Limit, The (30 page)

Moss would have tried again, and might have succeeded, but he suffered his own skid at Melling Crossing, spinning an entire 360 degrees on the wet road. Five laps later he dropped out with a broken brake rod.

Half an hour later von Trips saw a tire appear through the wall of rain ahead of him. A second tire emerged along with the red body of a Ferrari. The rookie driver Giancarlo Baghetti had pulled close to another car to shield himself from the water spraying onto his windshield and goggles. When the other car unexpectedly braked, Baghetti went into a spin. “Suddenly I saw the eyes of the Italian coming out of the rain curtain toward me,” von Trips said. “It was ghostly, eerie. He came closer and closer. Finally I flicked past him. On the next lap I saw Baghetti on the edge of the track. Without a car.” Baghetti had spun five times and rammed into a wood fence.

By now the clouds had parted and the road dried. The sunlight shone on von Trips as he crossed the line in first, seven seconds ahead of Hill. More than any other, this race made von Trips look like a champion in waiting.

Minutes later the two men flanked Laura Ferrari on the podium. She smiled and linked her arms in theirs, a show of Ferrari unity. Von Trips wore a laurel wreath. He held his cup aloft and sipped champagne from it as the crowd whistled and clapped. Hill, who had led the standings until this moment, stood by in a suede windbreaker looking as if he had aged ten years.

Halfway through the Grand Prix season Hill and von Trips began wearing down. Neither could gain the upper hand, and the deadlock put added pressure on both men to crowd the limit. Von Trips called their contest “the highest test, the high wire.” Their rivalry played large on the front pages of newspapers. Everywhere they went people asked about it. Teammates stole sideways glances to see how they were holding up.

“As I had feared, Trips and I became involved in an increasingly bitter competition for championship points,” Hill later wrote. “Because the championship was at stake, I was not able to be reasonable and sensible about every race. After all these years I should have been, automatically, but there was this continual counting of points. By midseason my concentration was suffering.”

Hill joined von Trips for a midseason break at Burg Hemmersbach, where the count lightened the mood with funny stories about his upbringing in the castle and the Americans stationed there. It is not known what else they discussed, but Hill clearly made a good impression on the countess. He was the sort of earnest and articulate young man parents approved of. Most of her son's friends cared only about speed and girls, but Hill's inquisitive mind took in everything European culture offered—wine, architecture, and history. The castle was like a museum, and she was his personal docent. In particular he shared her interest in music. It's easy to imagine him admiring the piano where she had played Chopin to von Trips as a boy. Hill and the countess agreed to attend the Salzburg music festival together later that month.

Back on the circuit, Hill and von Trips found it harder and harder to maintain a friendship under the strain of competition. In hotels and restaurants they were cordial, but they kept a protective distance. They greeted each other with tense smiles. “All year long it was him or me for the championship,” Hill said. “It's not a normal situation race drivers are in: you try to beat the other guys all day, and then at night you're supposed to forget all that.”

Their friendship was further strained by von Trips' driving.
Too often he seemed oblivious to the subtle points of protocol that safeguarded drivers, and his tolerance for risk had a infectious quality that Hill struggled against. “I was very aware of staying within my limits, but Trips was unpredictable in this regard, and in a way I feared him,” Hill said. “Racing against him, I soon learned that I was capable of being sucked into areas where I didn't want to be, even as I was having enough trouble knowing and sticking to my own limits.”

A week before the German Grand Prix at the Nürburgring, von Trips found diversion in speed of a different magnitude. The 36th Fighter Wing of the U.S. Air Force invited him to ride in a supersonic F-100. Just before the Ferrari transporter delivered the cars for practice, he drove an hour to the Bitburg air base where he was “passed around the officers' club like a champion cup,” said Harster, who accompanied him. A small, wiry major named Charlie Davis fitted him into the cockpit with a flight suit, oxygen, and radio. After the sickening G-force of takeoff, Major Davis gave von Trips an aerial view of the Nürburgring. “There was the track,” von Trips said. “There was the start and the finish. Charlie put the bird at an angle so I could see everything exactly. Then we were on the straightaway directly in front of the grandstand, on it at more than 900 kilometers an hour.”

“There was a green splash of color in the pits,” he added. “Probably the sleeping Lotus belonging to Stirling Moss.” (The Lotus would actually have been blue, the Scottish racing color.) “Thank goodness, no red,” he said. “I didn't need a bad conscience. The Ferraris weren't there yet. My car wouldn't miss me.”

Then the F-100 shot almost vertically through the clouds
and into a dark blue sky. Major Davis rolled the jet and flicked on the afterburners. “About 30 seconds later there was a light tremor through the machine,” von Trips said. “The needles with heights and speed began to dance like drunks.” They broke the sound barrier over Burg Hemmersbach. Von Trips called it “a visit with the Gods.”

He looked down from 40,000 feet at a serene and verdant countryside, but on the ground was a country in crisis. In August 1961 Germans fled East Berlin at a rate of fifteen hundred a day until Communist officials sealed the border with a barricade of barbed wire and jagged glass. Tanks patrolled the streets and police hauled thousands to detention camps. East and West faced off across the Berlin Wall, their fingers on the trigger.

Almost overnight von Trips' ambition to be the knight of a new Germany became closer to an imperative: he now carried the weight of national expectation. Divided and demoralized, Germany needed a uniting figure.

His countrymen had every reason to believe von Trips was on the verge of a Grand Prix title. His win at Aintree gave him nine points, leapfrogging him ahead of Hill in the championship standings. He arrived at the German Grand Prix with a two-point lead. He also had the comfort of racing on familiar ground. The Nürburgring was sixty miles from Burg Hemmersbach and practically within walking distance of the family hunting lodge. He was at home with the scent of pine needles and the short, steep mountains patrolled by wild boar and red deer. It was here that Bernd Rosemeyer had first roused his interest in racing.

Not that anyone would call the Nürburgring welcoming. On
the contrary, the drivers nicknamed it the Green Hell. It was a fourteen-mile roller coaster created exclusively for racing, with narrow, winding turns without guardrails and abrupt plunges that pitched cars airborne. The road ran up and down hills that a civilian road would skirt. An atmosphere of foreboding hung over the course with Schloss Nürburg, a medieval ruin, overlooking Butcher's Field, Pick Axe Head, Enemy's Garden, and other hazards. When an Australian driver was told (incorrectly) that Hitler himself had designed some of the features, he said, “I guessed as much.”

Von Trips arrived for practice a few days before the race and checked into the Sporthotel tucked under the grandstand. The hotel was reserved for teams on race weeks, and it took on a clubby aspect, with drivers wandering among rooms for meals and drinks. They could stroll to the pits in minutes. The drawback for von Trips was that thousands of admirers hovered, even on practice days. They encircled him at every turn, thrusting programs for signatures and cornering him with questions. Girls lingered in the stairwell hoping to meet him.

The demands chafed on his goodwill. “I noticed that I had slowly but surely fallen into a state of nerves,” he said. “I would like to leave the Nürburgring hotel and stay somewhere else, somewhere quiet, but I'm always there because it is practical. . . This time it was simply too dangerous for me. I had to find some peace at any price.”

Von Trips had a reputation for conducting himself as a gentleman, but “sometimes it's just too much,” he told a friend. “When I give a nice lad an autograph, I immediately have a whole tribe of people around me. So I'll go back to using my old method—I look at the floor, three feet ahead of me, and
walk through the area, try not to make eye contact with anyone. It's the best way to get through.” He thrust his hands in his pockets and nodded to avoid shaking hands.

With practice under way, word spread through the paddock that Enzo Ferrari had issued an edict from Modena that Hill should hold back, permitting von Trips to win the race and collect nine more points. According to an anonymous source interviewed by Robert Daley, the decision was based purely on business:

Von Trips is to win here and the world championship, too, in recognition of his splendid victory in the rain at the British Grand Prix in July and because this will sell many Ferrari touring cars in Germany. Ferrari's American market already is booming. He figures that a victory by Hill would not add anything in America.

At Reims Hill had reluctantly complied with the order to step aside for von Trips, though fixing the finish had struck him as a shameful European arrangement determined by pedigree more than merit. But this time, with Hill trailing in points with three races to go, the suggestion that he take a dive stirred him to defiance. On the eve of the race he told Daley that he had not received any such instructions. Nor would he obey them.

“Ferrari can make all the decisions he wants to,” he said. “But the decisions wouldn't mean anything unless I go along with them. I don't intend to go along with them.”

As if to prove his resistance, Hill went out and drove a near-perfect practice lap in eight minutes and fifty-five seconds, with
an average speed of 95.2 mph. One report described him looking “starry-eyed and trembling” when he returned to the pits. It was the fastest lap ever clocked at the 14.2-mile Nürburgring and the first to break the nine-minute barrier, which many considered inviolable. Hill called it a “freak” performance that he would not likely repeat.

“Out of the car he seems colder, more determined than ever before,” Daley reported. “There is an icy edge to his apparently friendly banter with von Trips.”

Meanwhile von Trips struggled through a series of mechanical setbacks. “Madre Mia,” he said as he pulled in after a practice run. Tavoni came over with the conciliatory air of a physician. “First, the transmission is bad,” von Trips told him. “Second, the chassis sits miserably on the course. And what about the time?”

The lap time was indeed laggard. At nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds, he was thirty-four seconds slower than Hill. Tavoni assured him that the mechanics would work through the night to get things right.

Von Trips' mood lightened on the short walk back to the Sporthotel. “If the engine cooperates,” he said, “I will also come in under nine minutes.” He paused to book a private hour of practice at 7 a.m. the next morning, for which he paid 100 deutsche marks.

The reworked engine proved surprisingly swift, allowing von Trips to break the nine-minute mark the next day, as he predicted. Later that morning a light rain fell, preventing Hill and von Trips from duplicating their earlier times. Hill clocked nine minutes and seven seconds; von Trips was two seconds faster. It was a good sign for von Trips. “Now I know that
under the same conditions on the Ring I am probably just a tick faster than Phil,” he said.

A pack of photographers encircled him, each calling for a different pose.
Sit behind the wheel. Look under the hood. Share a laugh with your teammates.
“If they only knew how tired I am,” he whispered to a friend.

That night von Trips snuck away to an old hotel in a nearby village. He ate in a private dining room and borrowed a bed from a mechanic who had booked a double room above a stable. “I slept three feet above the manure pile,” he said. “No one wanted anything from me. It was just wonderful.”

Shortly after noon on race day von Trips ate lunch in his room at the Sporthotel, then napped briefly. His shirt was unbuttoned. Around his neck dangled a gold chain with the Ferrari insignia of the prancing stallion. Hill was staying a few rooms down the hall, and he dropped by. Von Trips could see that Hill was in the same state of nervousness. “Now we'll start together once more,” said von Trips.

“To a good race,” he added.

“We'll have a good race,” Hill said.

Von Trips bathed with cold water and ate a final snack to fortify his blood sugar. At 1:57 p.m. he walked through the tunnel leading to the track. He was greeted by Fangio, who would drop the starting flag. The former champion embraced the man who hoped to succeed him.

Three hundred and fifty thousand Germans stood on the wooded hillsides to watch their national hero flash by in a red Ferrari. By most counts it was the largest crowd gathered at the Nürburgring since von Trips' hero, Bernd Rosemeyer, had driven there in the 1930s. The crowd didn't seem to care that
von Trips was driving an Italian car. He wore a silver helmet in honor of Germany.