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The Online Magazine for Italian and French Classic Car Enthusiasts

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Interview with Michael Cannell, Author of “The Limit”

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The book is out, the reviews are rave. The Boston Globe says “The Limit, Life and Death on the 1961 Grand Prix Circuit” reads “like a thriller”; the Wall Street Journal calls it a “well researched chronicle” and “an enthralling history of road racing’s golden era”; USA Today said it “deserves a spot in the library—if not, soon enough, on the DVD rack” Indeed, author Michael Cannell, a lifelong New Yorker who is not a car nut and who doesn’t even own one, sold the rights to the movie before the book was even written.

For us hardcore euro-car-nuts, much ado about an old subject. But Cannell thought that the story of Phil Hill and von Trips would resonate with today’s audience, and apparently he was right. According to the Hollywood Reporter, Spiderman Tobey Maguire snapped up the rights to develop the project at Columbia Pictures long before the book was published, perhaps in an attempt to keep ahead of filmmaker Ron Howard, who will begin shooting the Lauda/Hunt epic, “Rush”, in February. Then there is A.J. Baime’s “Go Like Hell”, also presumably in the process of getting to the big screen, not to forget that Wallace Wyss’s book SHELBY: The Man The Cars The Legend has also optioned its movie rights to a film producer.

VeloceToday will review “The Limit” in depth next week. But even before the book was published, Wally Wyss caught up with author Michael Cannell, and asked all the right questions. His interview follows.

Interview by Wallace Wyss

Wyss: Mike, what is your background? Are you a car guy per se?
Cannell: Strangely enough, I’m not a car guy. Quite the contrary, in fact. As a lifelong New Yorker, I don’t own a car. And I’m a pretty poor driver. It is a source of some embarrassment to me that I have shown up to interview great automotive figures in a compact rental car that I can hardly park. [Read more…] about Interview with Michael Cannell, Author of “The Limit”

Phil Hill, On Record

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Hill with a Peugeot in a R&T ad. Now listen to the recording below.


Below, we give our readers a chance to hear a rare 33 1/3 rpm recording, sent to us on a plasticized square piece of cardboard which measures seven by seven inches. For the record, it is simplistic, it is advertising, and it is not particularly well executed, even for the late 1950s. But it offers us a unique insight into what was then a new world for Americans, that of sports car racing and strange foreign cars with even stranger names. Despite being scripted, it says something about Phil Hill we may not have been able to ascertain elsewhere. Most telling, even though it is obviously a bought and paid for commercial, it is honest, as honest as Phil Hill always was.

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Click on record to listen to Phil Hill.
Note that there is a 20 second
pause at the start.

This rare audio record came our way via Serge Dermanian, a retired Ferrari restorer living in Nice, France. Shortly after publishing an excellent article by Philippe H. Defechereux, which used an ad in which Phil Hill was photographed with a Peugeot 403, we received an email from Dermanian who mentioned that he had a record to go along with the ad. He added that he would be glad to send it along. We hooked up our stereo phonograph, carefully played the ancient audio device for pickup to a digital recorder, and finally converted it to the digitized format for use on a computer.

In addition, on this old, scratchy record, we hear Road & Track Editor John R. Bond, almost a lone voice in the wilderness, who used the magazine’s power and platform to beg Detroit to build cars with good handling, quality, common sense and good gas mileage. There is a message here, then, and now.

Our thanks to Serge Dermanian for finding and sending along this rare recording of the late Phil Hill. Note that there is a 20 second pause before the actual voices are heard, so have patience.

Lynch at the Quail 2008

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We lost one of our finest when World Champion Phil Hill left us on August 28. He was enjoying cars and his many friends and admirers right up until the end. Phil won three races at the old Pebble Beach road course and also won the Pebble Beach Concours twice with cars he restored personally. Here, he poses at The Quail with former Ferrari President, Jean Todt, who managed Ferrari’s racing team during the Schumacher era. Credit: Marcel Massini

Michael T. Lynch reports on this year’s Quail Logde happenings.

The Quail – A Motorsports Gathering has now established itself as the hottest ticket of Monterey Peninsula automobile festival week. The tickets sold out back near the beginning of 2008 in a matter of hours. [Read more…] about Lynch at the Quail 2008

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