Limit, The by Michael Cannell Page A

So, as much as anything, Hill raced for credibility. If he could go fast enough, he thought, he might earn respect.
    It was a revelation to see the comparative stature of European drivers when Hill served as an alternate for an American team at Le Mans, the storied 24-hour race held 113 miles southwest of Paris. The drivers came from Europe’s most prominentfamilies. They attended galas and cocktail parties thrown in their honor and lounged in hotel bars pealing with the sound of laughing women. Strangers bowed to them on the streets.
    At Le Mans the drivers operated in teams of two, switching off in 2.5-hour shifts. Hill co-drove a little Italian-made Osca
barchetta
with Fred Wacker, a veteran of the American sports car circuit. They led their class after eight hours, but withdrew when their axle broke. The crew blamed Hill, saying he had ignored their orders to avoid first gear. “That might be and I remember feeling guilty about it,” he later said, “but I was at a time in my career when getting me to go slow was a difficult thing to do.”
    During a particularly misty dawn, Tom Cole, an American driver sharing a 340 MM Ferrari with Luigi Chinetti, overturned and was killed at a tricky curve known as Maison Blanche. As much as anything Hill had seen, Cole’s death made vivid the perils he would face. “I began to brood over the whole business,” he said. “Cole’s death intensified my feelings in this regard, and while I could appreciate the new attitude I had found in Europe it did not cancel out the extreme tension and anxiety which was building up within me.”
    He would find nothing to reassure him in the following weeks. Bill Spear, a thirty-six-year-old driver from Connecticut, had invited Hill to co-drive a Ferrari with him in a 12-hour race in Reims, France. They picked the car up in Italy and drove over the Alps with Spear and his mechanic, a Frenchman named Maurice, leading the way in a Bentley. Hill followed in the Ferrari.
    The sun rose before 4 a.m. as they crested one of the highest Alpine passes and coasted down the far side. On the longdescent Spear somehow lost control and the Bentley slid off the road and rolled down an escarpment. “It looked like a toy tumbling in front of me,” Hill said. He parked the Ferrari and clambered down the mountainside to find Spear and his mechanic pinned in wreckage. “Maurice had blood coming out of his ears and nose and he was moaning,” Hill said. “I couldn’t handle it. I went around to Spear and told him I’d be back with help. I went back up the road and talked to myself the whole way to prevent myself from flying off the road. I was so frantic about what to do.”
    Within five miles Hill came to a village of stone cottages called La Grave, appropriately enough. It was now 4:30 a.m. He banged on random doors until he found a doctor who loaded a stretcher into the back of his Renault. They managed to remove Maurice from the wreck, but he died during the hour drive to Grenoble. Later that day Maurice’s wife arrived from Paris and demanded to know if anybody had prayed for her husband or administered last rites.
    Spear survived, but he was unfit to race in Reims. Hill entered the 12-hour race with Chinetti instead. The brakes were erratic and the windscreen was puny. Chinetti’s helmet blew off on the second lap and they found themselves squinting into the wind at 150 mph. They lasted four hours.
    Whatever his reservations, Hill returned to Mexico later that year for the 1953 Carrera Panamericana, again driving a Ferrari provided by Allan Guiberson. Richie Ginther, who had recently been discharged from his duties as an army helicopter mechanic, joined him as navigator.
    Hill and Ginther flew to Mexico City and drove south to Tuxtla Gutiérrez. As they traveled the race route in reversethey notated blind turns and other danger spots in a logbook. Meanwhile, Jean Behra, the French driver