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car history made up for the rude accommodations. The monthlong training sessions were like a master class, and they allowed him to bask in greatness. He was photographed behind the wheel of “Old Number One,” the first MG ever produced, and he met Goldie Gardner, an elaborately mustachioed old driver who held twenty-two international speed records. In May, toward the end of his stay, Hill rented a room on a farm in Billingshurst, south of London. Spring had come to West Sussex, and the countryside glowed emerald green. The fields carried the rich scent of springtime. That month may have been the only time that Hill enjoyed a peace of the spirit. “During that final month down there, before I headed home, I swore that I would never let myself get tense or nervous again,” he said. “The area had anOld World calm that settled into your bones. I’d roam the hills, walking the country, which was really beautiful at that time of year—and nothing seemed important enough to worry over.”
    Hill broke from his respite long enough to attend the British Grand Prix held on a former World War II bomber base at Silverstone, Northamptonshire. It was a far grander event than he had ever seen, with 100,000 spectators in their Sunday best eating sandwiches in white canvas food tents and drinking pints served from forest-green beer trucks. It was the first race attended by a British monarch. King George VI and Queen Elizabeth shook hands with all twenty-six drivers, then retired to the royal box.
    From his grandstand seat Hill could see the paddock, an enclosed area beside the racetrack where drivers, managers, reporters, and mechanics mingled among trailers and refreshment tents. The cigar-shaped single-seat Maseratis, Talbots, and Alfa Romeos rolled to the starting line and barked to life. They rumbled nose-to-tail around the flat 3.6-mile course marked by hay bales, flashing by the grandstand with a thumping vibration that Hill could feel in his sternum. He could not imagine that he would ever drive in such an event.
    Seventy laps later the Italian anthem played in honor of the winner, an impassive Italian named Nino Farina who sang as he raced. Like the drivers of the 1930s, he wore no helmet, only leather goggles pulled over a linen aviator’s cap. He was among the first to strike a casual posture behind the wheel—arms outstretched at ten and two o’clock, head cocked to the side—that would be widely adopted by Hill’s generation. Farina would go on to win the 1950 championship, the first held after the warand the first governed by a new set of specifications for cars and engines known as Formula 1. It was considered the fastest, most advanced class of racing.
    Hill returned to the United States in June with a souvenir, a long-hooded black Jaguar XK120 with an open cockpit, red leather upholstery, and rakish windscreen—a gleaming trophy of postwar modernity. The efficient sweep of its lines captured what speed looked like in 1950. Hill made it even faster by drilling holes in the alloy chassis for lightness and replacing the heavy leather upholstery with airplane seats.
    During the war Jaguar had been limited to production of military motorbikes and armored sidecars while quietly refining the XK120’s engineering on paper. It was unable to produce the car until 1949. In May 1950, the roadster clocked 136 mph on a straight run along a Belgian highway, making it the fastest production car in existence. It was a sensation: within a year it would be driven by Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Clark Gable, and Lauren Bacall. The MG roadster that had seemed so advanced a year earlier now looked outmoded.
    Hill’s Jaguar came with a plaque bolted to the dashboard certifying that it was a replica of the record-breaking model. It was packed in the hold when Hill arrived in New York on the
Queen Mary.
He disembarked on a West Side pier, drove over the George Washington Bridge, and