The Limit: Life and Death on the 1961 Grand Prix Circuit

By Michael Cannell

Available from:
Twelve Books, New York
www.twelvebooks.com

Hard cover, 336 pages, $25.99 ($12.99 e-book)

Reviewed by Larry Edsall
Zoom an e-mail to Larry

In the summer and early autumn of 1961, American sports fans were engrossed with a race, a race between New York Yankees teammates Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris as they battled to see which might break the previously unassailable single-season home run record set three decades earlier by the famed Babe Ruth.

But it was another race involving teammates that occupied the attention of European sports fans that season. This was the race was between Wolfgang von Trips, a German count whose family estate had been reduced during World War II to little more than a family farm, and Phil Hill, an American who had found within the insane pace of racing cars the sanity that had been lacking in his parents' home.

Like Mantle and Maris, von Trips and Hill were teammates on the most famous of the teams in their sport -- Ferrari. As if a German and an American -- close friends but also intense rivals -- racing for Italy's famed Enzo Ferrari wasn't dramatic enough, their race was played out against a backdrop of a period in which race car drivers faced death at every curve in the track.

That "neither man was Italian... suited Enzo Ferrari," writes Michael Cannell, who chronicles the race between Hill and von Trap in his book, The Limit: Life and Death on the 1961 Grand Prix Circuit. "Every time an Italian driver died the government launched a meddlesome investigation and the Vatican made thunderous condemnations."

Cannell adds that the rivalry between "the American technician" and the "German nobleman, loner versus bon vivant, backstreet hot rodder versus Rhineland count," was made even more vivid because of their polar personalities, as well as the fact that either would become the first world driving champion from his country.

Cannell was an editor at The New York Times, though not in the sports department; he edited the House & Home section of the newspaper. But one day he found a book by the newspaper's correspondent who had covered Grand Prix racing and realized the Hill-von Trips race and an era in which "the sport was dangerous to a degree that seems unthinkable today" were stories that needed to be told.

And he has, in a book that he expertly crafted to unfold much like an auto race itself, from the pre-race driver introductions, though the slow laps behind the pace car, the early jockeying for position, the pressure of the pit stops and the drama of the late-race passing and the chase for the checkered flag.

But Cannell also takes the reader into the closed garages and even inside the cockpit, into the driver's thoughts and emotions, and reveals that too often, even in victory there is loss.