Limit, The by Michael Cannell

times by tenths of a second. Six thousand miles from California, Hill had found a place that felt like home.
    It would not be an easy home. As he would soon discover, Modena was a Shakespearian court, full of subterfuge and friendships cut short—and lorded over by the implacable Enzo Ferrari.

Enzo Ferrari as an Alfa Romeo driver in 1921. “One must keep working continuously. Otherwise, one thinks of death.” (Associated Press)

5
Pope of the North
    F OR ALL THE GLAMOUR of the Ferrari name, its founder lived a circumspect life of Old World persuasion. Enzo Ferrari parked his considerable heft in the same barber chair—the first one on the left—at 8:30 every morning for a shave. He ate lunch,
salsicce cotto
or
tortellini alla panna
, with the same consiglieri in a private room at Il Cavallino, a restaurant he set up in a farm building directly across from the factory gate in Maranello. He and his cronies talked about the blunders of Il Canarini, the local soccer team, the evening card game, and the whores who joined them for grappa.
    Ferrari was a tall, bulky man with a sweep of receding white hair and a prominent Roman nose. He was rarely seen without sunglasses and his trademark baggy suit. His pants rode high on his tub-shaped midsection, hoisted by suspenders.
    There were many women in Enzo Ferrari’s life, but noneheld a central place. He once said that the greatest love a man could know was the love between father and son. If so, Ferrari was doubly blessed. He had two sons: Dino by his wife, Laura, and Piero by his mistress Lina Lardi. He had dozens more, if you count the drivers.
    Dino was a tall, dark-haired boy whom Ferrari hoped would succeed him as head of the Ferrari marque. It was an unrealistic ambition. Dino was born with a rare form of muscular dystrophy and doctors warned that he would not see adulthood. To complicate matters, his congenital ailment afflicted only men. Ferrari’s wife, Laura, had been the carrier, which stirred the simmering mix of resentment and guilt in the Ferrari marriage. (In his 1991 biography of Ferrari, Brock Yates suggests that Laura may have been a prostitute when she met Ferrari, and Dino’s illness could have been syphilis transmitted in the womb.)
    Dino’s disease was easily thrust from their minds as long as he was active and strong. As a teenager he happily rode a bike from the Ferrari apartment in Modena to the factory nine miles up the road in Maranello, where he was a bright-eyed apprentice. He spent long days hunched over the drafting board as an engineering student in Modena and Switzerland, but he tired easily and returned home before completing his studies.
    â€œThe symptoms of his illness were now perceptible,” Ferrari wrote in his memoir, “erupting dramatically” for the first time at a dinner with drivers and mechanics when Dino was nineteen. They had gathered to celebrate a win at the Mille Miglia, but Ferrari cut the dinner short when Dino was too weak to eat.
    When he wasn’t caring for Dino or meeting with engineers at the factory, Ferrari visited Lina Lardi, the mistress who livedwith their son Piero in the village of Castelvitro, nine miles south of Modena. She was by all accounts a sweet-natured woman who made few demands. Her redbrick farmhouse surrounded by cherry trees was a sanctuary from the trials of Ferrari’s office and the enmity of his marriage. Like many aspects of his life, this alternate household lived in the half shadows.
    By the fall of 1955 Dino was bedridden with kidney failure. His parents hovered, attending to blankets and meals. “I had always deluded myself—a father always deludes himself—that we should be able to restore him to health,” Ferrari wrote. “I was convinced that he was like one of my cars, one of my engines.”
    Ferrari drew up daily charts to track Dino’s calories and urea in his blood, and he noted them in a log. One night, with the