Limit, The (6 page)

A few days later Hill and Stubbs arrived at the starting point, the mud-street jungle town of Tuxtla Gutiérrez, where mariachi bands played and banners flew in the central square.
Mongrels barked. Peasants stared silently as the foreigners outfitted gleaming cars as if for war. They tore out backseats to make room for auxiliary fuel tanks and spare tires. Shock absorbers were upgraded and earsplitting horns wired up. Drivers taped headlights to protect them from flying rocks.

“This race will kill us all,” the Ferrari driver Giovanni Bracco had said after the 1951 Carrera. “The Italians will not race in Mexico again.” He was wrong. Hill found the Ferrari crew encamped in a rented garage on the edge of town. Inside sat half a dozen long-hooded cars as red as nail polish with their hoods agape. Drivers and mechanics conferred in clusters, like surgeons in an operating room. Bracco was there, despite his reservations. He had prepared by driving all 1,933 miles in advance, stashing Pirelli tires along the way and marking bumps, blind turns, and other hazards in a cryptic code of yellow circles and arrows painted on the road surface.

Chinetti had arranged for Hill to drive a well-worn black-and-silver Ferrari coupe owned by Allen Guiberson, a Texan who had amassed a fortune manufacturing oilfield equipment. Hill was a private entrant—a “privateer,” as they were called—but it was in Ferrari's interest to assist him, since Hill's results would reflect on the company's reputation. So team managers welcomed Hill into the garage, and they would supply him with parts, lodging, and other help as the Carrera made its way north over the next five days.

Hill felt scarcely qualified to join Ferrari, which had three of the world's top road racers—the formidable Italian trio of Bracco, Ascari, and Villoresi—driving a new model, the 340 Mexico Berlinetta, shipped from Genoa. The Berlinettas looked devilishly fast, and they were: they went from 0 to 60
in under six seconds, topping out at 174 mph. The mighty V12 engine sat in a lightweight chassis skinned with sleek and sinister bodywork.

The Ferraris faced a Mercedes team that had resumed racing that year with the experimental 300 SL coupe, a low-slung silver roadster nicknamed the Gullwing because its doors hinged upwards like wings. It gleamed with the impeccable metallic beauty of German engineering. (In a case of inspired casting, Grace Kelly drove a Gullwing in the 1956 film
High Society
.) The Mercedes factories in Stuttgart had suffered severe bombing during the war and had yet to resume full production. Drawing on existing parts, the engineers created a car with exceptional acceleration and low aerodynamic drag. Earlier in the year the Gullwing had won at Le Mans and came second in the tortuous Mille Miglia, the 1,000-mile race over narrow Italian roads.

Mercedes prepared for Mexico with Teutonic thoroughness. A team of two dozen drivers and specialized mechanics arrived weeks in advance armed with rainfall charts, road temperature gauges, and three diesel trucks that distributed mountains of spare tires along the route. (Oddly enough, the Mercedes drivers included John Fitch, a former Nazi prisoner of war and one of the first American pilots to down a Messerschmitt.) Impressive as it might be, the German show of force left Hill flat. He preferred the Italian artistry of Ferrari, even if it looked outmatched.

Hill's unheralded arrival in Tuxtla Gutiérrez marked his debut in international competition, an advancement earned with thousands of gut-thumping miles on ovals and back roads. He would now face his gravest test yet. A poor showing
would demote him to provincial races, possibly forever. Worse, it would confirm Hill's gnawing self-doubt. He feared that he wasn't good enough to race at this level and would end up trapped in a life like his father's, a 1950s organization man with a suburban home and loveless marriage.

So Hill stepped up to the big leagues scared of failure, and equally afraid of persevering. Cars had once been an escape from an unhappy household and a path to self-esteem. Now, for the first time, he confronted a frightening reality: sports cars were lovely, but cruel. On the eve of his international debut he suffered the first onset of a debilitating anxiety. “It came home to me that I was in a sport in which people were getting killed,” he said. His apprehension was heightened by internal conflict: the closer he moved to elite competition, the more he anguished over whether he could qualify as a legitimate career racer. The more he won, the more unworthy he felt.

His anguish expressed itself as a debilitating sinus condition, muscle spasms, heart palpitations, and an ulcerous inability to digest solid food. In the company of daredevils he was reduced to eating jars of baby food. “Most of this stemmed from my basic uncertainty about life,” he said. “I just didn't feel that I belonged down there in Mexico racing against all these professionals. My system rebelled, and I recall almost blacking out a couple of times before the race was over.”

At 6:30 a.m. on the morning of November 19, the cars lined up single file at the edge of town and took off into a foggy dawn at one-minute intervals. Hill bent over for his customary pre-race vomit, then took off at his appointed time. A movable city of support staff followed in cars and planes.

The Carrera Panamericana was modeled after the Mille
Miglia and other town-to-town road races held in Europe, but it was more like a survival test. Cars splashed through rivers and flew off humps on half-paved roads. It was a murderous marathon plagued by washouts and brake failure. Tires cooked on the baking concrete and popped like firecrackers. Between deathly heat and diarrhea, some drivers lost fifteen pounds over the course of the race.

On the first day the pack drove north to the mountains. Hill and Stubbs struggled to see through the dust and dead bugs caked on the windshield. When Stubbs spotted an upcoming bend he would shout a warning and Hill would downshift three or four gears. It was so noisy that they often resorted to hand signals.

Some stretches of road were no more than unevenly paved cart tracks connected by narrow bridges with planks set down for tires. It was not uncommon for drivers moving at 120 mph to spy an armadillo crossing the road, followed by a thump and crunch as it went under the wheels. Farm animals were a bigger problem. “How do you factor in a burro in the middle of the road in a corner just over the brow of a hill?” Hill wondered.

Hill was accustomed to short circular racetracks, where, over the course of several laps, drivers gradually figure out the advantageous line into curves and where best to brake. By comparison, each Mexican mile brought a lurid surprise. Shortly after the start, Ascari, the world champion, crested a hill and found a left-hand turn where he had expected to go right. He rolled his Ferrari coupe at 90 mph and skidded a hundred yards on its roof, thereby eliminating Ferrari's biggest threat to Mercedes.

“We saw Ascari's mechanic rushing toward us down the highway waving excitedly,” Hill said. “The road disappeared
into a sharp cut and as we slowed going through we saw this battered Ferrari rolled on its side, with Ascari standing calmly beside it. This shook our confidence, but then we saw two of the Mercedes undergoing tire changes by the edge of the highway, and this really cheered us up.”

One hundred and ninety miles into the race, a blistering hot stretch winding through sand dunes, a vulture angling for a freshly flattened armadillo smashed through the windshield of a Gullwing driven by Karl Kling, who had started as a reception clerk at the Mercedes office in the 1930s. The vulture knocked Kling's navigator, a former Luftwaffe pilot named Hans Klenk, unconscious (he was not wearing a helmet) and showered the car with bloody chunks of bird flesh and broken glass. Klenk awoke within minutes and urged Kling to keep driving. The next morning all three Mercedes appeared at the starting line with protective vertical bars soldered over the windshields and megaphones to help the navigators shout warnings to the drivers.

Seventeen of the ninety-two starters failed to finish the first leg. A Lancia rolled and ignited after its tire blew. Two Mexican drivers were hospitalized after steering their Oldsmobile off a mountainside. Philip Gow of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, fell out the side of his Lincoln while trying to extinguish an electrical fire.

Hill fared slightly better. Mexico's southernmost roads were made with crushed volcanic rock that wore on tires. Hill cut a hole in the front fenders so that he and Stubbs could check the wear as they drove, but it was hard to see the lacerations at 120 mph. After 330 miles, he crossed the first day's finish line in the Indian town of Oaxaca in ninth place. His tires were worn to bare canvas.

At beery evening gatherings the drivers shared gallows
humor in a chatter of French, English, Italian, and German. As a matter of survival they shared information about upcoming hazards and arcane mechanical issues, such as high-altitude carburetion. “They were a band of brothers,” said Doug Nye. “They all knew that tonight could be their last. There was a good chance the next bed they slept in would be a hospital bed, or a sleep for eternity.”

Armed guards watched the cars at night. The locals had a taste for violent mischief perpetrated more out of boredom than animosity, as Hill learned the next day in the hamlet of Acatlán. A handful of
policía
stood on the outskirts of town enthusiastically waving the cars down a narrow main street shaded by four-story buildings. It was a trick. A waiting crowd of men wearing straw cowboy hats and women in long braids laughed and clapped as the drivers abruptly entered a rectangular plaza and frantically tried to make a series of 90-degree turns. Hill skidded on the wet clay and clouted the central fountain. He and Stubbs stepped out into the blasting midday heat and squandered ten minutes hauling the car off the plaza and replacing the left front wheel. They limped through the afternoon with the front end out of alignment.

Jean Behra, a stocky former motorcycle champion driving a French-made Gordini, led the race on the second day as the course climbed 7,000 feet in the Sierra Nevada. This was the wildest stretch of the race, with steep climbs and roller-coaster curves marked only by white-painted stones strewn along the shoulder. There were no guardrails. Drivers flew around corners and skated to the edge of the roughened asphalt with nothing between them and sheer dropoffs. In some places rock faces fell away a thousand feet on both shoulders.

Thirty miles from the town of Puebla the road plunged into a gorge and made a series of switchback turns. Hill saw tire marks running straight off the road just before a bridge. Behra, still leading, had overshot the turn and vaulted over the edge at 120 mph. He would have plunged into a boulder-strewn river had his car not lodged between two rocks after a tumble of about thirty feet. The spare tires piled in the backseat may have saved his life by acting as a roll bar. He staggered from the car with a severe concussion and seven broken ribs.

After a half-hour stop in Puebla, the surviving drivers flew along a road lined with old eucalyptus trees and passed over the Río Frío Pass, the highest point in the race. On the far side they descended 10,000 feet through a series of switchbacks into Mexico City where 500,000 waving, singing peasants filled the streets for the anniversary of the 1910 Revolution, the Mexican equivalent of the Fourth of July. The crowd surged and seethed even after news that their countryman, Santos Letona Díaz, had died after driving his Jaguar XK120 into a bridge parapet. Nor did they heed the urgings of soldiers standing by with fixed bayonets. The throng parted reluctantly as the cars inched forward, escorted by motorcycle police. Young men ran alongside drumming on the hoods. Hill spent the night pounding dents out of the car body and fixing its leaking radiator.

The pace quickened with the mountains behind them. Over the next four days the drivers crossed broad parched plains as they pushed on to León, Durango, Parral, and Chihuahua. Hill had by now found the right tire pressure and fuel load, and he managed to stay just behind the lead pack where Ferraris and Mercedes fought. On the second to last day it looked as if he might move up a notch by overtaking Jack McAfee of
Manhattan Beach, California, who was slowing as he struggled to see through a cracked windshield. Just as Hill caught up, McAfee's windshield shattered. His sight restored, McAfee pulled away.

Meanwhile Kling, in a Mercedes Gullwing, went all out to catch Bracco, who led the race in a Ferrari. The final run was treacherous with sand blowing across the road, but Kling managed to erase an eight-minute deficit with a blistering desert sprint to win the Carrera. A crowd of Mexicans and Americans watched him nose ahead at a finish line set up at the Ciudad Juárez airport, across the Rio Grande from El Paso.

Mercedes had toppled the indomitable Ferrari team with obsessive planning and the renewed muscle of German engineering. Over the five-day race Kling averaged more than 100 mph. “We were so fast on some of the stages that even in a chartered DC-3 our director of motorsport, Alfred Neubauer, couldn't keep up,” Kling said after the race.

Neubauer stood at the finish line in a suit and trench coat, smoking cigarettes and bear hugging his drivers. The Carrera was Mercedes' first win in the Western Hemisphere and an important step for a company fighting its way back to the top after the devastation of war.

With his suspension nearly gone, Hill thudded his way to a sixth-place finish, earning $581. It was a striking rookie showing, particularly for a driver too unnerved to eat solid foods. His Ferrari was pockmarked from flying stones. Patches of paint were sandblasted off, leaving bare metal shining through. Bits of animal stuck out from the radiator grille. Hill stepped from the car, wind-beaten and dust-covered. Snowflakes had fallen on the high desert earlier that morning. A handful of
drivers drank whiskey with Mexican blankets draped over their shoulders. They posed for pictures with a woman bullfighter. Strangers pounded them on the back. Photographers pressed in for portraits.

Hill had reason to smile as he shivered in the desert chill. For promising young drivers, a show of toughness counted as much as a win. Hill had proven his resilience with a gutty five-day run over some of the worst roads in the world. “If ever there was a racing event in which I felt I had countless times been close to wiping myself out, it was the Carrera,” he said.