The Limit

Starred review from September 26, 2011
Forget those NASCAR wimps; the European and Latin American sports scar and Formula One circuit of the 1950s is where real men raced—and died—according to this high-octane racing saga. Cannell (I. M. Pei: Mandarin of Modernism) follows two drivers for the Ferrari team: the steady American master-technician Phil Hill and a charismatic German bat-out-of-hell with the sublime name of Count Wolfgang von Trips. Driving day and night at insane speeds through cramped streets and blind curves without seat-belts or roll-bars, the two fight a war of attrition as dozens of competitors and teammates are mangled, cut in half, and burned alive in crashes. (Just watching the races was so lethal—“the hood spun loose and sliced through the crowd like a giant scythe, decapitating a row of spectators”—that the Vatican denounced them.) The author revs the narrative with greasy atmospherics and colorful figures like the Bond villainish motor mogul Enzo Ferrari—“What a pity. What about the car?” was his eulogy for a dead driver. There are also tales of womanizing, great stoicism, and a few pit stops for Nietzschean bombast: “It is danger and the insistent proximity to death that most ennobles the soul.” Cannell’s full-throttle epic leaves you breathless. Photos.

October 1, 2011
Vivid biography of a fast-and-furious competitor on the Grand Prix racing circuit. Former New York Times editor Cannell (I.M. Pei: Mandarin of Modernism, 1995) freely admits to not owning a car nor considering himself a particularly "impassioned driver," yet his biography of Phil Hill, a California mechanic who became the only American-born driver to win the Formula One Drivers' Championship Grand Prix, is a passionate, ambitious work. The author retraces Hill's youth, eager to escape the grip of his domineering, argumentative parents as a kid maturing in Depression-era Southern California. An early infatuation with cars found him tinkering with engine parts rather than playing team sports. An indifferent college student, Hill soon dropped out to work as a mechanic and international motor salesman, a livelihood that financed his first flashy European sports-car purchase. Time spent as a Jaguar trainee spawned some accomplished racing of his own throughout his eventful mid 20s, a time when both of his parents died within months of each other and the racing enthusiast became plagued with anxiety spells. Cannell astutely draws on a wealth of sports publications, memoirs and magazines to convey Hill's distinctive passion for the raceway and his competitive nature that belied a reputation for being kindhearted, timid and prone to severe stress. Hill climbed the ranks as a Ferrari rookie driver and meticulous automotive diagnostician, and was soon joined by crash-prone German nobleman teammate Count Wolfgang von Trips. Winning the Italian Grand Prix in 1961 proved to be the bittersweet pinnacle of Hill's career as von Trips died in the same race in a tragic spinout that also killed 15 spectators. Cannell doesn't lean on the crutch of exposition to convey Hill's intrepid, sporty story, demonstrating great talent as a biographer. A crisply written, effectively compelling chronicle.

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