Limit, The (28 page)

A minute to go. The drivers adjusted goggles, snapped helmet straps, and scanned gauges. The hornet shriek of exhaust reverberated off the tiers of hotels and grand homes ringing the semicircular harbor. Hill and von Trips put their cars in gear and held the clutch to the floor, eyes fixed on the starting flag.

When the flag dropped, sixteen cars leapt from a billow of blue exhaust and the gray smoke of burning rubber. Ginther squeaked into the lead as the cars sprinted the first 300 yards and abruptly slowed to 30 mph for the first turn, a 180-degree hairpin known as the Gasometer. Moss and a young Scotsman named Jim Clark shadowed Ginther with the pack strung out behind. They moved like a herd of red, silver, and blue thoroughbreds, darting left and right but never touching. The drivers switched gears every three or four seconds, leaning out to watch as they placed the front wheels on a precise line.

They climbed the switchbacks to Casino Square, passing between the green-domed Casino and the Hotel de Paris, two Belle Époque wedding cakes at the clifftop. A wrong turn here and a car would fall eighty feet. The pack fought and wove for advantage as they funneled downhill through zigzagging legs ending at a dark, curving tunnel that opened onto a long waterfront run back to the starting line.

Clark dropped back on lap 11 with a faulty fuel pump, leaving Moss to shadow Ginther. Moss pressed, hoping to force Ginther into a mistake. On lap 14 Moss made his move. He slithered by Ginther coming out of the Gasometer to steal the lead. Eleven laps later Ginther yielded to Hill, who had worked his way up from seventh.

Von Trips never joined the lead pack. A faltering battery
reduced his revs, causing him to miss a gear shift on the last lap and smack into a guardrail at Mirabeau, a hairpin leading down to the tunnel. He was unable to finish, but he would be awarded fourth place based on the number of laps completed behind the winner.

Now it was a three-car race: Moss chased by the Ferrari tandem of Hill and Ginther. Hill closed to within four and a half seconds of Moss, waiting for the spot where he might pass. But he never found it. Moss was hitting his stride, smoothly shifting gears ninety times a lap. “What I remember about that race,” Hill later said, “was the frustration of busting my ass and not being able to catch Moss.”

By now Moss was lapping the slower cars, weaving among them for protection from his pursuer. “It was rather like a fighter plane being chased by a superior enemy and being saved by dodging into the clouds,” he said.

With brakes worn by the punishing twists and turns and his carburetor faltering, Hill motioned to the pits that Ginther should take over the chase. “Richie was going much faster than I was,” Hill said. “I kept waving for him to go by.”

Tavoni agreed. On the seventy-fifth lap—the three-quarter mark—he flashed Ginther a sign marked “Go.” It was his signal to move up into second place and assault Moss's seven-second lead. The two men flung themselves all over the road, swooping down the hills and peeling along the harborfront, the Ferrari edging closer by tiny increments. Ginther jawed hard on a wad of gum, his face set with determination. Billows of exhaust hung in the narrow streets.

Moss kept the lead, but that was not necessarily an advantage. “It's much easier to chase a man than to be the one being
chased,” Moss said. “If a man is following you really closely—within a couple of yards—he's learning an awful lot about your techniques and where he might be able to pass you. If you have a particularly unusual line around a corner you immediately show it to him. So unless you can break away from the pack it's not a good thing to lead for 99 out of 100 laps and then have the bloke pull out and pass you on the last one.”

It looked as if Ginther might do just that. With sixteen laps left he spat out his gum and stepped up the attack, closing to within four seconds. The Ferrari pit crew held out a sign marked “Bravo.” In cafés and on verandas the spectators stood. All of Monaco watched to see if Ginther would pass Moss in the final minutes. “The last few laps I stopped watching,” said Rob Walker, who owned the car Moss was driving. “I couldn't look anymore. I couldn't stand it.”

Even in the midst of the race Moss held the steering wheel with his fingertips and lifted a hand to wave at the crowd, which gave him a deceptively nonchalant appearance. “At Monaco in 1961 I was on the limit,” Moss later said. “One doesn't very often run a race flat-out ten-tenths. Nine-tenths, yes. But at Monte Carlo every corner, every lap as far as I can remember, I was trying to drive the fastest I possibly could, to within a hair's-breadth of the limit, for at least 92 of the 100 laps. Driving like that is tremendously tiring, just tremendously tiring, most people have no idea what it does to one.”

Before the final lap Tavoni held out a pit sign that said “All.” On the final lap Ginther mounted one last frantic blitz. He came within 2.8 seconds, but Moss held him off. He had snatched the win from the Sharknose pack in an aging car. Ginther and Hill followed Moss in that order.

“Until I saw the checkered flag I wasn't sure what would happen,” Moss said.

The British boats blasted their horns. Moss received congratulations from Prince Pierre in the royal box and held the trophy aloft while a band played “God Save the Queen.” His mother tried to push her way in for a hug, but the police turned her away. She watched with tears as her son lit a cigarette and took a victory lap, waving to the crowd with that distinctive British parade gesture. Moss called the race “my greatest drive.”

Hill was so exasperated as he talked with reporters that he looked as if he might break down. Ginther wiped his grime-streaked face with a rag and smiled ruefully. “Embracing him, it seemed to me that [Ginther's] overalls were completely empty,” said Franco Gozzi, one of Ferrari's aides. “He was shattered, all in, he had really given everything.”

Ferrari wouldn't have to wait long for revenge. Within days the teams packed up and moved to the Dutch Grand Prix at Zandvoort, a resort hard against the North Sea. The setting could not have been more different than Monaco. The Dutch track's broad, sweeping turns wound among massive sand dunes studded with scrub grass and scoured by cold sea winds. It was fast, with one side flattened to form a half-mile straight where the Ferraris could cut loose.

If they showed up. In the first practice session, held on a Saturday morning, the other teams whipped through biting wind and rain showers. There was no sign of Ferrari. The Lotus and Porsche crews conferred in hopeful tones—had the punishing maze of Monaco exposed a flaw in the Sharknose, sending Ferrari engineers back to the drawing board?

Minutes after the Monaco Grand Prix ended, Chiti had phoned Ferrari. Based on Ginther's performance he urged that 120-degree engines be installed in all three cars in time for the Dutch Grand Prix. After a short pause Ferrari said, “No, not even worth discussing.” Chiti was livid. He went to Maranello and demanded an explanation. Ferrari convened a meeting to discuss the proposition. Not surprisingly, Ferrari's deputies unanimously sided with Ferrari. Chiti dug in: either the new engines go in, he said, or he would quit. Ferrari backed down. “Do you as you like then,” he said.

The Ferrari team missed the first morning of practice as the new engines were prepared and installed. At lunchtime a red Ferrari car transporter, a double-decker truck shaped like an oversized fire engine, pulled up to the paddock and unloaded three Sharknoses. No longer constrained by the tight Monaco turns, the Sharknoses put on a display of raw speed. They were easily fast enough to earn Hill, von Trips, and Ginther side-by-side positions on the front row—a blockade of red. Moss would line up directly behind them.

After practice Hill, as usual, dickered with the mechanics. Von Trips noticed a ten-year-old Dutch boy sitting on the roof overhanging the low pits. He stepped onto a bench and pulled himself up, tousling the boy's hair and sitting with him for a few minutes, trying to glean warmth from the wan sun glimmering through the cold fog. It was the kind of spontaneous gesture that came easily to him.

On the morning of the race Prince Bernhard and Princess Irene arrived by helicopter and shook hands with the drivers. It did not go unnoticed that the princess wore a headscarf with the Ferrari logo. During the final tune-ups Hill found that his
car had developed a tendency to oversteer, which caused him to turn more sharply than intended. It was the sort of glitch that unhinged Hill, particularly when it arose during last-minute preparations. To make matters worse, his clutch conked out on the final warm-up lap. The mechanics swarmed, rushing to repair it five minutes before the start. Hill tried to “calm his palpitating heart with his right hand,”
Motor Racing
reported, “while he unwrapped a stick of gum with his left.”

Moss, who was not known for jokes, chose this moment to goad Hill. “Push that thing away,” he said. “It will only jam up the rest of us.”

“Oh, look Phil,” he added. “They're taking the whole bloody back end out of your car.” Hill had tried to ignore Moss, but now he turned in a panic. In the end the mechanics fixed the clutch and Hill got into his car on the front row. Moss chuckled just behind Hill, knowing that he had unsettled him.

After the start the cars vanished among the sand dunes. When they reappeared at the end of the first lap von Trips was leading. He had surged ahead while Hill tried to manhandle his errant steering through the rolling gray landscape. He was, by his own description, “all arms and elbows.”

“I was going around oversteering all over the place,” Hill added. “You can just oversteer your way around that course so long before you've done in your tires—and run out of adrenaline.”

With von Trips five seconds ahead, Hill sparred for second with Jim Clark, the Scot who had briefly challenged him in Monaco. Chiti and Tavoni were working their stopwatches when Clark ripped by an inch from the pits, forcing them to jump back. Clark's message was as unmistakable as it was intimidating. Even though Clark's Lotus handled the turns
adroitly, it couldn't compete with a Ferrari whistling down the long straights. For the first time in the season, the Sharknose showed what it could do. With twenty laps left Hill pulled away. Chiti exhaled in relief. Il Commendatore could no longer question the 120-degree engine's capability. It looked unbeatable.

Now Hill was finding his rhythm, and he began eating into von Trips' lead. Just as Hill drew up behind von Trips, the phone rang in the pits. It was Ferrari calling from his office. On his orders Tavoni held out a message board dictating the order of finish: “Trips-Hill.” With the first Ferrari win of the season within reach, Tavoni would not risk any tangles. “They just didn't want us ripping each other up once the thing was stabilized,” Hill said. Von Trips led all seventy-five laps, scoring his first Grand Prix win—the first by any German in two years—with a dominating performance. Cheers erupted in beer gardens and rathskellers all across Germany.

Prince Bernhard and his daughter, Princess Irene, were supposed to present the winner's trophy, but the crowd surged onto the field and formed an impenetrable throng around von Trips, who pulled Hill under the victory wreath with him. Von Trips had agreed to a post-race interview with Hermann Harster, the German journalist who was covering the race for a Hamburg tabloid, but von Trips had no way of getting to their meeting place. He borrowed a bicycle from a teenager and rode with the teen sitting on the handlebars. “It was a big day for him,” Harster wrote. “How many kids are ridden around on their bicycle by a Grand Prix winner?”

Moss and von Trips had each won a race. The pressure was now on Hill to keep pace at the Belgian Grand Prix, held at
Spa on June 18. “Trips wanted it very much, and so did I,” Hill said. “And despite the fact that we were members of the same team we each knew that we'd have to fight with everything we had to win the title. The tension continued to build from race to race.”

If Hill were to win he would have to prevail on the fast and unforgiving track at Spa, where drivers rocketed through the Ardennes Forest at an average speed of 130 mph and slid around turns on asphalt softened to a slippery sheen by an early summer heat wave. As if to prove up front that he was in the fight for good, Hill scorched the practice laps and recorded the first lap under four minutes in track history. The fastest practice times earned him the right to start in the pole position, the inside spot on the front row that guaranteed an edge as the pack entered the first turn. Von Trips would line up beside him. Completing an all-Ferrari front row was Gendebien, who, as a Belgian, was driving a Sharknose painted yellow, the Belgian racing color.