Limit, The (22 page)

The hospital attendants struggled to get him to the upstairs operating room because the door wouldn't fit in the elevator. As they shifted him to a stretcher a priest showed up and began administering last rites. “I told him, ‘No, no, no. I'm not dying,' ” Kessler said.

When the nuns unzipped his raincoat in the upstairs operating room they found pieces of roast chicken that Kessler had tucked away to eat during the long night at the wheel. They mistook the chicken for intestines or mangled body parts. Kessler tried to explain what it was, but he did not speak French. “Finally I picked up a piece and ate it to show them it was chicken, and one of them just went down like a rock.”

One by one Hill's rivals crashed or dropped out. While von Trips napped in the drivers' bunkhouse, his co-driver, Wolfgang Seidel, drove off the road and had to quit.

Just before midnight, Hill woke up from a nap in the bunk-house to learn that a Jaguar was gaining on Gendebien, his co-driver. Jaguar had won Le Mans five of the previous eight years, and it was intent on extending its dominance. By the time Hill trudged through the mud to the pits Gendebien's lead was
down to 26 seconds. When the cars came around again Hill could see through the gloom that the green Jaguar had taken over the lead.

On the next lap Gendebien pulled in and turned the car over to Hill, who gave all-out chase through the blackness. The tinny loudspeakers crackled to life as an announcer alerted dripping clusters of die-hard spectators to the pursuit. Peering through the rain, they watched Hill close the gap. Within seven laps Hill was harrying the Jaguar, and finally passed it to reclaim the lead. By 2:30 a.m. Hill was ahead by an insurmountable lap and a half.

Dawn revealed a string of ashy hulks abandoned on the muddy verge, like sea creatures left by a receding tide. Spectators emerged from tents and tiptoed across fields of mud. At noon, after 251 laps, Hill was poised to lap the second-place Jaguar, driven by Duncan Hamilton, for the second time when a small French Panhard abruptly slowed in front of them. Hamilton swerved, turned over, and bounced sideways across the road. Hamilton's Jaguar flew “so high in the air,” Hill said, “that I could see its underside and thought at one point it might hit me.”

Hill drove on unscathed. By afternoon, the rain stopped and the sun burst through, drying the road and bathing the French countryside in a glowing light. “We had some laps in hand,” Hill said, “the tension from the driving in the wet was gone and we knew we could win.”

He crossed the finish line at 4 p.m., his hand raised in triumph, with an average speed of 106 mph and a 100-mile lead on his closest pursuer. Movie footage of that day shows him smiling broadly as Gendebien, checkered flag in hand, clambered
onto the hood for a victory lap. It was a gutsy display of driving in what might qualify as the toughest racing conditions of all time. Only twenty of the fifty-five starters finished. Hill later called it “my favorite race and the most rewarding to me.”

For all his anguish, Hill came away with a reputation as a hard-as-nails endurance driver. Within six months he had won at Buenos Aires, Sebring, and Le Mans, almost single-handedly securing the sports car championship for Ferrari. He had every expectation that his tour de force at Le Mans would secure him a start in the French Grand Prix two weeks later, on July 6, but no offer came from Modena.

The next afternoon Hill drank tea in the dining room of the Hotel de Paris in Le Mans with McCluggage and other friends. They told him he was loyal to the point of foolishness, and that he should not allow Ferrari to take advantage of him. They urged him to force the issue. Bonnier offered Hill the use of his two-year-old Maserati 250F. “We all said, ‘Phil, you should do that,'” McCluggage said. “ ‘I'll show you' wasn't his style, but we tried to give him backbone.”

In the end, Hill agreed to borrow the Maserati. It was outdated, with six fewer cylinders than the Ferraris, but it would allow him to make his Grand Prix debut. “At least I'd call some attention to myself.' he concluded. “I was tired of waiting in the wings for an onstage call.”

Peter Collins endured his own frustrations in the wake of Le Mans. He and Hawthorn disliked the race more than most. They hated its circus atmosphere and Gallic chaos. Before the 1958 Le Mans they joked that they could not abide the race for its entire twenty-four hours. They would be home in England,
they said, in time for Sunday lunch. Ferrari's spies reported these words back to Modena, where they burned in Il Com-mendatore's ears.

Collins was one of the few drivers whom Ferrari took to his heart. He had a sunny, openhearted disposition and he embraced the local Modenese ways. Most British drivers stationed in Italy subsisted on steak and French fries and learned just enough Italian to order a Campari and soda. Collins, on the other hand, spoke fluent Italian and relished the local menu of Lambrusco, tortellini, and steamed meats. He seemed to fit effortlessly into Ferrari's world.

When Ferrari's son Dino lay dying of muscular dystrophy in 1956, Collins paid daily visits. According to Tavoni, Collins treated Dino as a brother:

Dino would say, “Peter, are you going to the movies tonight?”

“No, I will stay here with you. Why?”

“Because if you go to the movies, tomorrow morning you can tell me all about it. I cannot get out of bed. I am like a small bird in a big cage.”

So Peter would go to the cinema and the next day he would describe to Dino the movie he had seen. Naturally this kindness created a very good impression with Enzo Ferrari and the Signora, although Peter did not do it for this reason.

After Dino died, Collins became a surrogate son to Enzo Ferrari. Ferrari loaned him Dino's apartment above Il Cavallino
and looked in on his way to work. Laura Ferrari swung by in her chauffeured car to do laundry and tidy up.

Their relationship cooled after Collins married. By April 1958 Collins and Louise were spending most of their time on their new forty-three-foot motor yacht, which they docked at the exact spot on the Monte Carlo harborfront where Alberto Ascari had driven into the water three years earlier. They christened her Mipooka, an Irish name for goblin. They hosted Hill and von Trips often, serving Pimm's Cups and throwing coins to the musicians strolling the harborfront.

“[Collins] had become unhappy living under the Ferrari yoke at Modena,” Hill said. “No matter who you were, when you lived there you had to toe the Ferrari line and like so many other people Peter became uncomfortable at always having to please Ferrari—for everything to have to be his way.”

The bond between Collins and Ferrari further unraveled after Hill's victory at Le Mans in 1958. Collins shared a Testa Rossa with Hawthorn, who mangled the clutch in the surge to get ahead at the start and brutalized it chasing Moss in the early going. “Mike always screwed up the clutch,” Hill said. “I think he had more to do with clutch development at Ferrari than anyone else.”

By 7:30 p.m. the deteriorating clutch required a repair stop of twenty minutes, a delay that left them six laps behind Hill. By midnight they were hopelessly mired in the rear pack. At 2 a.m. the clutch gave out entirely. He left the car by the roadside and walked back to the pits in the downpour. A few hours later Hawthorn, Collins, and Louise drove to Paris, took the boat train to London, and continued on to Hawthorn's family
home in Farnham, Surrey. They arrived in time to hear the coverage of Hill's victory on the radio.

When word of the Collins-Hawthorn withdrawal reached Modena, Ferrari fulminated. To lose was bad enough, but to abandon the car and leave the race grounds was in his view unforgivable. To make matters worse, the Ferrari mechanics retrieved the Testa Rossa and found the clutch working, possibly because it had cooled overnight. If Ferrari's special regard for Collins dampened when he married Louise, it now ended in recrimination. Collins had sullied the Ferrari name. He was persona non grata.

It has been said that the long campaign to uphold the empire ingrained in British schoolboys a heightened respect for national teamwork. As a result their approach to racing and other sports was fundamentally different from the gladiatorial spirit instilled in Italians. Collins and Hawthorn had an unbreakable allegiance, but only to each other. It was their slightly subversive way of expressing British patriotism within an Italian organization. In the pubs and pits they called each other “mon ami mate,” a term borrowed from a popular British comic strip. On the track they maneuvered in cahoots, taking turns running in the lead while the other blocked anyone from passing. They were a team within the team.

In the weeks after Le Mans, their teammate Luigi Musso complained to Ferrari that Collins and Hawthorn conspired against him. Standing at the bar with a tweed jacket and pipe, Hawthorn told Musso that he and Collins would ensure that the next champion was British, not Italian. What the British might consider schoolboy teasing, Musso took as harassment.

Musso was a swarthy Roman, the son of an Italian diplomat, with light eyes and the charismatic disposition of a gentleman
sportsman. With Ascari and Castellotti dead, he bore the burden of national expectation. Ferrari called him “Italy's last world-class driver in a long line of stylists.”

Musso struggled to live up to that role. On the night before races he closed his eyes and let his memory wander through the rooms of his childhood home, conjuring the walls, furnishings, and paintings. He never knew why, except that it calmed him.

He also struggled financially. He had left his wife and two children for a twenty-four-year-old dark-haired beauty, and in the process fell badly into debt. His arrears mounted after he signed a deal to import a thousand Pontiacs to Italy. It had not occurred to him that Pontiacs were too big for narrow Italian streets, or that their brakes would fade halfway down an Alpine descent. “It was a disaster,” Tavoni said. “The day before the [French Grand Prix] he received a telegram from his partner in Rome saying, ‘You must win so you can pay off your debt.' ”

Ferrari promised Musso that Collins and Hawthorn would not gang up on him at the French Grand Prix. When the Ferrari drivers arrived at the Lion d'Or Hotel across from the great cathedral in Reims, they were dumbstruck to learn that Ferrari had dropped Collins to Formula 2, a lower-ranking class run with smaller 1.5-liter engines. It was a shocking demotion, considering that Collins had won the French Grand Prix two years earlier, and an obvious punishment for the Le Mans fiasco.

With Ferrari holed up in Modena, Collins took his objection to Tavoni. In a heated argument in his hotel suite, Collins accepted blame for ruining the clutch at Le Mans. He begged Tavoni to restore him to the Formula 1 lineup if he performed well in the Formula 2 race held earlier in the day.

Tavoni tried to talk Collins out of it. “I told him that it was
going to be a very hot day and this was not a good idea,” Tavoni said. Eventually, after consulting Ferrari by phone, he agreed to let Collins drive in the Grand Prix if he felt up to a second race.

The tensions were put aside the night before the race as drivers went out to dinner together. When they returned to the Lion d'Or, the group, led by Hawthorn, Hill and Musso, spotted a little white Vespa 400, one of the lightest cars ever made, belonging to Harry Schell, a popular Franco-American journeyman driver. Flush with Bordeaux, they hoisted it from its parking place, carried it through the lobby and up a flight of stairs. “They looked like a gang of ants carrying a dead grasshopper up a sand bank,” McCluggage wrote.

They had hoped to drive the Vespa down the corridor, honking the horn outside Schell's room. When they found that he was out celebrating his girlfriend's birthday, they deposited the car in a second-floor parlor where it stood beside gilt-framed mirrors and antique card tables with a For Sale sign on its roof. They then called the concierge to complain that Mr. Schell's car was bothering guests trying to play cards. Would they please ask him to remove it?

“A short time later Harry called the concierge and told him he knew exactly who the parties involved in the caper were,” recalled Cahier, who was one of the perpetrators, “and if his car was not in front of the hotel in the morning each of theirs would be terminally sabotaged.” Fangio considered driving it down the stairs, but in the end they carried it back, Cahier wrote, “with what seemed like a lot more effort.”

The next morning Collins came in second in the Formula 2 race, prompting Tavoni to make good on his promise and restore him to Formula 1. He lined up in the second row of
the starting grid. Hill's practice times earned him a place in the fifth row, a respectable spot given that he was in Bonnier's outmoded Maserati 250 F. His defection drew threats from the Ferrari camp, which had not believed he would go through with his disloyalty. “If you get in that Maserati,” Tavoni had said before the race, “you'll never get in a Ferrari again.”

“So be it,” Hill said.