Limit, The Read Free Page A

in the evening, their headlights winding through the mesquite and sagebrush, and gathered around bonfires with beer and bedrolls. They started their engines at dawn, before the sun warmed the flats.
    The Southern California aircraft industry had produced a generation of young men adept at welding and lathe work. From their garages and backyards came a fleet of lowered and lightened hot rods—fenderless, hoodless, and roofless. They were uncomfortable but fast, skimming the hard-packed sand at 125 mph and kicking up thirty-foot rooster tails of chalky dust.
    One by one, or in pairs, they peeled across the desert, reachingspeeds as high as 125 mph or so before hitting what they called “the traps.” A stopwatch triggered when they crossed a rubber hose and stopped when they hit a second hose a quarter mile away. Timers seated at a makeshift table calculated their speed and shouted it to onlookers standing by in the hot rod uniform of Sinatra-slick pompadours and flapping shirttails.
    Hill stacked issues of
Autocar, Motor Sport
, and other British magazines in his bedroom. At night he studied the grainy photographs of his faraway heroes—Juan Manuel Fangio, Luigi Villoresi, Alberto Ascari—leaning into curves on dusty Sicilian hills or rampaging down Adriatic straights. The images were like dispatches from a foreign war, their drama magnified by remoteness.
    Hill had never seen specimens of that world up close until a boy named Donny Parkinson started showing up on the lakebeds in a Bugatti or BMW. Parkinson’s father was a prominent architect—he designed the Los Angeles Coliseum and City Hall—and a prodigious car collector. Parkinson, who would later marry Hill’s sister, invited Hill to borrow from the family’s automotive library, and to inspect their considerable stable of foreign cars. Hill passed his hands over the Italian leather seats and German steering wheels without much hope of ever seeing that world firsthand.
    In fact, his future was altogether unclear. His friends Richie Ginther and George Hearst were drafted in advance of the Korean War, but the military rejected Hill because of his sinus condition. So he worked for a while on the opposite end of the war, as a nose-gun assembler at the Douglas Aircraft plant in Santa Monica. His father wanted him to attend Union College,but Hill defied him by enrolling at the University of Southern California where he halfheartedly studied business administration, a subject Helen urged because she expected him to someday handle her estate.
    He joined Kappa Sigma fraternity, attended sorority parties, played folk songs on a guitar, and cruised fraternity row in Helen’s Pierce-Arrow. He did everything expected of a pledge, but his heart was not in it. Try as he might, he could not summon his father’s gusto for hobnobbing and backslapping. Even after moving into the frat house he would slip away a few nights a week to stay in the bedroom he kept at Helen’s house. He had long since abandoned his parents’ home.
    Hill called his college career “a bust.” He was a lackluster student and an indifferent frat brother, but he could not come up with an alternative. In the late 1940s California was bursting with opportunities, but he was adrift. “From the time I was a little boy, people would ask me: ‘What do you want to be, Phil?’ I couldn’t tell them,” he said. It didn’t help that his brother Jerry was the classic California boy—blond, self-assured, athletic, and popular with girls.
    Hill listened hard for a calling, but heard only pistons. Car mechanics was the one subject that stirred him, but grease monkey did not seem a plausible occupation. Mechanics were dropouts. It was considered a job of last resort.
    Nonetheless, Hill jumped when a job presented itself. In June 1947, after Hill’s second year of college, Hearst referred him to a mechanic named Rudy Sumpter who needed help