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those days,” Hill later recalled. “I don’t really know why except that it was such a simple life. I was totally devoted to it and totally interested in it.”
    The midget team was now racing seven nights a week. When a driver broke his leg, Sumpter asked Hill to replace him in a field of forty cars. He spun badly on the first lap of a qualifying race, then settled down as he got the hang of sliding around the dirt oval. The trick was to ride in what drivers called the groove, a line that cuts low on turns and wide on straightaways. He qualified for the finals “even though they told me I looked like a cow walking across an icy pond.”
    Hill drove well enough to earn a regular spot, though the assignment soured when he performed poorly in a stretch of races, finishing in the back of the pack at Gilmore Stadium and smacking the fence at San Bernardino. Hill blamed his washout on poor mechanics. Sumpter disagreed. Hill quit.
    Midget racing was a uniquely American sport taken up by tough young men from blue-collar neighborhoods. The fastest advanced up the ranks to the Indianapolis 500, the pinnacle ofAmerican driving. Hill might have followed that path, but he found oval racing a deadening merry-go-round. California had not yet built an extensive network of roads. Its racing was consequently modeled on horse tracks. Cars skidded counterclockwise around the same quarter mile lap after lap, their wheels perpetually swung leftward. European races, by contrast, were run on a car’s natural surroundings—long loops of closed-off public roads with a rich variety of rises and dips, twists and hairpins. As sports cars grew in popularity, the divide deepened. Hill’s friends from the midget ranks dismissed European sports car drivers as effete “tea baggers.” The tea baggers, in turn, mocked the midget drivers as “circle burners.”
    Hill was more connoisseur than combatant. He far preferred the continental aesthetics of speed—the contours of a tapered car body, a finely calibrated engine working its way up the gears like musical scales, a coupe braking at just the right moment as it swung through a curve shaded by overhanging trees.
    From his greasy perch in the repair shop of International Motors, he could imagine no happier future than tuning and repairing European cars. With that ambition in mind, he persuaded Van Dyke to send him abroad to study mechanics with the great British carmakers. In the late fall of 1949 he traveled by freighter from Boston to Southampton, England, and then by train to Leamington Spa, a short drive from the Jaguar plant. Hill was met at the train station by a man with the implausible name of Lofty England, who as team manager would lead Jaguar to five victories at Le Mans.
    Hill spent a cold winter in a series of boardinghouses while he performed monthlong apprenticeships at Jaguar, SU Carburetors, Rolls-Royce, and MG. It was a harsh change from SantaMonica. In 1949 England was still scraping by on rations. Hill ate mutton and drank lukewarm beer with a coarse-talking crew of Cockney mechanics. “He found himself in this stunningly shabby and war-battered country where seagulls were coughing into the fog and people went about their business looking pale and broken,” said Doug Nye, author of more than fifty books on motor racing. “It was as different from California as a place could be.”
    While training at Rolls-Royce, Hill stayed in a drafty Kew hostelry where guests deposited sixpence into an electric radiator for twenty minutes of heat. On his first night he noticed that one of the two heating coils was disconnected, so he screwed it back on. The next night he found that the landlady had disconnected it again. “Every day was this ritual of reattaching it before bed,” he said, “and detaching it in the morning so [the landlady] wouldn’t start augmenting my room rent.”
    His intimate encounters with sports