Limit, The (33 page)

In Modena, Ferrari put on another show of mourning, as if his lament shielded him from blame. A few days after returning from Monza, Hill met Ferrari in a café across from the
factory. He looked “fatigued and hollow-eyed with the shadow of a beard,” Hill said. Ferrari asked if Hill would return next season. Hill said yes.

“It was an emotional moment,” Hill said. “Ferrari was capable of turning on great displays of emotion and one could not say that they were phony—any more than the third act of
Tosca
is phony. But there was something essentially theatrical about these displays—a great outpouring and then the curtain fell and it was over. La Scala might have lost a star when Ferrari went into tears.”

Von Trips' funeral cortège assembled in the forecourt of Burg Hemmersbach; Phil Hill (second row at right) with other pallbearers before the procession to the church. “It was a nightmare,” he said, “acted out in daytime.” (Associated Press)

Ferrari's mourning period did not include a trip to Horrem for von Trips' funeral. He stayed home, and he forbade Chiti and Tavoni from attending for fear that they might inadvertently give the press information that prosecutors could use in a criminal charge against him. In their place Ferrari sent his wife Laura, accompanied by Amerigo Manicardi, Ferrari's international sales manager.

Hill felt almost too guilty to go. Von Trips' photograph hung in classrooms all over Germany, as if the nation were mourning a martyred statesman. Hill dreaded the prospect of showing up as his replacement. “For all the Germans, Trips was going to be the new world champion,” he said, “and I had to go as this terrible disappointment.” In the end, the countess asked Hill to serve as a pallbearer, so he packed his bags. “I have never experienced anything as profoundly mournful as that day,” Hill later wrote. “It was a nightmare acted out in daytime.”

It was not a funeral so much as a Gothic death pageant. The day began with a mass in Burg Hemmersbach. Afterwards, a procession formed in the castle forecourt with the casket riding on a stand fitted like a ski rack on top of von Trips' dark green Ferrari roadster. Hill and seven other pallbearers walked coatless in the rain beside the car. Hill rested a hand on the driver-side door—von Trips' door—as the cortège crept along cobbled streets lined with rows of black umbrellas.

Local schools were closed for the day and ten thousand people turned out. Many laid garlands on the curbside. An old woman carrying a brass lantern led the procession. Behind her walked family and dignitaries from all over Germany. A band, dressed in black, played Chopin's funeral march.

A second lengthy mass was held at St. Clemens, a simple
village church, where a three-hundred-year-old bell tolled, followed by a procession to the cemetery. To keep pace with the slow cortège, the mechanic driving von Trips' Ferrari had to ride the clutch, and it began to slip and wear down. The drivers marching beside the car exchanged worried looks. They knew the clutch might burn out before they reached the cemetery—a final indignity for poor von Trips.

It was raining harder now. The pallbearers shouldered the coffin and slipped and slid their way up a muddy hill where the final service was conducted and von Trips was entombed in the Gothic family tomb. Beneath the coat of arms was inscribed the Latin phrase
In Morte Vita.
In death there is life. Huschke von Hanstein said a final word: “About you, Wolfgang Graf Berghe von Trips, one can speak only good.”

After the funeral, Hill returned to the home where he was lodging and took a long hot bath. Word came that the countess would like to see him that evening. They had struck up a friendship during his periodic visits to the castle. She teased him for not joining her at the Salzburg Music Festival earlier that month, as he had promised.

Since leaving Italy, Hill had suffered a painful stitch in his side. It was the kind of psychosomatic ailment that had afflicted him throughout his career. “I had felt it before,” he later wrote. “It told me that I was tense, that I must relax.”

Oddly, the cramp vanished as he talked with the countess. “I sensed, as we spoke, that she did not condemn racing,” Hill wrote. “I knew she was terribly hurt by the loss of her only son, but he had chosen a dangerous career and now that he was gone she accepted the fact like a Spartan mother.”

There were no flashbulbs when Hill landed at Idlewild Airport in New York en route to California. Between flights he called Denise McCluggage, who lived in Greenwich Village. He told her that he felt more like an afterthought than a champion. “He was slipping home essentially unnoticed,” she wrote.

With the title wrapped up, Ferrari saw no reason to send his team to the final Grand Prix in Watkins Glen, New York. By skipping it, he denied Hill a chance to race before his countrymen as the new champion. “I was really sick about that,” Hill said, “for that day should have been the crowning glory of my career, the biggest day of my life.”

Instead, Hill went home to Santa Monica, where the World Championship barely registered. Americans knew about Grand Prix—they had glimpsed it in movies and magazines—but they just didn't much care. It was a distant European fixation that earned far less notice than the Indianapolis 500.

The Hill–von Trips rivalry, so feverishly followed in Europe, was eclipsed in America by that summer's home run derby between Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris. In a case of excruciatingly bad timing, Hill won the championship three weeks before Maris broke Babe Ruth's single-season record of sixty home runs. If Maris was an overgrown boy gamboling on grassy fields, Hill was like the shaken survivor of a distant war.

In December, Hill appeared on an episode of
To Tell the Truth
, a game show predicated on the obscurity of the guest's achievement. Asked in an interview if his life had changed, Hill said, “Not at all. If you mean do people recognize me and stop me on the street, they don't.”

If Hill was an overlooked champion it was partially because he did not look the part. He was slight of build and grim-faced,
with none of the swagger and easy bonhomie Americans expect from a winner. He seemed too articulate to be an athlete. Plus, there was a particular fragility about him in those months after the Italian Grand Prix, as if he were more affected than he let on. “Perhaps I am oversensitive,” he wrote in October, “but since returning to America this fall I have found that I am being treated with kid gloves.”

At home in the Spanish-style house on the drowsy outskirts of Santa Monica he listened to minuets and concertos on his player piano. The fingers of long-dead masters trilled the keys. These were ghostly concerts performed only for himself. When the music stopped, the house fell silent.

The greatest year of Hill's life had found its bittersweet ending. Even in death von Trips had denied Hill the full satisfaction of winning. Over the short California winter Hill summoned himself. He would go back to Modena in the spring and try to do it all over again.

W
HEN
L
AURA
F
ERRARI
saw Hill at von Trips' funeral she asked how he would be returning to Modena. She disliked her escort, Amerigo Manicardi, and she was clearly fishing for a ride home with Hill. In a moment of panic Hill said he was continuing on to a business engagement in Stockholm, though that was not the case. The next day Hill was driving his Peugeot 404 from the Milan train station to Modena with Richie Ginther when they spotted Laura in an adjacent car. Both men scrunched down so she wouldn't see them. Meanwhile, Laura had recognized Hill's gray Peugeot. Is that Phil Hill's car? she asked Manicardi.

“I don't know,” Manicardi said. “There's nobody in it.”

“Oh, that's all right then,” she answered.

A few weeks later Ferrari's lieutenants gave him a letter demanding that his wife stay out of the factory. They considered
her disruptive. The grievance had simmered for years, but it erupted into mutiny a month after von Trips' death.

Laura Ferrari had kept her distance while her son was alive. After Dino died, in 1956, she became a daily presence at the factory, where she ate sausage in the lunchroom with mechanics and lorded over financial matters. Throughout the 1961 season she attended races as her husband's proxy, a scarf tied over her hair in the manner of peasant women. She spied for him at parties and in the pits. Tavoni and Chiti looked over their shoulders for her, suspecting she second-guessed their tactics and badmouthed them to her husband.

Enzo Ferrari refused to intercede when his staff confronted him with their letter of complaint. (They also demanded raises, which could not have helped matters with their notoriously stingy boss.) “If this is how you feel,” he told them, “there is the door. Here is your money. Out!”

Eight key managers and engineers walked out, led by Tavoni and Chiti, the two employees most responsible for the championship season.
Guerin Sportivo
, a weekly sports magazine, printed a cartoon of eight headless men leaving the Ferrari factory. Behind them stood Ferrari with eight heads bundled in his arms.

Within a year the eight exiles had formed a new race team, Automobili Turismo e Sport, or ATS, based on a farm west of Bologna with backing from Count Giovanni Volpi di Misurata, the twenty-four-year-old son of Mussolini's finance minister and founder of the Venice Film Festival.

Ferrari tried to compensate for the loss by inviting Stirling Moss to Modena for a solicitous talk. He sent a coupe to the Milan airport for Moss to drive and greeted him with a double-cheeked kiss. Over lunch at Il Cavallino, Ferrari made an extraordinary
offer: If Moss signed on, Ferrari would build a Formula 1 car to his specifications within six months. “He said, ‘I'll make it,' ” Moss said. “Whatever you want I'll build it for you.” Ferrari may have been the only carmaker capable of making good on such a promise. His craftsmen could fabricate a new car in months, a fraction of the time it would take the British
garagistas.

Moss was intrigued, but wary. Ten years earlier Ferrari had offered him a car for a race in Bari, Italy, only to reassign it to another driver at the last minute. Moss had nursed the insult for a decade. Still, he could see the benefit of an alliance. They might not like each other, but they could help each other win. More than anything, Moss wanted a championship.

In the end, Moss agreed to race a Ferrari, but only if it was operated by Rob Walker's team and painted the dark blue of the Scottish Walker livery. That suited Ferrari perfectly. One of the best drivers in history, in the prime of his abilities, would race his car, but Ferrari would not have to pay him as a team member.

On April 23, 1962, a month before his Ferrari debut in Monaco, Moss entered a minor Formula 1 race known as the Glover Trophy at the Goodwood track in West Sussex. He was up dancing until 2 a.m. the night before, then rose, apparently unaffected, and prepared his pale green Lotus. On the eighth lap he pulled into the pits with his transmission stuck in fourth gear. By the time mechanics fixed it he had dropped to dead last. “What are you going to do?” a friend asked. “Have a bloody go,” Moss answered.

In his urgency to make up time he flew down straights at 180 mph and swayed into corners at 75 mph. “He's pushing it,” a mechanic said. On the thirty-fifth lap Moss neared a twisty right-then-left maneuver called St. Mary's Corner at 110 mph. His car unaccountably veered off the road, streaked across
150 yards of lawn, and smacked into an eight-foot embankment. A nurse held his hand for half an hour while mechanics sawed through the crumpled aluminum and removed his unconscious body. Blood smeared his face and dripped onto his white coveralls. The impact had crushed his cheekbone and shattered his left eye socket. That was the least of it. X-rays showed a severe bruise on the right side of his brain. He lay in a coma for a month with his left side partially paralyzed. In moments of delirium he spoke in French and Italian about women (
Connie, vous êtes une belle fille. Vous êtes très sympathique
) and racing (
É molto difficile per un corridore—molto difficile).
It was noted that his accent was far purer than when he was conscious.