The grace of Phil Hill: America's charming F1 champion

The notoriety of the Pebble Beach event itself, together with his manner of winning it, called this young Californian’s talent to the attention of the racing world. Soon he was driving other people’s cars along with his own new C-type Jaguar, refining his style every time out. Winning major club races again and again across the US bolstered his reputation until, in 1958, he was called to the Scuderia Ferrari. That first year he co-drove a 250 TR sports racer to victories at Buenos Aires, Sebring and Le Mans. By the end of the year he was a Ferrari F1 driver.

Not under happy circumstances, though. As was all too common in those days, the position opened when fellow team member Peter Collins was killed at the Nürburgring. Intently introspective, keenly cerebral, tautly strung, Hill struggled to shrug off the dangers in what he was doing.

“Within a 15-month period,” noted Phil’s close friend John Lamm in an interview for Road Track magazine, “Phil’s Ferrari team-mates Luigi Musso, ‘Fon’ de Portago, Peter Collins, Mike Hawthorn and Jean Behra were gone.

“’It sounds cold, thinking about it now,’ Phil explained. ‘They were all good friends, and I was living on Peter Collins’ yacht in Monte Carlo at the time of his death. But we were right in the middle of a very dangerous period in automobile racing, when people were buying it left and right and had been for quite a while. We were very defensive about anybody trying to get into the life or death aspects of racing. We tried to avoid it and not talk about it.

“‘In retrospect, I’m pretty certain we knew it was a losing discussion at the time. We would have had a tough time rationalising why it was OK to continue. In that atmosphere, a lot of things that don’t make sense now were logical then.’”

The mental turmoil gave him a nervous, apprehensive edge. At one point he suffered an ulcer. Writer Gerald Donaldson, quoted him as saying, “Racing brings out the worst in me… makes me selfish, irritable, defensive. If I could get out of this sport with any ego left I would.”

Yet he did not get out, not then. Danger be damned, he was resolved to prove himself. As the US journalist David Malsher-Lopez put it last year, “Not a man of bullish self-confidence, then, but steely determination.”

Add to that an iron-clad capacity to focus on the job. Stepping into a racing car seemed to flip a switch. If Hill had been at his ‘worst’ before the race, once it began his best came out. He handled the machine with sensitivity and grace, running fast without whipping his mount, thinking strategically, keeping his mind on the finish line and reaching it often in an era when many didn’t.

It is a tragic fact that Hill’s day of triumph is shrouded in horror. No one can forget that his Ferrari team-mate, Wolfgang von Trips, died in a savage accident that also took the lives of many spectators. Until that instant at Monza the German driver had the better chance of taking the title. Post-race photographs show smiles on winner Hill’s face, but the man himself said there was no joy behind them.

By haunting coincidence Mario Andretti, the second American driver to become champion, did so at the same cost, when his Lotus partner Ronnie Peterson perished. At the same circuit.

Thus both Hill and Andretti had to fight the same internal war of opposing feelings.

Phil Hill was a Ferrari works F1 driver from the last part of 1958 through to 1962. During the three full seasons he rode the Prancing Horse, ’59 to ’61, he won a total of three grands prix. Not a sensational percentage, but one worthy of respect.

Especially so for someone whose youth was not bathed in the culture and mystique of European F1. Hill himself assimilated before many of his compatriots, but to most Americans of his era Formula 1 was a ‘foreign’ form of the sport and they had to be sold on it. Having one of their own become world champion was a powerful selling point — not least for his Italian employer, for whom America was becoming his marque’s most important market.

“He is perhaps the most underappreciated world champion in F1 history”

Yet the one time Hill’s home crowd saw their man drive an F1 Ferrari was at a sparsely attended Sebring in 1959, when his car failed after a handful of laps. Whether that poor first impression could have been redressed in the following two US GPs cannot be known, because the Commendatore refused to participate.

Thus at Watkins Glen in 1961, the wrap-up GP of the season, America’s freshly minted first-ever world champion was reduced to saluting his fans from a parade car. A Ford.

Such cold disrespect by his transatlantic boss did nothing to diminish Hill’s standing on the western side of the water. To the world at large it may be true that he was, as Malsher-Lopez remarks, “perhaps the most under-appreciated world champion in Formula 1 history”, but his fellow Yanks revered him. His accomplishments with sports racing cars, domestically as well as internationally, were more than adequate to make Phil Hill one of our most distinguished drivers. His character as a person made him one of our favourites.

Everyone who remembers Phil Hill mentions what a gentleman he was. I saw that side of him after I’d asked his help with a book on Chaparrals (for whom he scored three significant victories), and I had thanked him in the foreword. Fully a year after publication I was in Monaco for the Grand Prix, and came across Phil also watching the action. Over the screams of engines he made a particular point of expressing his appreciation for mentioning him.

I thought, it isn’t often in this business that you get sincere thanks from a racing driver. Mostly, their self-absorbed minds just don’t work that way. Not an ‘ordinary’ guy in the conventional sense, obviously, but one without the airs one might expect of‘ a champion’. There was no pretence. No nonsense. A straightforward man who raced because he was a racer, just that, and thereby kept the whole thing straight in my mind.

Straightforward, but not simple. Others knew him better than I and can recite many examples of his complexity. While Phil was still alive, the weightlifter whom he turned into a race fan, Richard, remarked that his friend was once offered a car dealership, but turned it down. “He didn’t want to be bothered. It would have made him rich, but he’s that way. Phil lives in his own world.

“He’s a quirky guy. Phil only wore chemise Lacoste shirts and khaki pants, a whole lot of ’em. In Europe he drove a Peugeot 404; I think they loaned it to him, and its door panels were stuffed with his winnings in cash, $25,000 or $35,000 worth.

“When he gets mad he gets withdrawn. Nobody can sulk like him. He spends as much time in Santa Monica as he can; he loves the house his aunt gave him. He had beaucoup girlfriends, one after another, but wouldn’t marry while he was racing because of the threat of being killed.”

When Phil finally united with his soulmate Alma in 1971, it was a solid commitment. When he died in 2008, due to complications of Parkinson’s disease, they had been married for 37 years.

No one can know a man better than his wife, and we are indebted to Alma Hill for sitting with Road Track’s John Lamm to talk of her late husband with enthusiasm and love.

“The greatest adventure ever. Never, never a boring moment. Phil was a multifaceted, very intelligent human being so we never had a dull moment,” she said for Lamm’s story Life with a Champion in 2011.

“There was no pretence. No nonsense. He raced because he was a racer”

“It wasn’t always fun, fun, fun. Some of it was extremely intense and he could be an impatient man, but we had so many experiences. Sometimes when I looked at a calendar and saw what we did within a week, I didn’t think some people did that much in four or five years… Activity was surrounding us all the time.”

As his illness became known, I took an opportunity to ask Alma how Phil was doing. “Oh, he’s slowing down a little,” she told me with a fond chuckle. “He’s no longer racing around the house at 200mph. Now it’s only 150.”

Although I arrived too late to witness Hill’s strongest period on the track, I cherish the times I was able to spend with him in later years. Some of his independence of thought came out when my wife and I asked to interview him at Hill and Vaughn, the highly regarded classic car restoration business he operated near his long-time home in Santa Monica.

Leaning back from his desk in his classic old wooden swivel chair, trying to look at ease but fidgeting continually, swinging back and forth, waving his arms, talking a torrent, he told us many things, but one stands out now in my mind.

Kids today, he said with consternation, are so darn safety-minded. Why, when he invites young people for a ride in some wonderful old car, they look around and complain there aren’t any seat belts! He was genuinely puzzled. If not offended.

That seemed to contradict all that we’d heard of his notorious distress about the dangers in motor sport, but I understood perfectly. This man had been racing when racing was not about depending on technology for survival, but on yourself. To have to summon your absolute best. That, to me at any rate, is what makes it worth doing.

Yes, drivers worried about injury and death — so did we passionate onlookers — but the defence measure was to race with intelligence, vigilance and care. Which he did. Phil Hill never suffered a serious injury in a racing car. Yet he won the world championship.

“Going to races with Phil was a highlight of my life,” says Richard Cramer, acknowledging that their chance friendship made a lifelong enthusiast of him. “We were Kappa Sig brothers [American college fraternity], sure, but Phil didn’t have to be that kind to me.

“I agree with what I’ve heard people say, that Phil Hill is the finest race car driver who ever lived. Because he knew what was going on under the hood. Nowadays all these kids come out of karts and it’s all mostly electronics, push a button.”

“I just happened to be there at a time when we both were young.”