Limit, The by Michael Cannell Read Free Book Online

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.
    â€œThis 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 60in 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 showingwould 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