakers dressed him in a light blue suit and laid him out for viewing. Hill passed silently before the body, pausing to place a bouquet of red roses beside the coffin. “I bow my head before him with a tearful heart,” he said.

After the viewing, Hermann Harster locked himself in his hotel room to make notes for the book that he had collaborated on with von Trips, but would now finish alone. “Easily and quickly he died,” he wrote. “His face showed it. It was very peaceful. No trace of a violent death.” The next day the body was flown home to Burg Hemmersbach in a chartered plane.

Hill had no wife or family to celebrate with. Nor was he in the mood. He returned to his hotel in Modena and listened to Bartók and Shostakovich. He felt pride in his accomplishment but nothing like true gratification. “There was a certain amount of guilt on my part,” he said, “that Trips was dead and I was alive and I had won the championship.”

Meanwhile, Italian officials reacted with their usual paroxysms of reprimand and reproach. They impounded the mauled remains of von Trips' and Clark's cars in preparation for a lengthy inquiry. Clark made an official statement to police, then made a hasty departure on Brabham's private plane. Italian prosecutors would hound him for years. Newspaper editorials condemned Ferrari.
L'Osservatore Romano
published a pronouncement from the pope that “it would be criminal to allow absurd performances of death like this to repeat themselves.”