Limit, The by Michael Cannell Page A

end in sight, he wrote, “the race is lost,” and put the log down for good. Dino died on June 30, 1956, seven months short of his twenty-fifth birthday. A troupe of factory engineers in overalls carried his coffin to a tomb in the San Cataldo cemetery on the edge of Modena.
    Ferrari did what he could to keep Dino’s memory alive. His son’s little Fiat sedan sat under a tarp outside the Modena workshop where Dino last parked it. Ferrari would not allow it to be moved. He hung a black-framed portrait of Dino in his Maranello office with votive candles burning beneath it, and embossed Dino’s name in script on the valve covers of a line of engines. Every morning, after visiting the barber, he pushed through the iron cemetery gates and perched on a bench, speaking aloud to his son about the week’s events—driver gossip, engineering advances, race results—as if they were seated at lunch.
    Without an heir, Ferrari lived only with the constancy of death. Dino’s passing shadowed him, and he relived it with the death of each successive driver. Only one thing kept the darkness at bay: the affirmative force of winning races. For Ferrari, it was an endless, insatiable need.

    Ferrari was born on the northern outskirts of Modena on February 18, 1898, the son of a blacksmith who fabricated sheds and gangways for the railroads spreading like tendrils through the Italian countryside. The household clanged with hammering in the adjacent ironworks as the old metal craftsmen tried to keep pace with the demands of industrialization.
    When Ferrari was ten his father took him and his older brother, Alfredo Jr., to see the great Italian driver Felice Nazzaro win on a 30-mile circuit of dusty public roads winding through the Bologna countryside. “It was watching races like that, being up close to those cars and those heroes, being part of the yelling crowd, that whole environment that aroused my first flicker of interest in cars,” he wrote.
    His ambition to drive race cars himself was put off when his father died of pneumonia in 1916. Alfredo Jr. died the same year of an undiagnosed illness while serving in the ground crew of a World War I air force squadron. Within a year of their deaths the Italian army drafted Ferrari and sent him to shoe mules used to pull artillery for a squadron on the mountainous Austrian front north of Bergamo. He nearly died after contracting pleurisy during the 1918 flu pandemic. He lay among other incurables relegated to a compound of wooden huts. According to Richard Williams, a Ferrari biographer, he woke each morning to the hammering of coffin makers.
    Despite all expectations, Ferrari gradually recovered. After his discharge he returned to Modena with no money or prospects. It is easy to trace the brooding, melancholy presence of the older Ferrari to this period of sorrow, guilt, and apprehension. “I was alone,” he wrote. “My father and my brother were no more. Overcome by loneliness and despair, I wept.” He considered himself an orphan, despite his mother’s presence.
    He parlayed his modest metalworking skills into a job with an outfit that turned surplus army trucks into passenger cars. His duties included driving the trucks ninety miles from Turin to Milan. In 1919, he entered the Targa Florio, a road race run annually through the Sicilian mountains. In those days getting to the race was often more demanding than the race itself. En route to Sicily he crossed the Abruzzi Mountains, where he claimed to have driven through a blizzard and chased off wolves with an army handgun that he kept under his seat cushion. As with many episodes in Ferrari’s life, it is hard to distinguish fact from the legends he invented for himself.
    By 1923 Ferrari had joined the Alfa Romeo team. Photographs show him sitting in the high cockpit of the period, wearing a long coat and operating gear levers as long as golf clubs. He recorded his first win by holding