- 03 Oct 11, 16:19#278265
Danger’s Still Our Middle Name
By MICHAEL CANNELL
Published: October 1, 2011
Michael Cannell is the author of the forthcoming book “The Limit: Life and Death on the 1961 Grand Prix Circuit.”
FIFTY years ago, Phil Hill became the first American to win the Formula One world championship. It was a jaw-dropping achievement for a driver who began as a lowly mechanic in Santa Monica, Calif. More impressive still, Hill won racing’s highest laurel at a time when European motor sports killed about a third of its drivers. In the days before seat belts and roll bars, race-car drivers were crushed, burned and beheaded with unnerving regularity.
A half-century later, those fiery deaths seem like ancient atrocities. Our risk-averse culture abides no such carnage. Drivers now wear flameproof coveralls and ride in seemingly impregnable steel cages. More than a decade passes between Grand Prix deaths.
In fact, we all benefit from the modern-day fixation on safety. Ours is a world of encyclopedic warning labels and four-wheel stability control guided by gyroscopic sensors. Even warfare is increasingly waged with computer viruses, drones and other remote gadgetry.
There is no cause to sentimentalize the days before seat belts or passenger-side air bags, and car racing’s popularity has hardly suffered from the arrival of safety features — though what was once a raw sport of nerves is now largely a technology contest. For some, that seems reason for regret.
One wonders if we live less fully by marginalizing physical courage, both in our own lives and in the sports we follow. Do we deprive ourselves of some Nietzschean invigoration, not to mention the tingling pleasures of precariousness, by relegating risk to the realm of video games?
There may indeed be a downside to the cocoon of security. Why else would we continue to court risk in outdoor adventure and sports? Professional football and other mainstream sports have laudably taken steps to minimize the dangers of concussions and other injuries, but the rising cult of extreme sports and the hairy shenanigans of the “Jackass” franchise come to mind as examples of a grass-roots culture that romances risk in defiance of conventional thinking. We might decry recklessness, but we respond with swells of emotion to spectacular air-show crashes, not to mention adventure tales like “The Perfect Storm” and “Into Thin Air.” We hate risk, except when we love it.
The drivers of the 1950s entertained no such conflict. They had a tolerance for bloodshed that seems unfathomable to us now. They crashed so routinely that the two-time world champion Alberto Ascari deliberately spurned his children to spare their feelings. “I don’t want them to get too fond of me,” he said. “One of these days I may not come back and they will suffer less if I have kept them a bit at arm’s length.” Sure enough, in 1955 Ascari flipped his Ferrari and died during a practice lap in Monza, Italy.
The British drivers in particular carried themselves with the forbearance of Spitfire pilots. In interviews, they voiced familiar platitudes about peril concentrating one’s mind on the here and now. “The very uncertainty sharpens the appetite,” said Colin Chapman, a driver who founded Lotus, the British race-car manufacturer. “The danger makes the value of life all the more appreciable.”
Hill was a voice of dissent. He broke with the stoic code by talking candidly, and volubly, about the foolishness of driving at 170 m.p.h. with no safety features aside from hay bales. Tetchy and high-strung, he paced the pits chain-smoking and wiping and re-wiping his goggles. One reporter called him “Hamlet in goggles and gloves.”
Hill’s Ferrari teammate and rival for the 1961 championship, Count Wolfgang von Trips, voiced the opposite view: he believed that racing fulfilled an inborn need for physical tests. If drivers died in pursuit of the flag, so be it. In his opinion, the fight ennobled the spirit and strengthened a new generation of leaders to face the challenges of the nuclear age. Racing, he said, was “beautiful and necessary.” Von Trips somersaulted off the track and died in the penultimate Grand Prix of the 1961 season, the same race in which Hill clinched the championship.
We might relegate the back-and-forth debate waged by Hill and von Trips to history, but it bears on our current preoccupation with safety, and the backlash against it. Von Trips contended that facing danger fortifies our inner life, a sentiment that may hold as true today as it did when the two men dueled in racing’s bloodiest seasons. “Only those who do not move do not die,” the French driver Jean Behra said in 1957. “But are they not already dead?”
By MICHAEL CANNELL
Published: October 1, 2011
Michael Cannell is the author of the forthcoming book “The Limit: Life and Death on the 1961 Grand Prix Circuit.”
FIFTY years ago, Phil Hill became the first American to win the Formula One world championship. It was a jaw-dropping achievement for a driver who began as a lowly mechanic in Santa Monica, Calif. More impressive still, Hill won racing’s highest laurel at a time when European motor sports killed about a third of its drivers. In the days before seat belts and roll bars, race-car drivers were crushed, burned and beheaded with unnerving regularity.
A half-century later, those fiery deaths seem like ancient atrocities. Our risk-averse culture abides no such carnage. Drivers now wear flameproof coveralls and ride in seemingly impregnable steel cages. More than a decade passes between Grand Prix deaths.
In fact, we all benefit from the modern-day fixation on safety. Ours is a world of encyclopedic warning labels and four-wheel stability control guided by gyroscopic sensors. Even warfare is increasingly waged with computer viruses, drones and other remote gadgetry.
There is no cause to sentimentalize the days before seat belts or passenger-side air bags, and car racing’s popularity has hardly suffered from the arrival of safety features — though what was once a raw sport of nerves is now largely a technology contest. For some, that seems reason for regret.
One wonders if we live less fully by marginalizing physical courage, both in our own lives and in the sports we follow. Do we deprive ourselves of some Nietzschean invigoration, not to mention the tingling pleasures of precariousness, by relegating risk to the realm of video games?
There may indeed be a downside to the cocoon of security. Why else would we continue to court risk in outdoor adventure and sports? Professional football and other mainstream sports have laudably taken steps to minimize the dangers of concussions and other injuries, but the rising cult of extreme sports and the hairy shenanigans of the “Jackass” franchise come to mind as examples of a grass-roots culture that romances risk in defiance of conventional thinking. We might decry recklessness, but we respond with swells of emotion to spectacular air-show crashes, not to mention adventure tales like “The Perfect Storm” and “Into Thin Air.” We hate risk, except when we love it.
The drivers of the 1950s entertained no such conflict. They had a tolerance for bloodshed that seems unfathomable to us now. They crashed so routinely that the two-time world champion Alberto Ascari deliberately spurned his children to spare their feelings. “I don’t want them to get too fond of me,” he said. “One of these days I may not come back and they will suffer less if I have kept them a bit at arm’s length.” Sure enough, in 1955 Ascari flipped his Ferrari and died during a practice lap in Monza, Italy.
The British drivers in particular carried themselves with the forbearance of Spitfire pilots. In interviews, they voiced familiar platitudes about peril concentrating one’s mind on the here and now. “The very uncertainty sharpens the appetite,” said Colin Chapman, a driver who founded Lotus, the British race-car manufacturer. “The danger makes the value of life all the more appreciable.”
Hill was a voice of dissent. He broke with the stoic code by talking candidly, and volubly, about the foolishness of driving at 170 m.p.h. with no safety features aside from hay bales. Tetchy and high-strung, he paced the pits chain-smoking and wiping and re-wiping his goggles. One reporter called him “Hamlet in goggles and gloves.”
Hill’s Ferrari teammate and rival for the 1961 championship, Count Wolfgang von Trips, voiced the opposite view: he believed that racing fulfilled an inborn need for physical tests. If drivers died in pursuit of the flag, so be it. In his opinion, the fight ennobled the spirit and strengthened a new generation of leaders to face the challenges of the nuclear age. Racing, he said, was “beautiful and necessary.” Von Trips somersaulted off the track and died in the penultimate Grand Prix of the 1961 season, the same race in which Hill clinched the championship.
We might relegate the back-and-forth debate waged by Hill and von Trips to history, but it bears on our current preoccupation with safety, and the backlash against it. Von Trips contended that facing danger fortifies our inner life, a sentiment that may hold as true today as it did when the two men dueled in racing’s bloodiest seasons. “Only those who do not move do not die,” the French driver Jean Behra said in 1957. “But are they not already dead?”
"I'll bet ya a hundred and five thousand dollars you go to sleep before I do."
--Dobbsie
--Dobbsie
You're a wild man on the road? 
