Limit, The (17 page)

Meanwhile, Peter Collins could not evacuate Buenos Aires fast enough. He had met Eleanora Herrera, a twenty-one-year-old insurance heiress, at a pool party before the Temporada. “It was love at first sight for me and I thought Peter felt the same way,” she said. They went out frequently the week before the first race and she visited him in the pits on practice days. By her account, Collins proposed to her a week after they met. He gave her a platinum ring with a pearl set in diamonds, she said, and her family marked the engagement by inviting Buenos
Aires society to a celebratory banquet. But as the racing wound down, she said, Collins withdrew. “He began to rejoin his racing friends in their exploits about town,” she told the
Daily Mirror
, a British tabloid. By her account, he left without a goodbye. Collins denied that they were ever formally engaged.

After detaching himself from Herrera, Collins flew to Miami. He had three weeks to kill before the Gran Premio, a 300-mile sports car race along the curving waterfront esplanade in Havana, Cuba. He planned to spend a few days in Florida, then visit a square-jawed American driver with thick eyeglasses named Masten Gregory at his home in Kansas City. He never made that trip. Stirling Moss had given him the phone number of a slender American actress with a broad incandescent smile named Louise King, who was performing in
The Seven Year Itch
at a theater in the Coconut Grove neighborhood of Miami. King resembled Ingrid Bergman, but with freckles and the hearty laugh of a fun-loving American girl. She had owned a British Austin-Healey sports car, one of the first in America, until crashing it in a road rally outside Baltimore. In 1955 she bought a new one in London and drove it to Paris and Monte Carlo, where she mixed with the racing crowd. She had met Collins at a party Bernard Cahier threw at his Riviera home before the Monte Carlo Grand Prix, but they apparently made no impression on each other. Neither could remember meeting.

Collins called her on February 4 and arranged to join her for a drink at a bar off the theater lobby at 11 p.m., after the final curtain. Though they had met before, it was essentially a blind date. “He just sparkled,” King said. “For me it was very close to love at first sight. He must have felt the same way.”

Two days later, King was sunbathing between Gregory and
Collins at the pool outside Collins' motel. He leaned over and, whispering so Gregory would not hear, asked King to marry him. She whispered back, “Yes!”

King's father, who was executive assistant to Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld of the United Nations, flew down from New York that Friday to talk her out of it. By the time King's father left on Sunday he had given his blessing. The couple married the next day—exactly a week after their first date—at an old stone church in Coconut Grove. Four hours later she was back onstage.

In late February Collins and the other Ferrari drivers converged on Havana for the Gran Premio. Enzo Ferrari did not supply them with team cars. Instead he telegrammed his permission to drive whatever privately owned cars they could find—as long as it was a Ferrari.

The government of Fulgencio Batista staged the annual Grand Premio to help fill the splendid hotels and casinos with free-spending Americans. This year there was a snag. A two-week longshoreman's strike in New York prevented a dozen sports cars from loading onto ships bound for Cuba. As a result, Havana was long on drivers and short on cars. Landing a ride for the Gran Premio became its own competition. Von Trips partied deep into the nights, chasing tips and rumors in brocaded nightclubs and cheap rum dives tucked in Havana's dark corners. He and Bonnier promoted their cause by returning to the airport and reenacting their arrival for newspaper photographers. The resulting coverage helped him connect with an American who had flown down with an ancient Ferrari Testa Rossa. Its gearbox sprayed hot oil over von Trips' gloves and goggles until he wrapped the transmission in cardboard.

Even in 1957 there were signs of the seismic changes to come in Cuba. Twenty-seven spectators were injured when a temporary wooden footbridge collapsed during practice runs. It was suspected that Fidel Castro's guerrillas, who were fighting government troops in the mountains, had sabotaged the structure. In the days before the race, flyers had circulated in Havana reading, “Don't go to automobile races. Avoid accidents. (signed) Revolutionary Movement of Twenty-sixth of July.”

On the first practice day von Trips met up with Hill, who was driving a war-weary Ferrari owned by the head of a New Jersey metal stamping company. Standing in the tropical heat, the two men compared notes on the waterfront road, known as the Malecón, which was buckled and undulated from years of tropical heat. During a warm-up run Hill chased Masten Gregory, whose heedless driving manner had earned him the nickname the Kansas City Flash. “Phil came in and said, ‘Masten has no idea what he's doing. He's out there going like hell on that damn road,' ” said Denise McCluggage.

“How do you know?” she said.

“Because I was right there behind him the whole time,” Hill said.

“I started laughing,” she said, “and then he started laughing too.”

A month later, Hill and von Trips shared a year-old 3.5-liter Ferrari at a 12-hour race in Sebring, Florida. Belches of exhaust fused with Everglades humidity as von Trips stepped hard on the accelerator at the start of a practice run. The mechanics and team manager watched with concern. When von Trips pulled into the pits the Ferrari crew huddled around the cockpit to review the car's performance. “It runs fine unless I do this,” von
Trips told them. He leaned across the dashboard and flipped a switch on the far right side.

Hill, who was listening in, expressed astonishment. “That's the fuel pump!” he said.

“Oh,” von Trips answered with his easy, sell-effacing laugh.

The car's brakes were so anemic that Hill did deep-knee bends with a hundred-pound weight on his back for weeks beforehand to build leg strength. In the end a faulty battery proved their undoing. After they traded the wheel off and on for six and a half hours the car coughed and went cold. They were forced to withdraw.

After Florida, von Trips swung through New York, with long evenings at El Morocco and the Copacabana. He also made the obligatory visits to Sardi's and Le Chanteclair, customary Midtown gathering spots for the racing crowd. He had by now exhausted his travel budget. His one gray suit was wrinkled and wrung out from too many parties. “With Argentine saddles, Cuban drums and American cowboy hats, I was laden with four months of the gypsy life,” he wrote. “I had a dollar in my pocket. It's going to take my poor mother a long time to—as she puts it—make a proper gentleman out of me again.”

The news of Collins' marriage did not sit well with Enzo Ferrari. He encouraged his drivers to take up with the tanned women in tight cashmere sweaters and oversize sunglasses who hung around the pits, and he was delighted to hear about their sexual escapades. He took these things as signs of manliness. But he discouraged serious relationships for a simple reason: he saw love as the enemy of speed.

“Ferrari didn't like his drivers to marry,” King said, “because
it sounded like they were settling down, which means slowing down.”

Ferrari had warned Eugenio Castellotti about this. “Men are creatures of their passions,” Ferrari told him, “and this makes them victims of women.” Like Collins, Castellotti ignored him.

Castellotti was an extravagantly wealthy young gentleman from Lodi who lounged in the pits with his white helmet pushed back over ink-black hair and a blue jacket pulled tight over sinewy shoulders. A cigarette dangled from lips so shapely they looked cartoonish. The Italian women called him Il Bello, the beautiful one.

When Alberto Ascari died in May 1955, Castellotti became Italy's last great hope to overcome the British virtuoso Stirling Moss and the Argentinean maestro Juan Manuel Fangio. He lived up to their hopes, winning a string of races. Most impressive of all, he took the 1956 Mille Miglia in a persistent downpour. Robert Daley, the
New York Times
correspondent, wrote that Castellotti “would pass other cars on the verge in a shower of stones, grinning like a fiend.” He had shown himself to be a true
garibaldino
, a slang term for drivers who, in Ferrari's words, “put courage and verve before cool calculation.”

Italy might once again have a great champion, Ferrari thought, if Castellotti could stay focused and avoid female entanglements. When the Ferrari team boarded an Alitalia flight from Milan to Argentina in January 1957, Castellotti was the only driver to sit out the poker game. His girlfriend had given him a bundle of letters at the airport with instructions to open one every hour. Castellotti had thrown himself into a blazing romance with Delia Scala, a classically trained ballerina
with a flourishing career in movies and television. The couple was a gossip column staple.

Ferrari disapproved. So did Castellotti's mother. When Signora Castellotti met Scala she said, “You look like a waitress. The kitchen is this way.”

Despite the objections, the couple became engaged in early March 1957, though they bickered often, and publicly, over whether he should quit his career to spend time with her, or vice versa.

On March 13 Castellotti was in Florence where Scala was performing in
Good Night Bettina
, a play about a husband who finds that his wife has an unexpected literary talent. The phone rang in their hotel bedroom. It was Ferrari angrily summoning Castellotti. Jean Behra had been circling the rectangular
autodromo
on the edge of Modena at terrific speeds. He threatened to break the record for fastest lap held by Ferrari for years. What galled Ferrari most was that Behra was driving a Maserati, Ferrari's crosstown rival.

Modena was a city divided. An ancient Roman road, the Via Emilia, ran down its center. Ferrari and Maserati were encamped on opposing sides, less than a mile apart, like an automotive version of the Montagues and Capulets. Ferrari could not tolerate the prospect of Maserati stealing the local record. He considered it an affront to the natural order. Castellotti must return immediately to defend it.

Castellotti roused himself from Scala's warm bed before 5 a.m. the next morning and drove over the Apennine Mountains to Modena. Waiting for him behind the
autodromo
's redbrick walls with peeling posters was a team manager, mechanics,
and an untested Formula 1 Ferrari. He climbed in and blasted down a damp track at more than 100 mph. On the third lap the crew signaled to accelerate.

It would not happen today, but in the 1950s a driver going more than 115 mph could be easily jostled and lose footing on the pedals. Whether this happened to Castellotti is not known. For whatever reason, he bungled a crucial downshift coming out of a curve. The car lost traction and began to slide. After a few desperate swerves his car flipped and rolled into a concrete wall beneath a small grandstand. The
autodromd
rang with the sound of screeching brakes and crumpling metal.

Castellotti was thrown out and landed on the tarmac. Don Sergio Mantovani, a local parish priest who was a fixture in the pits, ran through the debris and knelt beside Castellotti. His left eye was open, but he was fading. Mantovani raised his hand and blessed him. He and Scala were to have been married twenty-five days later.

When Ferrari heard the news, he said, “What a pity. What about the car?” He later said Castellotti was probably thinking too much about Scala and not enough about driving. It was an implicit warning to the other Ferrari driver: by all means court the coquettes, but never let love interfere with the proper handling of cars at the limit.

Ferrari skipped Castellotti's funeral, as usual. He had no use for the Catholic rituals of mourning. He did his own communing, with death. He could feel its presence in the black-and-white photographs of drivers hanging on the walls of his gloomy office and in his morning cemetery visits to speak with his son.

Ferrari accepted that death was the inevitable result of his
campaign for speed. His ambition was to win “even with the sacrifice of the most noble human lives.” To be fair, he wasn't the only one. On every factory team managers bullied and prodded drivers to the limit, and beyond; at every juncture they watched for signs that drivers were losing their nerve—particularly those recently married or recovering from a crash. “The owners see us drivers as a bunch of funny little psychopaths who sooner or later get too chicken to stick their shoe in it,” Hill said. “They want to know when this happens so that they can get someone else. So they pressure drivers in a hundred different ways.”