Limit, The (34 page)

On May 1, 1963—a year and a week after the accident—Moss returned to Goodwood to test his reactions. He still slurred words and he still struggled to focus his left eye, but he was prepared to consider a comeback. He clocked decent lap times in a Lotus—about three seconds slower than normal—but something was not right. He may have found his motor skills lacking, or maybe he simply lost his nerve. Moss would not have been the first convalescing driver to lose his appetite for the limit. Whatever the case, he issued a blunt statement to the press that evening: “I have decided to retire; I will not race again.”

Without Moss, Hill became the presumptive leader of the Ferrari team for the 1962 season. But there was little chance of him repeating as champion. Ferrari judged the year-old Sharknoses obsolete, and discarded them in favor of a new version. “We must inevitably replace it if we are to continue keeping just a little bit ahead,” he wrote in his memoir. But Ferrari was not keeping ahead. Without Chiti, the new version of the Sharknose failed to measure up against resurgent engineering from the British teams.

Hill might have helped the new Ferrari management tune the new cars, but he found them unreceptive. When he suggested refinements, the mechanics made them reluctantly, or not at all. It was as if the clock had turned back five years: once again nobody would listen to him.

When Ferrari introduced a lighter, slimmer Formula 1 car at the German Grand Prix on August 5, Hill refused to drive it. “It will be a better car some day,” he said. “But it isn't yet. It has not been tested enough.”

Tavoni's replacement, an imperious twenty-six-year-old heir to a perfume fortune named Eugenio Dragoni, used Hill as a scapegoat for the team's downturn, beginning with the Targa Florio in May. Hill's throttle jammed during a practice run, sending him off a short cliff at 85 mph. Dragoni attributed the accident to Hill's “hysteria” over von Trips' death. When Hill had a persistent flu at the British Grand Prix in late July, Drag-oni interpreted it as a lingering psychosomatic reaction.

Hill denied that von Trips' death had left an emotional scar. “I knew where I was psychologically,” Hill said, “and I was no more nor less ‘impressioned' by Trips' death than I had been by Collins' or Portago's or Musso's or Behra's or Hawthorn's.”

After one race Hill overheard Dragoni reporting back to Ferrari by phone: “Your great champion didn't do a thing.” Hill had never felt appreciated in his nine years with Ferrari, but by 1962 he found his position insufferable. He dined midsummer with Chiti, the defector, who was full of promising predictions for the new team. A spy reported their meeting to Ferrari, who likely punished Hill by assigning him inferior cars. It came as no surprise when Hill left Ferrari at the end of the 1962 season to join Chiti's team. That too was a disaster. Chiti's new Grand
Prix car was not ready for competition. Gearboxes, oil pumps, and fuel tanks failed, one after another. Hill's best finish in 1963 was eleventh in the Italian Grand Prix.

In 1964, with his reputation slipping, Hill accepted a pay cut to join the British Cooper team for one humiliating season. His seat didn't fit, forcing him to lurch awkwardly over the steering wheel and preventing him from driving from the shoulders as he preferred. The overheated cockpit gave him blisters. In Belgium his car caught fire during practice. A few days later the engine ignited on lap 14 of the race.

These mishaps were not his fault, but they shook his confidence. For the first time he began to commit serious driving errors. He was sparring with Brabham in the German Grand Prix when he fumbled a gearshift and trashed an engine. This time he accepted the blame.

Only three years removed from the championship, Hill's season became an embarrassment. On his first practice lap at the Austrian Grand Prix, held on a bumpy airfield in Zeltweg, he misjudged his speed going into a curve and skidded into a hay bale. The car hobbled back to the pits with a dislocated front wheel. John Cooper, the team owner, screamed at him, long and loud, within earshot of the other drivers, mechanics, and spectators. Hill crashed in the same curve during the race. The car erupted in flames just as he got out. Cooper fired him.

“There comes a time when every race driver becomes emotionally unsuited to this type of driving,” Cooper said. “Hill has reached this point. There may be some kind of driving Hill can still do. But I don't know what it is.”

Hill never regained his form. He raced sports cars for a few more years before retiring in 1967. “I had a premonition I was
ultimately going to kill myself,” he said, “and more than anything I did not want to be dead.”

He was among the last drivers of his breed to leave the sport. Within a few years racing became much safer with the introduction of crash barriers, seat belts, and cockpits designed for quick evacuation. The sport also grew far more concerned with money and media. In 1968 Lotus made a deal to display the Gold Leaf cigarette logo, and it traded its traditional racing green for the brand's gold and red. Within a few years virtually every car carried a sponsor's logo.

Shortly before retiring, Hill assisted in the production of
Grand Prix
, a 1966 John Frankenheimer movie based partially on his own experiences. He advised the director, drove camera cars, and appeared briefly on camera. In a case of art imitating life, a main character, played by Yves Montand, spun off the Monza track and died, just as von Trips had five years earlier.

At age forty Hill returned to Santa Monica, where he lived as an eccentric bachelor in the house left by his aunt Helen. He surrounded himself with antiquities—player pianos and thousands of piano rolls, trumpet-speaker phonographs, and a restored violano, a mechanical instrument that reproduces violin and piano music. He started a business restoring old cars and spent evenings listening to classical music alone or with small groups of friends. He was back where he started, with music and mechanics as his primary companions.

Hill never expected to marry. The impression of family life left by his parents was too distasteful. But at age forty-four, he wed Alma Baranowski, a spirited blonde teacher. They met when she accompanied a group of former students who came to see his cars. Hill had been busy restoring a 1927 Packard when they arrived.
His hands were slathered in grease and he wore an old sweater. “I opened the door,” he recalled, “and thought, ‘Thank you heaven!' ”

When Alma's father died, Hill flew with her to Arizona for the funeral. Her parents were Lithuanians who had left Europe after the war and settled in Phoenix, where her father worked as a laborer. A reception was held in the simple, sturdy house he had built himself. Alma's mother sat by the open casket stroking her husband's forehead and greeting guests. “They were mostly these big truck-driver types who'd worked with her husband,” Hill said. “They were crying and she was consoling them. She hugged and kissed these guys and, I remember, amid the tears there was laughter. She threw her arms around me and kissed me and I kissed her.”

Those kisses unlocked something in Hill. His own parents had never shown affection. He had attended their funerals—and those of dozens of drivers—with steely restraint. He had always lived in a state of withholding, which served him well as a racer. Now, for the first time, Hill unclenched and opened himself to the warming prospect of love and family. In the following years he became an attentive father to Jennifer, Alma's daughter from a previous marriage, and Vanessa and Derek, the children he had with Alma. He became the kind of father that he never had.

Hill's inner development had outward expression. It was clear to his friends that his demeanor had lost its coiled tension. “When he married Alma his whole personality changed completely, his whole being changed,” said Bruce Kessler, a driver who had known Hill on the circuit in the 1950s. “He was a different person. He was totally relaxed.”

Even amid the happy mayhem of family life, von Trips was never far from Hill's mind. His handsome presence hovered like
a shadow. Hill was asked about him frequently in interviews and at vintage car shows, as if their histories were still entwined.

Von Trips' fame grew with time. Nearly fifty years later, admirers still gathered at the mausoleum on September 10, the anniversary of his death, and they continued to leave flowers on the grassy shoulder of the Monza backstretch where he crashed.

Years after they married, Hill took Alma to Burg Hemmersbach to walk beside the ochre castle walls and view von Trips' personal effects—jazz records, driving shoes, photographs, oil portraits—housed in a museum on the estate grounds. When heroes die young, Alma said to the curator, they remain forever young and handsome in our minds.

At the end of his life Hill suffered from Parkinson's disease and multiple system atrophy, a degenerative neurological disorder. He was confined to a wheelchair in late August 2008 when Alma drove him up the coast to the Concours d'Elegance, a vintage car show held annually on the Pebble Beach golf course. After an event on Thursday evening Hill said that he wanted to see the road circuit where he had won the Pebble Beach Cup, his earliest triumph, fifty-eight years earlier.

They drove in evening light with Hill directing Alma in a faltering whisper past tents and polo fields. “He was very, very strange that night, and he wanted me to keep driving,” Alma said. “And he got so upset with me, because it wasn't what he was looking for.” Hill may have been searching for the road as he remembered it, the gravelly track darkened by overhanging cypress trees where he first earned a reputation for a precocious grasp of speed.

The next night, when Hill had trouble breathing, Alma called an ambulance to take him to a Monterey hospital. He died twelve days later at age eighty-one. A service was held on September 10,
the forty-seventh anniversary of his bittersweet triumph at Monza. His favorite classical compositions were played as guests filed into the St. Monica Catholic Church, followed by “Jesus Is the Sweetest Name I Know,” the hymn his mother composed in 1925. The cemetery cortège included the 1931 Pierce-Arrow that Hill drove while sitting on his aunt's lap. His coffin was covered by a laurel wreath arranged to look like the ones he wore on the victory podium.

Of the two men, von Trips may have left the more enduring legacy. Two years before he died he bought a pair of go-karts in Florida and shipped them to Burg Hemmersbach. He had planned to build a kart track where young Germans could learn to race. In 1965 his mother fulfilled his wish by opening a track less than a mile from the family home. It was leased to Rolf Schumacher, whose son Michael took his first laps there in 1973. Michael Schumacher would become the greatest Grand Prix driver of all time. He won five of his seven championships with Ferrari, returning the marque to dominance after a fallow stretch following Enzo Ferrari's death in 1988.

Fifty years after Hill's championship season, his era has passed from modern memory into history. The headlong runs through the rutted switchbacks of Mexico, the all-night grind through the rain at Le Mans, the back-and-forth battle of 1961—they live on in flickering YouTube videos and in the memories of a dwindling circle of survivors. These episodes seem unthinkable from the perspective of today's risk-averse culture. Formula 1 cars are now so safe that more than a decade passes between fatalities. But even today there are still some who believe, as von Trips did, that it is danger and the insistent proximity to death that most ennobles the soul.

I'm an unlikely person to write a book about car racing. Like many New Yorkers, I don't own a car. Nor am I a particularly impassioned driver. No matter. I believe that dedicated reporters can write on any topic if willing to do the legwork. To my mind, nonfiction often benefits from casting against type. Sometimes the outsider is the best storyteller.

I had an embarrassment of help along my way, starting with my agent, the wise and incisive Joy Harris, who helped me think carefully about structure, character, and tone from the outset. Thanks, as well, to Adam Reed and Sarah Twombly in her office.

I'm grateful to Jonathan Karp for his early commitment to
The Limit
and for advising me on novelistic nonfiction; to Susan Lehman for her helpful observations; finally, to Cary Goldstein, who helped me across the finish line with grace and
Like all great editors, Cary listens carefully and seemingly never sleeps. Sarah Norman and Richard Milbank added a valuable layer of editing and helped soften the American edges. I also want to thank Brian McLendon for shouting from the rooftops; Colin Shepherd for graciously handling so many logistics; and Roland Ottewell for smoothing the edges.

The acknowledgments page hardly seems sufficient for the debt of gratitude I owe Michael Dumiak, a first-rate journalist based in Berlin who tirelessly interviewed, researched, and translated on my behalf—all while handling his own bulging docket of deadlines. He also delivered pitch-perfect editorial comments. Portions of this book are his as much as mine.