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

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 gallowshumor 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