Limit, The (26 page)

The horrific death toll of the previous two years had depleted the Ferrari lineup. As a result, Ferrari may have needed von
Trips more than von Trips needed Ferrari. In the fall of 1959, Il Commendatore invited von Trips to Modena. Over the customary lunch of tortellini and Lambrusco at Il Cavallino he offered to reinstate von Trips. All was forgiven.

On December 12, von Trips was back in the fold, competing in the U.S. Grand Prix at Sebring. His return almost ended before it began. He crushed the nose of his Ferrari by running into Tony Brooks, but righted himself for a sixth-place finish. The mishap notwithstanding, it was clear that he was a shrewder and more circumspect driver.

The redemptive race, the one that demonstrated his new maturity, took place the following March when he overcame a pack of Coopers, Porsches, and Lotuses to win the Syracuse Grand Prix in Sicily, making him the first German to win a Grand Prix since 1939. “Wolfgang was once an erratic driver,” wrote Louis Stanley, an automotive historian. “Blessed with great bravery, the Count drove fast, sometimes too much so, with the inevitable result. . .In 1960, he stood in front of us, mature, with a great sense of responsibility.”

More important than the win itself was the way he won. He didn't try to do too much, instead relying on control and tactics to outlast the competition. When he crossed the finish line a laughing Ferrari mechanic lifted him from his seat. The black, red, and gold German flag was hoisted and the German national anthem, “Das Lied der Deutschen,” was played.

“Finally, a victory,” he wrote in a telegram to his mother. “Am happy. Wolfgang.”

The 156 Sharknose was Ferrari's answer to the nimble British cars of the late 1950s. Built in secret, with the flared nostrils of a predator, the Sharknose returned Ferrari to dominance. (Klemantaski Collection)

S
PEED IS THE KEYNOTE
of our age,” Alfonso de Portago wrote just before his fatal crash. They were prophetic words. On January 2, 1959, a 250-ton Soviet rocket lifted off from the desert steppes of Kazakhstan and roared into space. It broke Earth's gravitational pull, the first man-made object to do so, and passed the moon at 5,500 mph on its way to solar orbit. Three weeks later the jet age officially began with the first scheduled transcontinental flight of a Boeing 707 from Los Angeles to New York. In February, Texas Instruments requested a patent for the integrated circuit, an initial step in the computer revolution.

On the cusp of the 1960s, the modern world beckoned with supersonics, sex, and disquiet. But time stood still in sleepy Modena.
Paisanos
drove bullock carts down empty cobbled alleys. Balsamic vinegar aged in chestnut casks, as it had since
Roman times. Nine miles up the Via Abetone, in Maranello, teams of grizzled Ferrari artisans in brown coveralls made pistons, cylinder heads, and crankshafts by hand.

Nobody clung to the old ways more than their boss. The man who built a global brand synonymous with speed was oddly averse to the pace and practices of modern life. Enzo Ferrari refused to travel in airplanes. He avoided elevators, and he would see movies only if he could sit by the door. He clung to small-town habits—the barbershop gossip during his morning shave, lunches of boiled meat with his cronies, the daily visit to his son's tomb.

For the first time the Ferraris themselves looked old-fashioned. In the 1960 Belgian Grand Prix, Hill chased Jack Brabham, the 1959 world champion, for lap after lap as they snaked through the Ardennes Forest at 150 mph. Brabham flicked periodic glances over his shoulder to see Hill crowding his tail. In the end, the pace was too much for Hill's Ferrari. On lap 29 the engine ignited. Hill jumped out, patted down his singed coveralls, and doused the engine fire with a tiny extinguisher. The flames fed the impression that the Ferraris were straining to keep up. And they were.

It was a startling reversal. For years Ferrari had dominated with a succession of bullying, bellowing engines. The British marques had seemed alarmingly fragile by comparison. British racing was practically a cottage industry with homegrown production shops scattered across the Southeast and Midlands. British Racing Motors, known as BRM, was set up behind the founder's Lincolnshire home. Lotus operated from an old stable behind a London hotel. Chassis were stacked outside under a tarpaulin.

By 1959 the tables had turned. The British answered the Italian hysteria for speed with a cool and calculated efficiency. The engineers at Cooper and BRM had produced a new species of Grand Prix cars with the engine positioned in the rear. By 1960 Lotus followed. With the weight centered just behind the driver, the cars were more balanced and agile as they slipped around corners. They also had an aerodynamic advantage: without an engine up front to see over, the driver could sit lower, greatly reducing the car's wind resistance.

The Ferraris still rocked the grandstands with their banshee blare. They still looked like felines poised for the pounce. But they now seemed comparatively heavy and ungainly, like woozy heavyweights. With weight positioned way up front, they waddled around turns and labored to keep up with the lighter, nimbler British cars, even on tracks that favored a wealth of horsepower.

Ferrari brushed off foreign innovations. He dismissed Cooper and the other British outfits as
garagistas.
No, he told friends over grappa, the red cars would always house beastly, gut-pounding engines up front. “It's always been the ox that pulls the cart,” he said.

The ox might have pulled the Ferrari cart forever had the Ferrari engineer Andrea Fraschetti not spun and flipped while testing a prototype at the Modena
autodromo
in August 1957. He died the next day. In his place Ferrari hired a rotund Alfa Romeo engineer with thick-framed glasses named Carlo Chiti. He moved into an apartment next to Ferrari's above the old Modena workshop at 11 Viale Trento e Trieste. Together they looked like an Italian version of Tweedledum and Tweedledee. The craftsmen joked that Ferrari and Chiti wore glasses
because their protruding stomachs required them to stand at a distance.

The provincial Ferrari circle received Chiti with suspicion. He came from Florence, just sixty-four miles from Modena, but it might just as well have been Moscow. Mechanics muttered an old Modenese proverb under their breath: “Better to die in bed than to have a Tuscan at the door.” Nor did they welcome Chiti's progressive ideas about suspension geometry, weight distribution, and aerodynamics. Ferrari had its set way of doing things, and it did not welcome change.

Chiti brought an artist's disposition to the drafting table, working extravagant hours and erupting into volcanic fits when his new methods met resistance. Not surprisingly, he favored moving the engines aft, and he bought a Cooper chassis to demonstrate how it might be done. Ferrari was unimpressed. “He was unwilling for us to try, even at the level of a mere project,” Chiti said, “because he believed this would be a betrayal of the technical philosophy of his firm.”

Ferrari might have curbed Chiti's experiment once and for all if not for an unexpected change in the Grand Prix specifications. On October 29, 1959, the Royal Automobile Club threw a formal party at its 258-room clubhouse in the St. James's neighborhood of London to honor Vanwall, a British manufacturer that had won six Grands Prix that season. After years of chasing red cars, the British had dominated. This was their victory party.

At evening's end, after the awards had been handed out, Augustin Pérouse, president of racing's governing body, stepped to the microphone. The room went silent as his announcement sank in. New regulations for Formula 1 would limit engine
capacity to 1.5 liters, a reduction of 40 percent. To discourage the construction of fragile cars, a weight minimum of 450 kilograms would be imposed.

The British racing establishment had drunk rounds of toasts that night, and the hall was syrupy with patriotism. It came as a shock to learn that now, with British racing green finally dominant, the ground rules would be upended. The British jeered.

In one sense their indignation was puzzling. The new rules, to go into effect in 1961, were roughly equivalent to those governing Formula 2, where the British had thrived. It might well benefit the British to extend the rules to Formula 1. But the reaction was based more on nationalism than logic: delegates from Monaco, Holland, France, Germany, and Belgium had voted for the change. Italy alone had joined Britain in opposition. The British felt that their European neighbors had ganged up on them in their moment of triumph. They objected, as well, to the prospect of Pérouse, a Frenchman, imposing a gutless reduction of power and spectacle.

Over the next year the
garagistas
drafted a series of complaints to the sport's governing body, the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile in Paris. The federation's “structure is slow and cumbersome even as your sport is fast and alive,” said Moss, who must have felt doubly frustrated. A London judge had just revoked his license for a speeding violation. The arresting constable asked him, “Who do you think you are, Stirling Moss?”

The British were in no position to rush new machines into production, even if they wanted to. Their budgets and workshops were too small. As the months passed the British delegation offered counterproposals and compromises and
huffy condemnations—all the while assuming that they would prevail.

But the federation held firm. By September 1960 it was clear that they would not rescind the new 1.5-liter rules. Cooper and Lotus gave up and began work on new engines and cars, knowing that they could not produce them in time for the 1961 season.

While the British were arguing, Ferrari was quietly plotting a surprise. As soon as Pérouse announced the new regulations, Ferrari had sequestered Chiti in a secret Modena workshop, away from the Maranello factory, to develop a rear-engine car that complied with the new rules, giving him a six-month head start over the British. “Ferrari had agreed to try,” Chiti said, “even though he wasn't really in agreement.”

In February 1961 the automotive press came to Maranello to see Chiti's secret weapon. The Ferrari 156 was a stripped-down screamer with tapered torpedo lines and wide-splayed wire wheels. It descended from earlier Formula 1 models, but with a more modern aspect: its physiognomy expressed a sinister form of Space Age speed. The 156 possessed the beauty of a design reduced to its essence. Beneath the polished red skin a 400-horsepower V6 engine nestled behind the driver. Chiti sank the engine deep, near the middle of the chassis, so the car would have a lower center of gravity and handle more deftly than its precursors. The result was a harmonic convergence of power and weight. The reporters standing in the factory's cobbled forecourt nodded.
Bellissima, bellissima.
This was a car to carry Ferrari back to the podiums.

Chiti shaped the 156 with the aid of a wind tunnel, a new technique for Ferrari. It consequently had a swept-back jet age
profile with drivers reclining like Mercury astronauts behind a low wrap of windscreen. It was a new look for a new era of technological advance. The 156 looked dazzlingly fast, and it was. In test runs von Trips touched 180 mph. It would take its nickname from the twin intake nostrils fitted on either side of its sinister snout: the Sharknose.

Chiti had engineered not just a car, but a reversal of fortune. The Sharknose all but assured that Ferrari's dominion would be restored for the 1961 season. He had won the race for horsepower and handling before the first starting flag dropped.

The only remaining question was which Ferrari driver would ride the Sharknose to the championship. The coming season shaped up as a two-man race: Hill versus von Trips.

In March 1959,
Sports Illustrated
put Hill on its cover with the tagline “Sports Car Driver of the Year.” He was photographed leaning against the hood of a 250 Testa Rossa with his legs crossed and a smile on his tanned face. After years of anguish he looked happy and confident. “I'm always afraid when I race,” he told the magazine, but he persisted “because I do it well.” That was Hill's career in distillate—a debilitating apprehension overcome by the draw of automotive distinction. He was ready for a summer-long push to prove that an American, an outsider and misfit once relegated to sports cars, could earn the highest laurel of a European sport.