Limit, The (9 page)

Four days later Ascari turned up at the track in Monza,
where his friend and protégé Eugenio Castellotti had completed twenty-five test laps in a new Ferrari sports car they were to share in a 1,000-kilometer race. Most of what Castellotti knew about racing he had learned from Ascari. “Be calm,” Ascari had told him on practice runs. “Slip into the car like you were going for a normal drive, instead of at 120 mph. Put your wheels where I put mine.” Ascari became not just a tutor, but a loved mentor. Castellotti bought the same string-backed driving gloves as Ascari, the same blue polo shirt, the same goggles.

Ascari had not planned on driving that day in Monza, but when Castellotti took a break he impulsively decided to take a few laps before going home for lunch with his wife. “You have to get straight back into the saddle after an accident,” he told a friend, “otherwise doubt sets in.”

He slipped behind the wheel in his street clothes and peeled out of the pits with his tie flapping over his shoulder. The chinstrap of his lucky blue helmet was being repaired, so Ascari uncharacteristically borrowed Castellotti's white helmet. After a warm-up lap he waved, as if to confirm that he was okay. He slid his hands around on the wheel, gripping and ungripping as he always did. On the third lap Castellotti could hear Ascari change gears out of sight on the far side of the track, then the engine fell silent. Castellotti ran across and found the car upside down in a patch of bushes. Ascari had been thrown from the cockpit and landed on a stretch of grass. He was gasping faintly when Castellotti reached him. Blood trickled from a nostril. “His eyes seemed to stare at me with their usual kindness,” Castellotti said. “I knelt down next to him as if to help him, but by then my best friend had left me.”

Castellotti was inconsolable. “When I close my eyes,” he later said, “I can hear Alberto giving me advice.”

The exact cause of the crash was never determined. Two days later a horse-drawn wagon carried his black coffin through the somber streets of Milan with his blue helmet resting on top. He was buried next to his father, who had died in a similar crash while leading the French Grand Prix at Montlhéry, outside Paris, thirty years earlier. They were the same age almost to the day.

While Ascari was laid to rest at the end of May 1955, Hill and Ginther were headed to Genoa on a freighter with Allen Guiberson's Ferrari 750 Monza in the hold for a series of races in France, Italy, and Germany. They were nearing Gibraltar when the captain told them in broken English that a famous driver had died. He had heard a bulletin on the ship's radio, but missed the name. Hill and Ginther stood on deck, the freighter rolling and lifting beneath them, trying to guess whom the driver might be.

The next day they received a shipboard wire from Chinetti: Get off at Barcelona and go directly to Modena. Ginther slept on the all-night train up the coast of Spain and France while Hill looked out the window at the passing towns. At dawn they pulled into Modena where a rosy morning light shone on the ancient stone campanile and a piazza cluttered with market stalls. Modena was a provincial center one hundred miles southeast of Milan known for balsamic vinegar and a sweet, fizzy wine called Lambrusco. Most crucially to Hill, it was the engine capital of northern Italy—home to Ferrari, Maserati, and a supporting cast of parts manufacturers, transmission
shops, body fabricators, car journalists, assorted flunkies, and a healthy population of whores.

Hill dropped his bags at a hotel and went directly to the Ferrari factory, a tidy fortress nine miles up the road in the village of Maranello. A guard opened the gate and Hill walked through an archway beneath the Ferrari name spelled out in its distinctive early modern lettering to wait bleary-eyed in a dingy cubicle. The door opened and there was Enzo Ferrari, age fifty-seven, standing over Hill in a dark suit and tie, his receding silver hair swept back and his rheumy hooded eyes hidden behind thick sunglasses. Ascari was dead, he explained, and he needed an understudy.

Ferrari led Hill to the factory floor where mechanics were readying the Ferrari 121 LM that Ascari was to have driven at Le Mans. It had a long sinuous body suggesting coiled energy, like a cat waiting to pounce. Ferrari created it to counter the experimental Mercedes 300 SLR, which had rolled out of the Stuttgart factory earlier in the year with an early version of fuel injection and magnesium alloy bodywork. Ferrari asked Hill what he thought of it. Beautiful, Hill said.

“Then how would you like to drive it at Le Mans,” Ferrari said, “with your great antagonist from Mexico, Umberto Maglioli?”

The 24 Hours of Le Mans were among the most prestigious in the world of racing, and crucial to carmakers' fortunes. The entrants were modified showroom models or prototypes that would soon be put into commercial production. The event acted as a measure of their relative durability and the marques' progress in developing new engine and brake technologies.
Everyone wanted to know if the British, Germans, or Italians were winning the engineering race, and Le Mans gauged their relative standing. To put it another way, Le Mans was an arduous form of consumer testing. The eight-mile loop on closed country roads was an agony of acceleration and braking repeated over the length of a full day.

Among other things, Le Mans was an extreme driving test wrapped in a Gallic carnival. Every June, 300,000 revelers arrived in caravans of dented Deux Chevaux and Peugeots packed with
poulet
, baguettes, and wine. They came for the spectacle, and for the ghoulish prospect of witnessing a crash. They were rarely disappointed.

The racing fans,
les fans de courses à voiture
, rode the Ferris wheel, cheered professional wrestlers, packed into all-night dance halls, and whistled at girls in the burlesque tent. On Sunday, mass was held every few hours in an outdoor chapel. The cars whizzed by hour after hour as French carnival music blared. The drivers could tell when dawn was near by the smell of bacon. “I hate Le Mans,” said Stirling Moss, the golden boy of British racing who had recently joined the Mercedes team. “It's not a race but a circus.”

It was a circus, to be sure, and more dangerous than ever with the bigger, more powerful Mercedes, Ferraris, and Jaguars sharing the roads with swarms of puny MGs and Gordinis. Alfred Neubauer, the Mercedes team manager, complained to French officials that the road was too narrow, particularly around the pits where drivers slowed and veered before they pulled in. The new Mercedes SLR, which could reach 185 mph, would jostle wheel to wheel with little MGs on a track no wider than a two-lane road. “Just imagine, a driver realizes a fraction
of a second too late that he's been told to slow down,” Neubauer said. “He tends to brake suddenly. On a narrow track like this it could have disastrous consequences.” We have been organizing the race since 1923, sniffed French officials. Nothing like that has ever happened.

During practice, Pierre Bouillin, a twenty-year veteran who raced under the name Pierre Levegh, coasted into the pits in his Mercedes after a close brush with a little 2-liter Gordini. “We have to get some sort of signal system working,” Levegh said. “Our cars go too fast.”

Levegh was a short, solemn man. Friends called him “the bishop” behind his back. He was hell-bent on winning Le Mans as a matter of national pride, for
la gloire.
Still downtrodden from the war, France clamored for a hero to stand up against the foreigners—particularly the Germans. Levegh was consumed by a dark, bullheaded determination that it would be him.

Levegh did not compete at Le Mans until 1951 when, at the advanced age of forty-five, he finished fourth in a Talbot Lago, a car made in the suburbs of Paris. Talbot offered Levegh a team car for the next Le Mans, but he felt that mechanical failure had prevented him from winning in 1951. So he turned them down and spent an enormous sum—nearly three times the first-place prize money—preparing his own Talbot.

At first it looked as if his plan might work. He stayed with the lead pack into the night hours of the 1952 race. By 3 a.m. many of the top contenders had broken down. Levegh took the lead. The two drivers who shared a car normally switched places every two and a half hours, but Levegh was so obsessed with winning, and winning alone, that he waved off his
co-driver every time he pulled in for refueling. By dawn he hardly knew whom he was talking to. He looked ashen and his head teetered with sleeplessness and road fatigue. He sucked on an orange and refused to relinquish the wheel.

With every stop he appeared more dazed, but the tingling possibility of winning sustained him. By dawn he suffered stomach cramps and struggled to focus his eyes. His lap times were slowing, but he nursed a three-lap lead on the more powerful Mercedes. The public address announcer's voice cracked with emotion. Spectators streamed over from the dance halls and shooting booths. Could this one man hold back the hated Germans single-handedly?

With an hour and a half to go, exhaustion caught up to him. He fumbled a gearshift, causing the crankshaft to whirl and blow the engine. His car clanked to a halt. Two Mercedes passed him to claim the top two finishes, a result so repulsive to French spectators that race officials chose not to play the German anthem for fear it would incite a riot. The French press blamed Levegh for the German win, accusing him of vanity and foolishness.

Levegh was inconsolable. He had trouble breathing after he was pulled from the car. He vomited and gagged for an hour, then wept in his wife's arms. If his car had lasted another hour or so he would have become a French folk hero and the only man to win Le Mans alone. It was bad enough to lose, but to lose to the Germans, occupiers of France, was more than he could bear.

For its part, Mercedes was in the delicate position of trying to win, and win with overwhelming force, without raising the specter of German machinery crushing its neighbors.
If nothing else, the company wanted to engender goodwill so it could sell plenty of cars in France. Neubauer saw a public relations opportunity in Levegh's defeat. After the race he told Levegh that he would hold a place for him at Le Mans if he wanted to join them.

By the time Hill arrived in Le Mans three years later, levegh had agreed to race a Mercedes. In doing so he had placed himself in the middle of what the press called “World War II on the track,” a confrontation between the British and Germans on ground once occupied by German soldiers. The Luftwaffe had used Le Mans as an airstrip, and two miles away the Nazis set up an internment camp for captured members of the French Resistance. Many of Levegh's countrymen disapproved of his alliance with the German company, but Levegh knew that it offered the best chance of winning. The new Mercedes 300 SLR was so advanced it bordered on science fiction: it had a space-frame chassis and hydraulic flip-up air brakes, similar to those used in airplanes, designed to take pressure off the disc brakes. With an engine capable of 185 mph, the drivers would need all the brakes they could get as they slowed at sharp corners, most crucially the hairpin turn at the end of the long Mulsanne Straight.

At age forty-nine, Levegh knew that this was likely his last chance for redemption. He was a somber presence at the otherwise lighthearted meals the Mercedes team shared at their hotel. “He was torn between his fear and his ambition,” said Artur Keser, the company's public relations director.

A few minutes after 3 p.m. on a hot and windless afternoon, gendarmes began herding people from the start area. One of the unique aspects of Le Mans was that it began with a short
footrace. In keeping with this custom, sixty cars were lined up at a 6o-degree angle to the track, their hoods pointed to the runway. The drivers waited directly across the road beside a flimsy white fence where a crush of spectators stood thirty deep.

As the starting clock ticked down to 4 p.m. all chatting and rustling hushed. For a moment it was so quiet the drivers could hear birds singing. The grandstand crowd stood on their chairs for a better view. The Italian count Aymo Maggi, one of racing's elder statesmen, stepped from a cluster of race officials and swung the French tricolor. The drivers sprinted across the road, jumped into their cockpits, and hit the start buttons. Fangio was among the last to pull away, having caught his pant leg on the gearshift. Eugenio Castellotti shot to a quick lead in a big 4.4-liter Ferrari, followed by a Jaguar D-Type driven by Mike Hawthorn, a British driver with whitish-blond hair and the generous cheeks of a well-fed English schoolboy. The French called him Papillon because he always wore a bow tie in the car. In third place was Maglioli in the Ferrari he would share with Hill.

The pack whipped under a pedestrian bridge shaped like a Dunlop tire and into the sharp Tertre Rouge turn, flooded down a four-mile tree-lined straightaway to the 300-degree Mulsanne turn, and on around past a swerve called Maison Blanche before the long straight back to the grandstands.

Castellotti was clocked at 181 mph, but he fell off the pace after the first hour, leaving Hawthorn to fight it out with Fangio, the five-time world champion driving a Mercedes. In his memoir Hawthorn admitted that he was “momentarily mesmerized by the legend of the Mercedes superiority. . . Then
I came to my senses and thought, ‘Damn it, why should a German car beat a British car?' ”

Hawthorn and Fangio passed and repassed each other a dozen times, setting lap records ten times in the first two hours. They drove side by side much of the time, stealing looks at each other. Fangio drove in a relaxed posture, as he always did. Hawthorn slouched forward with his mouth agape, as if urging his car on. The public address announcer shrieked
les voilàl
—here they come!—as the pair passed in streaks of silver and green. “At this stage I was driving flat out all the way and had absolutely nothing in reserve,” Hawthorn later wrote.

Hill watched from the half-covered Ferrari pits, one of more than a dozen lined up directly across from the grandstand. The Ferrari 121 was the most powerful machine he had ever driven. “I was pumped,” he said, “ready to take on just about anything.” Beside him the team manager barked orders and the mechanics carefully arranged their gear—wrench sets, cases of oil, air canisters, and jackstands—in preparation for their own long struggle. As drivers began pulling in at the end of the first two-and-a-half-hour shift, the pit crews jacked up cars, knocked off hub nuts, yanked away worn tires, and shoved gas nozzles into empty tanks. The incoming drivers shared a few words with their substitutes.
Don't let her overheat. Watch for the oil spill just beyond the hairpin.
Then the car was gone with a shattering bellow.