



Before he had even got out of the cockpit, he had been handed a lit cigarette and a pint of beer by Hawthorn and had received a kiss from his wife.īut at the Nürburgring in Germany two weeks later, as Louise sat on the Ferrari pit counter with a stopwatch and a lap chart, he went off the road and hit a tree, suffering injuries from which he died in hospital that night. He became less enthusiastic when the couple decided to live on a boat berthed in the Monaco harbour at the start of the 1958 season while planning to buy a home of their own.Ĭollins finished third in the Monaco Grand Prix and fifth in France before winning the British Grand Prix at Silverstone, where he outpaced Hawthorn’s Ferrari with a display that suggested he was ready to challenge for the world championship. He was particularly fond of Collins, who had befriended Ferrari’s son, Dino, when the young man fell ill with a rare form of muscular dystrophy from which he died in 1956. The newlyweds, well matched in cheerful temperament and golden looks, were often accompanied at the circuits by Mike Hawthorn, Collins’s British team mate, good friend and accomplice in off-track high jinks.ĭespite his disapproval, Ferrari lent them a house, the Villa Rosa, on land he owned close to the team’s headquarters in Maranello in northern Italy. On discovering that the two would be in Miami at the same time, he told Collins to look her up. The initial meeting had been arranged by Stirling Moss, who had encountered King during the annual Nassau Speed Week in the Bahamas in 1956.
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He was a 25-year-old racing driver from Kidderminster in Worcestershire, starting his second season as a member of the Ferrari grand prix team.Įnzo Ferrari, who believed that marriage slowed his drivers down, was the only one who did not entirely approve of the sudden arrival of King, who has died aged 88, in Collins’s life. She was a 24-year-old American actor on tour with the Broadway production of The Seven Year Itch, taking the Marilyn Monroe role. Two days later, as they sunbathed by a local hotel pool, he proposed – and the following Monday they were married. Louise King met Peter Collins in a Miami bar on a Monday night in 1957.
