Free Limit, The by Michael Cannell Page B

wheels where I put mine.” Ascari became not just a tutor, but a loved mentor. Castellotti bought the same string-backed driving gloves as Ascari, the same blue polo shirt, the same goggles.
    Ascari had not planned on driving that day in Monza, but when Castellotti took a break he impulsively decided to take a few laps before going home for lunch with his wife. “You have to get straight back into the saddle after an accident,” he told a friend, “otherwise doubt sets in.”
    He slipped behind the wheel in his street clothes and peeled out of the pits with his tie flapping over his shoulder. The chinstrap of his lucky blue helmet was being repaired, so Ascari uncharacteristically borrowed Castellotti’s white helmet. After a warm-up lap he waved, as if to confirm that he was okay. He slid his hands around on the wheel, gripping and ungripping as he always did. On the third lap Castellotti could hear Ascari change gears out of sight on the far side of the track, then the engine fell silent. Castellotti ran across and found the car upside down in a patch of bushes. Ascari had been thrown from the cockpit and landed on a stretch of grass. He was gasping faintly when Castellotti reached him. Blood trickled from a nostril. “His eyes seemed to stare at me with their usual kindness,” Castellotti said. “I knelt down next to him as if to help him, but by then my best friend had left me.”
    Castellotti was inconsolable. “When I close my eyes,” he later said, “I can hear Alberto giving me advice.”
    The exact cause of the crash was never determined. Two days later a horse-drawn wagon carried his black coffin through the somber streets of Milan with his blue helmet resting on top. He was buried next to his father, who had died in a similar crash while leading the French Grand Prix at Montlhéry, outside Paris, thirty years earlier. They were the same age almost to the day.
    While Ascari was laid to rest at the end of May 1955, Hill and Ginther were headed to Genoa on a freighter with Allen Guiberson’s Ferrari 750 Monza in the hold for a series of races in France, Italy, and Germany. They were nearing Gibraltar when the captain told them in broken English that a famous driver had died. He had heard a bulletin on the ship’s radio, but missed the name. Hill and Ginther stood on deck, the freighter rolling and lifting beneath them, trying to guess whom the driver might be.
    The next day they received a shipboard wire from Chinetti: Get off at Barcelona and go directly to Modena. Ginther slept on the all-night train up the coast of Spain and France while Hill looked out the window at the passing towns. At dawn they pulled into Modena where a rosy morning light shone on the ancient stone campanile and a piazza cluttered with market stalls. Modena was a provincial center one hundred miles southeast of Milan known for balsamic vinegar and a sweet, fizzy wine called Lambrusco. Most crucially to Hill, it was the engine capital of northern Italy—home to Ferrari, Maserati, and a supporting cast of parts manufacturers, transmissionshops, body fabricators, car journalists, assorted flunkies, and a healthy population of whores.
    Hill dropped his bags at a hotel and went directly to the Ferrari factory, a tidy fortress nine miles up the road in the village of Maranello. A guard opened the gate and Hill walked through an archway beneath the Ferrari name spelled out in its distinctive early modern lettering to wait bleary-eyed in a dingy cubicle. The door opened and there was Enzo Ferrari, age fifty-seven, standing over Hill in a dark suit and tie, his receding silver hair swept back and his rheumy hooded eyes hidden behind thick sunglasses. Ascari was dead, he explained, and he needed an understudy.
    Ferrari led Hill to the factory floor where mechanics were readying the Ferrari 121 LM that Ascari was to have driven at Le Mans. It had a long sinuous body suggesting coiled