Limit, The (29 page)

The lead switched back and forth between Hill and von Trips as they swung through curves at 150 mph. Hill eventually pulled away, three times recording track records. A heavy rain closed in and the pack slowed by about ten seconds a lap, impeding von Trips from challenging Hill, though he surely would have pressed had he known that Hill was vulnerable. A tiny pebble had lodged in Hill's eye on the twentieth lap. He drove the last third of the race half blind.

Once again Tavoni held out a sign freezing the positions, this time with Hill beating von Trips by barely a half-second. Hill looked embarrassed as the laurel wreath was laid on his shoulders. Victory displays always made him uncomfortable and
he slipped away as fast he could. More than anything he was relieved to have done it—relieved to be back in the mix—but he called it “more of a joke than a race” because of Tavoni's orchestration.

The win in Belgium propelled Hill to the top of the standings. He now had nineteen points, one more than von Trips. He had shown his mettle by scrapping from behind in the tally, and it looked as if he would add to his lead two weeks later at the French Grand Prix in Reims, a race on public roads looping through the patterned geometric fields of Champagne country. His car ran particularly fast in warm-ups, giving him “a guilty surge of pleasure.”

Hill's car was so fast that it became a point of contention in the elaborate game-within-a-game that preceded each race. Von Trips groused to Tavoni that Hill had an unfair advantage. Hill knew that von Trips was right. “God, my car was clearly superior to Trips',” he said. “I mean, my car was a full half-second, three quarters of a second faster.”

Von Trips demanded that Hill take a few laps in his car to demonstrate its slowness. If Hill also logged sluggish lap times it would prove that the problem lay with the car, not the driver. “I didn't really want to,” Hill said. “After all, it might not be running right and they might fix it so that it would be faster than mine.”

Ferrari normally prohibited drivers from handling a teammate's car for fear of sabotage. In this case Tavoni relented under pressure from von Trips. “Sure,” he told Hill, “take it around.” Hill only agreed because there was an oil spill at Thillois, a hairpin turn just before the pits. If he drove slower than
von Trips, he figured, he could blame it on the oil. In fact, he drove three blazing laps, beating von Trips' lap time by half a second, a generous margin by Grand Prix standards. “I really let it all hang out,” he said. “I flew. When I came into the pits, Trips was the picture of gloom. I said, ‘I'm sorry I wasn't able to turn in a good one with all that damn oil all over, but it doesn't feel half bad, to tell you the truth.' ” Hill compounded the insult by winning the hundred bottles of champagne awarded to the driver with the fastest practice lap.

As if that weren't humiliating enough, von Trips looked back on the next practice lap to see Moss riding an out-of-date Lotus in his slipstream so that the more powerful Ferrari would suck him along in its wake. Moss and other British drivers had perfected the technique during those many difficult years when their cars could not keep up with the Italians. When Tavoni waved in warning from the pits, von Trips sped up, hoping to shake Moss, but he succeeded only in pulling him along faster. Moss's practice times were consequently much faster than they would otherwise be—the speediest among non-Italian cars by two seconds—assuring that he would start near the front. On his way back into the pits he flipped the Ferrari crew the two-fingered up-your-arse gesture.

On the morning of the race the July sun scorched the blond wheat fields like a blowtorch. The thermometer touched 102 degrees in the shade and 120 degrees on the circuit. Women clutched glasses of cold champagne beneath broad-brimmed hats. The drivers lingered in the pits, dousing their coveralls with water. Ferrari mechanics wiped the cockpits down and removed body panels to allow cooling air to flow around the drivers' legs and bodies. Hill put a rubber bag of ice water on
his floorboards with an improvised hose snaking up his shoulders. When he stepped on the bag a cold spritz trickled down his back.

The heat softened the black tarmac, loosening bean-sized pieces of gravel. It was like “driving on a spill of ball bearings,” Hill said. Two years earlier, on the same road, a bit of gravel had bloodied Hill's nose. “I was drinking blood for about five laps and couldn't feel a thing,” he said.

As expected, the Ferraris jumped out front with Hill leading comfortably, followed by von Trips. After eight laps Hill eased back. Five laps later von Trips pulled up and Hill let him pass. It was still early and Hill could afford to sit back and spare his engine exertion and overheating.

On the other hand, Hill may have been ordered to give way to von Trips. Denis Jenkinson, a long-bearded correspondent for the British magazine
Motor Sport
, wrote that Tavoni had told Hill in a pre-race meeting that he would have to step aside for von Trips, despite Hill's faster practice times. Hill had accepted the order, according to Jenkinson, but with an eruption of anger. Hill's frustration is understandable. For five years he had accomplished everything asked of him, only to see Ferrari repeatedly favor von Trips. Hill's rage would only have pleased Ferrari. An angry driver, he knew, was a fast driver.

As it turned out, von Trips would not win, with or without Hill's help. He pulled into the pits on the eighteenth lap with his engine smoking and steam spewing from his right-hand exhaust. A piece of gravel had punctured his radiator.

Spectators saw a broad smile of vindication under the tinted visor of Hill's helmet as he reclaimed the lead. The race was now his to lose. With a 16-second lead he could afford to slow down
and play it safe. He could coast home without incident. Ginther, in second, was too loyal to challenge him. Moss was laps behind. Hill was now all but assured of extending his lead in the Grand Prix tally and extinguishing some of the crushing pressure.

The race appeared locked up for Hill until he came out of a long downhill straight—among the longest and fastest on the entire Grand Prix circuit—at 160 mph and swung into the notorious Thillois hairpin expecting to drift his car around. Maybe he was too relaxed. Or maybe the heat had wilted his reflexes. Either way, he committed a rare miscue and skidded clockwise 180 degrees directly under the gaze of a grandstand. He might have quickly recovered if Moss, still struggling with his brakes, had not plowed into the Ferrari's nose, spinning Hill another half turn. Hill then stood mid-track, cars whizzing by on either side, push-starting his car. He shoved it into motion with one hand and threw it into gear with the other. In the process the car ran over his foot. By the time the engine shook to life he had dropped to ninth place, which is where he finished.

Hill still led von Trips by a point, but he had fumbled his chance for an insurmountable lead. “My golden opportunity to make a decisive leap in the point standings was lost in one stupid move,” he said, “but perhaps a certain Calvinist notion of retribution had been satisfied.”

The charcoal skies hung low with a cold spit of rain when Phil Hill set out alone to walk the three-mile track at Aintree, site of the British Grand Prix and home of the Grand National, the country's most famous steeplechase. He had come a week early to inspect every detail—the pebbled texture of the road, the windy stretch near Bechers Bend, the sightlines into Cottage
Corner. He had come to absorb the feel of the place, to visualize it. If he learned anything from the frustrating Reims episode of the previous week, it was that anything can happen. He wanted to eliminate uncertainties.

Wolfgang von Trips, the presumptive world champion, after winning the British Grand Prix on July 15, 1961. For a divided Germany, he was a hero on the verge. (Cahier Archive)

Hill walked along a dead-flat black asphalt road separated from the steeplechase course by high hedges and white fencing. It was a grim expanse, as featureless as a pool table, overlooked
by a double-decked Victorian grandstand with a deep overhang to shelter spectators from persistent drizzle. Along with bland food, the cold Lancashire rain was Aintree's most distinctive aspect. Rain sprinkled on the practice runs and poured in sheets fifteen minutes before the start, sweeping the track with puddles. Dark roiling squall clouds mingled with factory smoke from Liverpool five miles to the south. Mechanics rushed to exchange smooth-tread tires for wet-weather versions with deep grooves for traction. Hill and von Trips stood in drenched coveralls adjusting their helmet visors.

Spectators huddling under umbrellas hoped the rain would help Moss pull off another upset. He had grown up in the damp British weather, and his wet-road skills had earned him the nickname “Rain Master.” But when the Union Jack dropped it was Hill, not Moss, who jumped out in front. He led for the first six laps with von Trips driving into a forty-foot plume of spray thrown up by his rival's Ferrari. Hill drove with great authority, safely negotiating flooded sections at Country Corner and Valentine's Way.

Before the race, while the track was still relatively dry, Hill had adjusted his car's brake balance so the front wheels had more braking force. He regretted it now as his front tires began losing traction on the flooded tarmac. On the seventh lap he gained speed on the long backstretch, then braked in a tricky spot known as Melling Crossing, where a road crossed the track. He skated at 100 mph toward a massive solid oak gatepost, spinning first one way, then the other. His championship prospects seemed to vanish as he slid hopelessly closer to the post. He had unwillingly entered the state drivers feared most: he was a passenger without control, waiting for the slide to play itself out.

At the last second, as the gate loomed beside him, his front tires found grip through the puddle. He engaged a low gear and dodged the post by an inch. It was a near miss, but the fright played on his nerves. “A few years earlier it would have been forgotten—like a letter dropped in a mailbox—the instant the wheel caught hold,” he said, “but by 1961 it stayed with me.”

Consciously or not, Hill drove more cautiously after his close call, allowing von Trips to nip by. Then Moss came up from behind to badger Hill. On the tenth lap Moss blew by him, drawing cheers from the grandstand. Badly shaken, Hill dropped to third.

Now it was von Trips' turn to see Moss looming in his rearview mirror, waiting to pounce like a wolf on the smallest mistake. Moss was an endlessly resourceful fighter with British veins of ice. In the past, his unnerving presence, combined with the foul conditions, might have provoked von Trips into an impetuous blunder. But by now von Trips knew how to keep his composure, and he drove a nearly flawless race through unrelenting rain. “Sometimes I lost my Ferrari at 150 kilometers an hour and we skipped through the puddles like a stone thrown flat on the water,” von Trips said.

Still, Moss kept turning up the heat. Lap after lap he hounded von Trips. By the twentieth lap Moss had closed to less than a second—an arm's reach away. He made his move at Tatts Corner, a 90-degree turn at the far end of the backstretch, but von Trips closed the door on him.