Limit, The by Michael Cannell Read Free Book Online Page A

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 MilleMiglia 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.
    â€œWe saw Ascari’s mechanic rushing toward us down the highway waving excitedly,” Hill said. “The road disappearedinto 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,