Limit, The by Michael Cannell Page B

off a snarling pack of pursuers in a 225-mile road race through pine forests fringing Ravenna. It was one of the few stirring performances of his middling driving career. The crowd carried him on their shoulders after he crossed the finish line at the steps of the local basilica. Before returning to Modena he was introduced to Count Enrico Baracca, father of Francesco Baracca, a World War I pilot who shot down thirty-four planes before crashing to his death at the front. His squadron emblem was a prancinghorse, a
cavallino rampante
, painted on the side of his biplane. At a later meeting with Count Baracca’s wife, the Countess Paolina, she purportedly urged Ferrari to adopt the emblem. She promised that it would bring him luck.
    What happened next is a mystery of the soul. In the summer of 1924 Ferrari had a shot at joining the top ranks of drivers. He won three races in a row when he arrived in Lyon for the French Grand Prix. He took practice laps on a muddy road in his cigar-shaped Alfa Romeo, then abruptly lost his nerve. He left the track without explanation and boarded a train for Modena. His inner resolve had crumbled, leaving him unable to face the heightened expectations. Unsteady nerve was a failing he would never forgive drivers in later years.
    Ferrari entered a few more races, but by the time Dino was born, in January 1932, he had found a new calling as the shrewd and exacting manager of Scuderia Ferrari (
scuderia
is an Italian term for horse stable), a racing arm of Alfa Romeo that competed with the adopted emblem of the black stallion that Ferrari brought with him. Scuderia Ferrari was hugely successful, but success did not guarantee longevity. In January 1938 Alfa Romeo ran low on funds and scaled back its racing program. An Alfa Romeo truck pulled up to 11 Viale Trento e Trieste, Ferrari’s Modena workshop, and began hauling away spare parts and machine tools. Ferrari was absorbed into the main workings of the company, but he left in November to operate the
scuderia
independently. When Ferrari beat an Alfa Romeo for the first time, in 1951, he said, “I have killed my mother.”
    By the time Phil Hill came to Maranello in 1956, Ferrari was a national hero for producing cars that consistently beat the hated foreign marques. The low, powerful machines withdistinctive Ferrari engines and long voluptuous lines had won hundreds of races on four continents. They won in the mountains of Mexico and the forests of France, on roads cut through the sands of Africa and the winding streets of Monaco. In doing so Ferrari restored a measure of pride to a country humiliated by war. When Ferrari won, Italy won.
    Ferrari came to be known as the Pope of the North. The more his cars won, the more actors, business leaders, and politicians gravitated to Maranello, as if making a pilgrimage. His clients—he always called them clients, not customers—included Nelson Rockefeller, Jimmy Stewart, Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, and King Leopold III of Belgium. “There is no finer thrill in the world than driving a Ferrari flat out,” said Roberto Rossellini, the film director and avid client who occasionally came for lunch with his girlfriend Ingrid Bergman.
    Appointments to see Ferrari were as coveted as a papal audience. The
clienti
entered through an archway in the low brick factory compound and sat waiting—and waiting—in a bare blue chamber outside Ferrari’s office. The delay was his passive-aggressive way of showing disdain for clients who tried to reward themselves for financial success or retrieve part of their youth. Rudeness was a way of expressing, however obliquely, that humble Italian workmen, like his father, were the equals of his moneyed customers, who in his opinion rarely deserved such exquisite cars. Ferrari was not handsome or well bred, nor did he pretend to be. But he possessed something almost incalculably desirable. In a mid-1950s culture enthralled by jets,