Speed Kings Read Free

car kicked on again, as though it had been booted up the trunk. Up above 100 mph, and faster still, to 110 mph, 115 mph, where the needle held and started to flicker up and down.
    As he came into Antibes, Billy reined the car in again. It had a crash gearbox, a bugger to work. Billy pressed the clutch, came out of gear into neutral, revved the engine till it was in synch with the cogs, and slipped back into a lower gear. A double de-clutch. He did it unthinkingly. His foot danced on the pedals, and his practiced hand worked the stick down by his right side, moving, as his friend Henry Longhurst put it, “as smooth as butter.” Of course, Longhurst said, “if you got it wrong, you could break your wrist, let alone your gearbox.” But Billy was in rhythm with the car. He worked it as a good drummer does his instrument, hands, feet, and thoughts all moving together in time.
    Skirting Nice, Billy had to dodge between the traffic, which was moving soslowly in comparison with his car that it may as well have been standing still. There was no point stopping for it at this speed. Billy’s maxim was “Don’t brake, avoid.” Which he did. In, out, and around, his mind working overtime to find the ideal line, making a series of quick calculations, like a man running downhill over rough terrain—his thoughts moving as fast as his feet as he figures out a safe path across the rocks. The car shot on along the Basse Corniche, the sea on one side, the cliffs on the other.
    The Bentley’s beam axle made it a bumpy ride, and with the big silver supercharger weighing down the front, Billy’s model was particularly prone to understeer. On the turns, it spat up gravel as it pulled out wide, away from the road. On the tight horseshoe at Villefranche, he pushed the throttle down farther, forcing more torque into the back wheels, making the cross-ply tires bite in an attempt to balance out the drift. It was a double-or-quits move. And it worked. A bit more throttle. A bit more, and then the back of the car tucked in and the whole thing snapped back into line as they entered the straight road.
    He was into the last stretch, across the border into Monaco, and really screaming. The stopwatch ticked onward, fifty-two minutes, fifty-three minutes, up toward the hour mark. He sped on, past Beaulieu and Cap Ferrat, Eze, Cap-d’Ail, through the outskirts of Monte Carlo, that “sunny place for shady people,” as Somerset Maugham called it. Past the port and on to Avenue d’Ostende. And there it was, the Hotel de Paris. Billy eased the car back down, changing down the gears as the pace slackened off. He pulled to a stop, for the first time since setting off, just outside the front doors of the hotel. He glanced down at the dash, punched the button on the stopwatch. Fifty-eight minutes. Made it. And with almost two minutes to spare.
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    E veryone who knew Billy Fiske, however well, agreed on one thing: he loved speed; seemed, even, to live for it. In the 1980s, when the actor Douglas Fairbanks Jr. was asked what he remembered about his friendship with Billy, the first thing that popped into his mind was that “he was famous for setting the speed record between London and Cambridge.” Henry Longhurst, Billy’s friend from his days at Cambridge University, said that Billy had “an uncanny eye for speed.” Like all Billy’s friends, Longhurst had a fund of stories about his journeys in the passenger seat of that big green Bentley. Longhurst was a golfer, a good one, and he and Billy used to make the run from Cambridge to the Royal Worlington Course at Mildenhall, a twenty-one-mile stretch. “Sometimes the time would be around 19 minutes,” Longhurst wrote in his memoirs. “Andwithout a tremor of apprehension to public or passenger. Day after day, sitting on Fiske’s left, I would notice my own front wheel passing within an inch or so of its track the day