Book Review: "The Limit" by Michael Cannell

I just finished reading "The Limit" by Michael Cannell, which tells the tragic story of the 1961 F1 world championship season.  The detailed narrative culminates in a fascinating title chase, which ultimately saw Phil Hill triumph as the first American F1 champion, while his closest rival and Ferrari team mate, Wolfgang von Trips met a gruesome and fateful end at the Italian Grand Prix.  Along the way, we are treated to a vivid and occasionally shocking portrayal of the time, and of all the colorful characters who inhabited the world of motor racing in the late 1950s.

This wonderful and enthralling new work comes from an unlikely source: Michael Cannell is best known as a design/architecture journalist and author who professes little interest in or knowledge of cars and motor racing. Yet his journalistic research and storytelling powers are so strong that I never for a moment felt I was being narrated to by a neophyte. The highest compliment I can pay to the author is that his book is so thoroughly researched, it gives the impression the author is steeped in racing history, and understands the technical side of the sport rather well.

But it's really the human story that interests Cannell, and he delves deeply into the psyche of the neurotic, obsessive Phil Hill and the brash, yet boyishly charming Wolfgang von Trips. Making use of extensive interviews, diaries, letters and historical material, Cannell is able to weave together a remarkably human portrait of each driver, allowing us to really understand each man's philosophy about his sport, and how he coped with triumphs, setbacks, and the inevitable tragedies that were an all-too-common facet of racing in that most dangerous era.By 1957, Phil Hill (at center) and Wolfgang von Trips (to Hill’s left in a polo shirt) had joined the Grand Prix, an international fraternity with a grisly mortality rate. Credit: Klemantaski CollectionI personally picked up this book knowing relatively little about the personal biography of Hill or Trips, but by the end of the volume, I felt I had seen the fascinating intersection between two men's very different trajectories both as people and as athletes. This book is essentially the story of two men who came from wildly opposed circumstances, but came to share the same métier.  The randomness with which one triumphed and the other perished illustrates so poignantly the callous omnipresence of death in that era of racing.

While much is discussed about the 1960s as a "killer era" in F1, Cannell describes the death toll of the late 1950s with great aplomb and gruesome detail. The deaths were as grisly as they were frequent. Whereas the 1960s was an era predominated by drivers belted in to die in horrific fires, the 1950s saw drivers ejected from their mounts, causing broken necks, decapitations, dismemberments, and sometimes massive civilian casualties due to poor circuit safety.  The author, with whom I have become personally acquainted through his blog, likens the bloody F1 battle of the era as a proxy war that continued the nationalistic overtones and unfinished business of the second world war. And while I agree with him, I would add that the legacy of the war also seemed to steel the public against the shock of senseless death that became a regular occurrence.  We learn, for example, that as a young lad, von Trips was a member of a team looking for survivors in the cadaver-strewn rubble after the Allied fire bombing of Cologne.  Having seen humanity at its most shattered, surely this anaesthetized him to the scenes of carnage that were often on view --most notoriously at the 1955 running of Le Mans or the 1957 Mille Miglia.  The ability to look past tragedy and focus on winning, even at the risk of one's life, is the central enigma of the racing driver that is well examined in "The Limit."

The book is already available on Amazon, and although it's a little early in the season, I definitely recommend it as a holiday gift for anyone interested in racing history. The book should be on shelves in bookstores across the nation in the coming weeks.  Below is a video trailer for "The Limit" that you might enjoy watching:

Video of the Week: Stewart, Fittipaldi, and Cevert inspecting the track surface at Zolder

Today, the FIA places heavy expectations on the track owners to make sure everything is up to snuff in order for an F1 race to happen. Back in 1973, the Grand Prix drivers had to bear the burden of ensuring their own safety and threaten boycotts of the races if their demands weren't met.  Here, we see Jackie Stewart and Emerson Fittipaldi complaining that the track was resurfaced right before the race weekend, and that the fresh asphalt was in high likelihood of breaking up.  Francois Cevert is also shown making his views known!  The 3 men in this video went on to finish 1-2-3 in the actual race. Love the period look!

Monaco Moment of Zen

All in a day's work for this intrepid gendarme.

Eva Aeppli's 5 Widows - Memorial to the darker side of F1

Swiss-born artist Jean Tinguely was passionate about two things in life: Art and the Automobile, which he saw as a form of moving sculpture.  In addition to collecting both sculpture and cars, he was a fixture at the F1 circuit in the late 1960s and early 70s. He was close friends with Swiss driver Jo Siffert, and was present at Brands Hatch when Siffert was tragically killed. The photo below was taken the night before the accident, with Siffert at left, and Tinguely at right.

Clearly the death of so many friends and heros deeply saddened the artist, and one of the more interesting assemblages in his collection is his juxtaposition of Eva Aeppli's "5 Widows" with an ex-Jim Clark Lotus 33 from his car collection. 

It's my understanding that Aeppli's work - consisting of 5 black-shrouded female figures in folding chairs- was meant to stand by itself. But Tinguely's placement of the racing car beside the women recalls the way that many drivers' wives would sit in folding chairs in the pits, lap-timing the cars of their husbands.  The assemblage was made around 1972, which was a time of unparalleled death and sorrow in the world of F1.  Since the car belonged to Jim Clark, and we know Tinguely was acquainted with Siffert and Bonnier, I added Jochen Rindt and Jo Schlesser to comprise a probable 5 drivers whose deaths between 1968 and 1972 left the darkest shadows on the sport at that time. Tinguely supposedly had this piece in his bedroom as a shrine to his lost friends and a very moving artistic commentary on the waste of life that was all too common in the racing community of that era.  Further, given the gender dynamics of the time, the mute suffering of the women becomes all the more poignant.

The Museum Tinguely  in Basel is having an exhibit of automotive-related art entitled "Car Fetish. I Drive therefore I am" that seems well worth a visit if you find yourself in Switzerland. The show is up until October, 2011.

via italianfuturism.org

Elf Scan 20: Patrick Depailler

This is one of my favorite photos in the entire Elf Scan series.  A 25 year old Depailler looks past the camera with a gaze of intensity and focus.  Born in 1944, Patrick Depailler was one of the few drivers whose parents fully supported his interest in racing, and encouraged it.  He began by racing motorcycles, but after meeting Alpine boss Jean Rédélé, he transitioned to 4 wheels.  He began at Alpine as a mechanic, then a test driver, and finally a works racing driver.  At the time of this photo, his F1 career was still ahead of him.  His talent was never fully rewarded with a top-line drive, but he did manage 2 wins and 19 podiums in his 95 races in F1 -- most of them for Tyrell and Ligier.  Tragically he was killed in 1980, at age 35 during a test session at Hockenheim.