Limit, The (8 page)

At the 1955 running of Le Mans, Pierre Levegh's Mercedes spun into the grandstand, killing eighty-three spectators. For Phil Hill, it was a barbarous introduction to the European circuit. (Getty Images)

I
N THE SPRING OF
1954 Hill heeded his doctor's warning and quit racing. For the first time in five years he was spared the gnawing pressure of competition. With both parents dead he lived in his aunt Helen's house and worked as a part-time mechanic at Brentwood Motors, a foreign car dealership in Santa Monica.

His temperament was not suited to idleness. After tuning and restoring the family piano he gravitated to a more demanding project. Inside Helen's garage sat her blue 1931 Pierce-Arrow convertible, the lustrous object of childhood admiration. Its aura had hardly dimmed, though it sat in disrepair. Hill and his brother Jerry had talked about reconditioning it for years.

Hill could not do anything about his unhappy childhood, but he could restore this bright remnant. As spring turned to summer he redirected his obsessive, tightly coiled energy from
racing to automotive forensics. Day after day for ten full months he stood in the garage and diagramed each coil and spring's place in the intricate greasy puzzle and taped his notes on the rafters. He labeled the parts, hundreds of them, and stored them in neatly stacked boxes. He bought a similar model to cannibalize for parts, and with help from specialists he rewired and restored the wood-lined cabin and restitched its leather seats. After months of cleaning, sanding, and rechroming, layers of blue lacquer went on and a detailer applied white piping.

The restoration was the toil of a fastidious mind, a labor few drivers would consider. It must have cheered Hill. He felt sufficiently recovered from his ulcer, in any case, to race a boxy British Triumph TR-2 at Torrey Pines over Fourth of July weekend, winning his class but staying clear of the main event. A few weeks later he went to work on the set of
The Racers
, a Kirk Douglas movie based on a novel about a bus driver who enters the Grand Prix. Darryl Zanuck made it as a vehicle for his mistress, Bella Darvi, who later dumped him, racked up prodigious gambling debts at Cannes and Monte Carlo, and killed herself by sticking her head in an oven.

European racing was still relatively unknown to Americans. To show its full spectacle, Zanuck shot a wealth of widescreen CinemaScope footage during the 1954 season, including aerial views captured from an airplane trailing Juan Manuel Fangio, Alberto Ascari, and other standouts as they raced through the streets of Monaco and the Rhineland hills. Zanuck built exact replicas of the pits on the back lot at Twentieth Century Fox.

The world Hill abandoned had returned to him through the odd prism of Hollywood. His job was to maintain the three Maseratis and two Ferraris imported for the shoots, and to
show Douglas and other actors how to drive them in and out of the mock pits without stalling or stripping the gears.

He also did stunt driving for the film. On a canyon road north of San Diego he and Dave Sykes, an old racing friend, were driving side by side behind a camera car when they locked wheels and spun off the road. Neither driver was hurt, but for Hill it was like a Stanislavski exercise, as if he were acting out his worst fear for the camera. (The crash footage was not used because it didn't fit the script.)

In the fall of 1954, with the Pierce-Arrow restored and
The Racers
wrapped, Hill suffered what he called “the strain of inactivity.” He was twenty-six, and for the first time in his life he had nowhere to go. In October, after six idle months, he received an envelope postmarked Dallas. It contained a photo of a white Ferrari 375 MM with a shark tailfin and pronounced air vents added to the feline bodywork. Stapled to the photo was a note from Allen Guiberson: “Guaranteed not to cause ulcers.” In fact, Hill's ulcer had improved. Becalmed and unsure what to do with himself, he accepted Guiberson's invitation. “So despite my qualms and X-rays,” he said, “Guiberson's temptation tipped me back over the edge.”

Years later Hill would say that he had no choice. Racing was irresistible because he excelled at it. He could not turn away from it any more than Picasso could lay down his brush. “It was so dangerous back then,” he said, “you'd have had to be crazy to do it unless it was something you had to do.”

His retirement ended at March Field, a military airport in Riverside, California, converted for racing, where Hill came second in a crowd of Ferraris, Jaguars, and Allards. Encouraged to find his skills intact, he agreed to drive Guiberson's
Ferrari in the Carrera Panamericana in December 1954, in what would be the last staging of the race. This time he stood a better chance of a top finish. For one thing, he would not have to compete with Mercedes. The company skipped the Carrera because the Gullwing's sequel was not ready.

His main competition would be Maglioli, the rare Italian driver who was both determined and disciplined. “He is not wild,” a friend said. “He does not eat much; he drinks less than he eats. He is not crazy over women. The head rules him. For a young Italian that is odd. For an Italian race driver it is nearly impossible.”

Maglioli would drive the fastest car in Mexico, a new Ferrari 375 Plus with a 4.9-liter engine. It was a full 20 mph faster than Guiberson's three-year-old car. With elevated speeds, the race would be even more dangerous than in previous years. “A car which goes off the road,” Maglioli said, “goes to death.”

The Carrera was the usual clash of car cultures. Maglioli and the other Europeans lined up alongside oddball entrants like Akton Miller, a Californian who had assembled a rattletrap roadster, nicknamed El Caballo de Hierro (Iron Horse), from a hodgepodge of parts. El Caballo had earned a folksy following among Mexican locals, who enjoyed seeing a homegrown car go up against contenders like Porfiro Rubirosa, a well-tanned dandy who wore a scarf, polo sweater, and kid gloves behind the wheel of his privately owned Ferrari. When the Mexican press mischievously invited him to pose for a photo in El Caballo, Rubirosa sniffed and waved them off. “Rubirosa wouldn't even sit in El Caballo,” Miller said, “let alone have his picture taken.”

Ten miles into the first leg, Miller saw Rubirosa's Ferrari
pulled to the shoulder with a steaming radiator. As he shot past, he repaid Rubirosa's hauteur by flipping him the finger.

Within an hour another Ferrari fell out of the race. Jack McAfee steered into a tricky right-hand turn at 120 mph and slid sideways off the road, tumbled off a thirty-foot embankment, and rolled twice in the sagebrush. He suffered no more than a few bruises, but his navigator and close friend, Ford Robinson, broke his neck and died instantly. “No blood,” a Mexican bystander told a reporter. “A clean break of the neck.” McAfee swore he would never race again, but of course he did.

Meanwhile, Hill, again joined by Ginther, thundered to the lead in the mountainous first leg from Tuxtla Gutiérrez to Oaxaca with an average speed of 94 mph—a record for the stage—with Maglioli riding his tail the whole way.

By 10:40 the next morning a crowd had gathered in the hamlet of Atlixco to watch the first cars come in. The central square buzzed with anticipation: would Hill or Maglioli appear first? A loudspeaker crackled to life:
Carro a la vista, señores
(car in sight, gentlemen). Moments later the whine of a Ferrari revved to 7,000 rpm echoed off the adobe walls. Maglioli's red car flashed down the main street, pirouetted through two 90-degree turns in the central square, and vanished in a swirl of dust. Three minutes later Hill appeared, his tailfin covered in soot. For reasons Hill could not understand, the crowd threw rocks at him as he slowed for the turns and sped off.

Maglioli won the 252-mile run to Puebla by more than four minutes that morning, but Hill gained it back in the afternoon by driving like a madman down the short, down-plunging run to Mexico City. Hill knew his cumulative 45-second lead would not hold up when they left the mountains. Maglioli's newer
Ferrari would outmuscle him on the featureless straights where forty miles could pass without a turn. Hill's only hope was to stay close and hope for mishap.

Sure enough, Maglioli ended the duel by gunning his Ferrari to 160 mph through the wide-open desert. He gained more than a three-minute advantage on the run to León, leaving Hill to follow his taillights in the fog. Maglioli padded his lead on the next day's leg to Durango where the drivers stopped for a party on the set of a western called
Robber's Roost.
Maglioli led by ten minutes after booming his way to Parral and Chihuahua over the next two days. Hill stood securely in second place, but his three-year-old Ferrari was running rough. “I'll settle for second place,” he said in the high-walled enclosure where Ferrari bivouacked on the eve of the finish.

The Juárez desert glowed with campfires that night. Hundreds camped out and five thousand more parked along the race's final mile the next morning. The
policía
guarded the road, shooing cattle and spectators to the shoulder. A dozen private planes flew over the desert looking for the finishers. By 11:40 a.m. a tiny dust cloud gathered on the southern horizon. The two cars appeared as distant specks, followed by a loudening howl. Maglioli took the checkered flag at 134 mph, three seconds ahead of Hill. Both finishes were concealed in clouds of dust.

“Road racers are like roulette players,” Maglioli told the press a few minutes later. “We who race know that it is dangerous, but once we get the fever, we are satisfied with nothing else.”

Hill lost the 1954 Carrera by twenty-four cumulative minutes, but winning three of nine legs and pressing Maglioli in an
outdated Ferrari counted as a win of sorts. The Mexican press called him El Batallador, the battler.

Hill headed north with a sense of resolution and relief. For years he had agonized over what career to pursue—mechanic, driver, or something more conventional? “I was finally able to come to terms with myself and admit that racing was the profession I wanted to follow,” he said. It was a turning point. Now the question was how far could he go, and would he survive long enough to get there?

Ambitious young drivers hoping to advance up the amateur ranks had one thing working in their favor: attrition by death. The racing squads run by European carmakers, known as works teams, needed a supply of fresh blood to replace the drivers who burned to death, snapped their necks, or catapulted into trees. All of which happened with alarming frequency in the days before seat belts, fireproof coveralls, and other safety concessions.

Drivers talked about many things while they drank burgundy in cafés or waited in airport lounges—where to eat, practical jokes played on teammates, and, of course, the long-legged girls who followed them from race to race. They rarely talked about death. Whether they discussed it or not, they were acutely aware that roughly half of them would die in the coming seasons. The odds were grimmer than those their older brothers had faced in the war.

The death rate was so high that the great Italian driver Alberto Ascari distanced himself from his two children so that they would not miss him when he died. “I don't want them to
get too fond of me,” he said. “One of these days I may not come back and they will suffer less if I have kept them a bit at arm's length.” His only defense against death was the set of superstitions he faithfully followed.

Ascari was a self-possessed Milanese with ample cheeks and hazel-blue eyes who came to the racetrack each morning in a coat and tie, as if preparing for a day of desk work. He first sat behind the wheel at age five, on the lap of his father, Antonio Ascari, who led the Alfa Romeo team when Enzo Ferrari broke into racing in the 1920s. Like his father, Alberto became a national hero, twice winning the Grand Prix championship for Ferrari. Italians followed his career the way Americans followed Joe DiMaggio. They affectionately called him Ciccio, or Chubby.

The evening before the 1955 Monaco Grand Prix, Ascari watched a movie with Fangio and a few other drivers. Afterwards they walked a part of the circuit that zigzagged down the hilly principality overlooking the Mediterranean. When they came to a swerve leading onto the long harborfront straight, somebody said, “Whoever falters here, goes into the water.” Ascari touched wood. The next afternoon Ascari clipped a curb at that very spot, brushed an iron mooring bitt, and plunged into the harbor with a geyser of spray. Rescue divers stationed nearby dove in after him. After twenty agonizing seconds Ascari bobbed to the surface ringed by oily bubbles. When he found that he had come up without his pale blue helmet he sent a diver back down to retrieve it. The helmet was his good luck charm. He never raced without it. He was taken to the hospital with lacerations to the head, but he was otherwise unhurt.