The Limit: Life and Death on the 1961 Grand Prix Circuit by Michael Cannell

(Twelve, $26)

In the so-called “golden era” of auto racing, many drivers “fully expected to die on the track,” said Mark Yost in The Wall Street Journal. During 1952’s Carrera Panamericana, a five-day road race from Guatemala to Texas, one driver died when he crashed into a bridge, while a backup driver in the winning car was bloodied by a collision with a vulture. At the 1953 Carrera, 11 drivers and six spectators were killed—a toll exceeded two years later when a disintegrating Mercedes flew off the course during the annual 24-hour Grand Prix race at Le Mans, France, killing 83. Such stories abound in Michael Cannell’s gripping new book, which takes its title from a racing term denoting every driver’s ambition to push his car to a speed on the very edge of spinning out of control.

Cannell’s “exhilarating” narrative “will have you white-knuckling your armchair,” said John Wilwol in The Boston Globe. Cannell’s dual protagonists are longtime rivals who in 1961 vied for the Grand Prix championship while driving for the same team. In temperament, Wolfgang von Trips and Phil Hill were opposites. The aristocratic Von Trips, known to fans as “Count von Crash,” was a dashing Lothario with a foot that knew only the gas pedal. Hill, an American, was a former mechanic who found success in the driver’s seat by respecting “the limit” at all times.

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The whole story’s a bit “guy-centric,” said Douglass K. Daniel in the Associated Press. But The Limit succeeds where previous Grand Prix books failed because he focuses tightly on “the friction between drivers and owners, drivers and drivers, and drivers and their own psyches.” Hill was at times rattled by the carnage around him, briefly walking away from the sport after seeing a fellow driver burn to death. Compounding matters, Hill and Von Trips were forced to compete for the ardor of their sponsor, Enzo Ferrari, who favored drivers who exhibited little regard for longevity. Cannell will have you racing for the final page. Expect “the drama and nostalgia of Seabiscuit and the body count of Gladiator.”