Limit, The (4 page)

Hill broke from his respite long enough to attend the British Grand Prix held on a former World War II bomber base at Silverstone, Northamptonshire. It was a far grander event than he had ever seen, with 100,000 spectators in their Sunday best eating sandwiches in white canvas food tents and drinking pints served from forest-green beer trucks. It was the first race attended by a British monarch. King George VI and Queen Elizabeth shook hands with all twenty-six drivers, then retired to the royal box.

From his grandstand seat Hill could see the paddock, an enclosed area beside the racetrack where drivers, managers, reporters, and mechanics mingled among trailers and refreshment tents. The cigar-shaped single-seat Maseratis, Talbots, and Alfa Romeos rolled to the starting line and barked to life. They rumbled nose-to-tail around the flat 3.6-mile course marked by hay bales, flashing by the grandstand with a thumping vibration that Hill could feel in his sternum. He could not imagine that he would ever drive in such an event.

Seventy laps later the Italian anthem played in honor of the winner, an impassive Italian named Nino Farina who sang as he raced. Like the drivers of the 1930s, he wore no helmet, only leather goggles pulled over a linen aviator's cap. He was among the first to strike a casual posture behind the wheel—arms outstretched at ten and two o'clock, head cocked to the side—that would be widely adopted by Hill's generation. Farina would go on to win the 1950 championship, the first held after the war
and the first governed by a new set of specifications for cars and engines known as Formula 1. It was considered the fastest, most advanced class of racing.

Hill returned to the United States in June with a souvenir, a long-hooded black Jaguar XK120 with an open cockpit, red leather upholstery, and rakish windscreen—a gleaming trophy of postwar modernity. The efficient sweep of its lines captured what speed looked like in 1950. Hill made it even faster by drilling holes in the alloy chassis for lightness and replacing the heavy leather upholstery with airplane seats.

During the war Jaguar had been limited to production of military motorbikes and armored sidecars while quietly refining the XK120's engineering on paper. It was unable to produce the car until 1949. In May 1950, the roadster clocked 136 mph on a straight run along a Belgian highway, making it the fastest production car in existence. It was a sensation: within a year it would be driven by Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Clark Gable, and Lauren Bacall. The MG roadster that had seemed so advanced a year earlier now looked outmoded.

Hill's Jaguar came with a plaque bolted to the dashboard certifying that it was a replica of the record-breaking model. It was packed in the hold when Hill arrived in New York on the
Queen Mary.
He disembarked on a West Side pier, drove over the George Washington Bridge, and motored 2,440 miles to California, stopping en route to see the Indianapolis 500. Before the construction of interstate highways, cross-country drives threaded through small towns. One can only imagine the reaction when the black Jaguar stormed by at 30 miles over the speed limit.

At twenty-three, Hill had no designs on greatness. “The limit of my ambition,” he said, “was someday to become mechanic to a great racing driver.” That would change soon enough.

On November 5, 1950, five months after returning from England, Hill waited in the fifth row of bulbous sports cars—Allards, MGs, a Frazer Nash—pushed into position at a makeshift starting line beside a horse corral. Earlier he had snuck into the woods to heave a hearty vomit, as he often did before racing. He inhaled deeply and rested his hands on the steering wheel. It was the biggest race of his life.

Hill saw plenty of familiar faces on the starting line. He had chased them in illicit drag races on the back streets of Santa Monica and on the dry lakebeds northeast of Los Angeles. They had converged from all over California—Altadena, Oakland, Beverly Hills—for the Pebble Beach Cup, one of the first open-road sports car races in America. In imitation of European races, the course ran clockwise on winding public roads for a total of 100 miles. The program listed Hill as “a driver to watch.”

From the starting line Hill could see down the opening stretch of a tree-lined race course on closed-off roads, much of it gravel, that looped almost two miles around the rugged Monterey Peninsula with sly turns and clumps of spectators standing behind flimsy snow fencing. A cold wind rustled the cypress trees and fog drifted in from Carmel Bay, slicking the road.

Hill faced a dogged pack of Californians at a distinct disadvantage. Earlier in the day he had broken his clutch by shifting through the gears without letting off the throttle, a hot-rodding
trick known as speed shifting. Now, in the day's main event, he would have to make do by timing his gearshifts to the engine revs. Normally he would do so by watching the rev counter on the Jaguar's dashboard, but he was determined to time his shifts by listening to the engine revs so that he could keep his eyes on the road. A slip-up could be disastrous.

When the flag swung down, the cars leapt away in a swirl of dust and blue smoke. All but Hill. His Jaguar stalled. He jabbed the start button. Nothing. In a panic, he waved over the handful of friends who passed as his pit crew. Richie Ginther, a skinny, freckled kid from Hill's Santa Monica neighborhood, and his friend Hearst jogged over and pushed the black Jaguar into motion. The engine bucked to life, catapulting Hill forward.

Hill was last across the starting line by three hundred feet, but he caught up fast, passing two cars on the first lap. “I drove with a thrusting kind of fever,” he said. “Winning was essential and I just more or less drove over anyone who got in my way.”

The cars flicked by spectators at fifty, sixty, seventy miles an hour, but for Hill time slowed. He could see every dodge and feint with uncanny clarity. He was in what athletes now call the zone—a lonely state of heightened awareness.

As Hill wove through the pack, the leader, a white Jaguar driven by Hill's friend Bill Breeze, came into view a quarter mile ahead. Hill gained steadily, but he fumbled the timing of his downshifts and repeatedly sent the Jaguar skidding to the shoulders. By lap 9 he was within striking distance of Breeze. He could tell that Breeze's brakes were failing because he was slowing earlier before turns. Two laps later he pushed by him. Breeze dropped out with smoking brake drums.

Halfway through the race, with Hill comfortably in front, Ginther held up a sign saying “Long Lead.” He was trying to tell Hill that he could afford to slow down and spare his engine, but the protocol of road racing was so new to Hill that he misunderstood. He thought that somebody named Long was leading.

By now Hill's brakes were also failing. When his speed was too great to negotiate a turn, he slowed himself by tossing his rear wheels around in a sideways slide—a maneuver known as drifting. “The first Jags had notoriously bad brakes,” Hill later said, “but I got so that I learned how to run without using the brakes much.”

With shrouds of fog closing in and pursuers pressing the pace, Hill downshifted through hairpin turns and ripped down the dirt-packed backstretch. “He was driving the wheels off that car,” said Bill Pollack, a friend who had dropped out of the race and watched from the sidelines.

By the final lap the Jaguar was brakeless and mud-covered. Its humped fenders were dented from clobbering protective hay bales along the roadside. Ginther thrust both hands in the air as Hill crossed the finish line to take first place. Minutes later he cradled a trophy, surrounded by grinning locals.

It was an auspicious performance. Word of Hill's last-to-first scamper spread among racing circles as far as New York. “That was my breakthrough race,” he said. “With everything going wrong, I still won. It was there that people began to take notice.” All his expectations now shifted. The son of abusive alcoholics, a childhood misfit and college dropout, he felt the stirring of possibility. He would devote himself to working his way back to Europe, this time as a driver.

His greatest obstacle would be his state of mind. In the following months he seized up with anxiety before each race and grasped at any advantage he could find. It was not unusual for him to stay up all night refining his car, tweaking and tightening until minutes before the flag dropped. After each win, or near win, he slid into depression. He attributed his success to the mechanical edge he had fixed for himself, not his driving skill.

Hill had earned a reputation as a sensitive type prone to hand-wringing, but he was also capable of a cold detachment in the face of death. When his mother lay gravely ill in the winter of 1951 she asked him to be baptized. It was her dying wish. He refused.

A few days after she died in March, Hill, then twenty-four, stood over the casket studying her countenance. His only emotion was irritation at her makeup. “Those aren't my mother's lips,” he told the undertaker. “That is not the way they were.” Then, in precise detail, he described how his mother had made herself up so the undertaker could repaint her face. Hill's father died three weeks later, on Hill's twenty-fifth birthday, days after suffering a heart attack during a medical checkup conducted in preparation for a cruise with the naval reserves.

The deaths brought Hill more relief than grief. He had long since severed his emotional ties to his parents, if he ever had any. With his parents gone, he blithely used his inheritance to buy a Ferrari. It must have given him wry pleasure to plow the dividend of his unhappy family life into exquisite machinery. He was unaware that the car would draw him into another dysfunctional family struggle.

Enzo Ferrari in front of his Maranello factory: “I don't care if the door gaps are straight. When the driver steps on the gas I want him to shit his pants.” (Getty Images)

H
ILL BOUGHT HIS
F
ERRARI
from Luigi Chinetti, an importer who acted as Enzo Ferrari's ambassador and talent scout in America. After the Pebble Beach race, Chinetti took notice of Hill's ability, however callow. In the following years he would become something of a godfather to Hill, as he was to other promising American drivers. “I look for the fighter,” Chinetti said.

A moody man with a pronounced forehead, thick eyebrows, and an impenetrable Italian accent, Chinetti had a reputation as a tough long-distance driver, twice winning the 24-hour race at Le Mans before World War II. (He won in 1932 after plugging a leaky fuel tank with chewing gum.)

He came to the Indianapolis 500 as a Maserati manager and mechanic in May 1940, just weeks before Paris fell to Germany and Italy declared war on Britain and France. Chinetti was
an ardent anti-Fascist and he chose to stay in New York as an enemy alien and work as a mechanic for a Jaguar dealership.

Chinetti returned to Europe in 1946 as a U.S. citizen, flying with his wife and four-year-old son on one of the early transatlantic flights to Paris. He drove from Paris down to Modena, Italy, home of Enzo Ferrari, in a borrowed front-wheel-drive Citroën with tires so worn that a friend sat on the hood for traction as they crossed the snowy Alps.

At 11 p.m. on Christmas Eve, Chinetti pulled up in front of 11 Viale Trento e Trieste, a two-story stone building with a pair of Shell gas tanks stationed out front like sentries. This was the old factory where Enzo Ferrari had started out. He still lived there, in a modest apartment above the workshop.

Chinetti was by now accustomed to the prosperity of New York. He was shocked when he stepped into Ferrari's first-floor office. Seated in a worn leather chair under a bare light bulb, Ferrari, then forty-eight, looked haggard and heavy-lidded. The war had aged him and laid waste to his operations. The workshop that once bustled with craftsmen sat silent. With fuel scarce, the hissing fire was the only source of heat. “The place seemed like a musty tomb reopened to a crack of light after centuries of isolation,” Brock Yates wrote in his biography of Ferrari.

The two men had raced together on the Alfa Romeo team fifteen years earlier. They talked as old friends surrounded by dusty trophies and black-framed photos of drivers, many of them victims of crashes or combat.