Since the first of the 2025 Formula 1 season’s three grands prix to be run on United States soil has just taken place, in Miami, my thoughts have inevitably turned to the two US citizens who have won F1 drivers’ world championships, namely Phil Hill (1961) and Mario Andretti (1978).
Not surprisingly, they have (or had in Hill’s case, for he died in 2008, aged 81) quite a lot in common, despite being born in locations separated by 5154 miles (8295km): Hill in 1927 in Miami, Florida, USA, and Andretti in 1940 in Montona, then in Italy but now in Croatia and more commonly therefore referred to as Motovun. As I say, they each won an F1 drivers’ world championship, and I will dig into some of the parallels between their successful F1 campaigns in a little while. But they were both also fine sports car and endurance racers, especially for Ferrari.
Hill won the Le Mans 24 Hours three times, the Sebring 12 Hours three times, the Buenos Aires 1000km twice, the Nürburgring 1000km twice, and the Daytona 24 Hours once, all of those 11 wins in Ferraris except for his second Nürburgring 1000km victory, in which he drove a Chaparral; and he won much more besides. Andretti won the Sebring 12 Hours three times and the Daytona Six Hours (a one-off truncated version of the 24-hour event, run in 1972) once, all of those four wins in Ferraris except for his first Sebring 12 Hours victory, in which he drove a Ford; and he, too, won much more besides.
Hill’s third Le Mans win came with Ferrari in 1962
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If Hill’s sports car and endurance CV eclipses Andretti’s as a magnum opus – and it does – then Mario’s Stateside single-seater record wipes the floor with Phil’s. Andretti was and remains an IndyCar legend, having won four IndyCar National Championship titles, encompassing both USAC and CART. He lies third on the all-time list of most prolific race winners, with 52, including the Indianapolis 500, behind only AJ Foyt (67) and Scott Dixon (58).
Hill raced in F1 in Maseratis, Ferraris, Coopers, Porsches, ATSs, Lotuses (my preferred rendering of the plural, even if Latin pedants favour ‘Loti’ and Colin Chapman himself recommended ‘Lotus’), McLarens, and Eagles – quite a tally – but his three grand prix wins were all in Ferraris. He won the Italian Grand Prix twice – in 1961, his world championship year, in a rear-engined Ferrari 158, and in 1960 in a front-engined Ferrari 246, which victory was the last world championship-status F1 grand prix win for a car in which the horse (ie, the engine) was put before the cart (ie, the chassis) – and the Belgian Grand Prix once, also in his championship year.
Despite his affably self-effacing manner, he was a driver for the big stage and the grand occasion, for his 16 F1 grand prix podiums came at Monza (four), Monaco (three), Spa (two), Zandvoort (two), Reims, and Nürburgring, and three rather less celebrated F1 venues, Aintree, Avus, and Ain-Diab. How many of those 16 F1 grand prix podiums were in Ferraris? All of them. (Eagle-eyed readers – pun intended – will have noticed that I listed Eagle among the eight marques for which Hill raced in F1, but that is not strictly true: he entered just one F1 grand prix in an Eagle, at Monza in 1966, aged 39, having not raced in F1 at all in 1965, and he failed to qualify it. He never raced in F1 again.)
Andretti raced in F1 in Lotuses, Marches, Ferraris, Parnellis, Alfa Romeos, and Williamses – again, quite a tally – but 11 of his 12 grand prix wins were in Lotuses. There was no circuit on which he stamped his authority more imperiously than any other, really, although, like Hill, he crossed the Italian Grand Prix finish line in first place twice – in 1977 in a Lotus 78 ‘wing car’ and in 1978 in a Lotus 79 ‘ground-effect’ car, only to lose that second Monza victory to a 60-second penalty for a jumped start. He won at Jarama twice, and once each at Kyalami, Fuji, Long Beach, Dijon, Buenos Aires, Zolder, Paul Ricard, Hockenheim, and Zandvoort.
Andretti with the Lotus 78 that took him to his F1 title
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He scored his maiden F1 grand prix win at Kyalami in 1971, for Ferrari, in which year he was a USAC full-timer and raced only five times in F1, then he won nothing in F1 until the last grand prix of 1976, at Fuji, which well judged victory in a Japanese monsoon kicked off a 22-month golden spell in which he won 11 F1 grands prix for Lotus, scooping the 1978 F1 drivers’ world championship en passant.
Apart from his 12 grand prix wins he stood on a world championship-status F1 podium only seven times more. In other words, such was the competitiveness of his Lotuses in that golden spell, that he tended to win when he was not stymied by their unreliability or, it has to be said, thwarted by accidents triggered by his own impulsiveness. How many of his 19 F1 grand prix podiums were in Lotuses? All but two.
For both men, Monza was always special, and for Andretti it still is. In old age, Hill used to appear at the famous autodromo every year, and at no other F1 venue, and I often used to chat with him in the paddock, about racing, obviously, but also about his prized collection of old Packard road cars. And when I say old, I mean very old. At one time he had a 1912 Model 30 Touring, a 1927 343 Convertible Sedan, not one but two 1932 Twin Sixes, and a 1938 Model 12 Touring, which was mint.
From 2000 to 2003 – by which time his son Derek was racing first in Italian Formula 3000 then in International Formula 3000, having cut his racing teeth in Stateside series such as Barber Dodge, American Le Mans, and Toyota Atlantic – he and I used to talk about how to navigate Derek into F1. Sadly, it never happened.
Monza was and still is Andretti’s favourite F1 place, too. In 1954, at 14, he and his twin brother Aldo made the 304-mile (489km) trip from Montano (now Motovun) to Monza to watch Juan Manuel Fangio race his Mercedes-Benz against the Ferrari of their hero Alberto Ascari, and, although Fangio won and Ascari retired, Mario was transfixed – and hooked. “That’s when the die was cast, as far as the dreams of a young boy were concerned,” he remembered tearfully when 23 years later he won the Italian Grand Prix. “My life has come full circle now, today, here, at Monza,” he added, “because, for me, this is where it all began.”
In 1977, life came full circle for Andretti at Monza
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Nonetheless, Monza was also a place bitter-sweet for both of them. Yes, they both won their F1 drivers’ world championships there – Hill in 1961 and Andretti in 1978 – but, in each case, their triumphs were secured by dint of the fact that the only drivers who could possibly beat their points totals by that time in the season, their team-mates, both lost their lives there.
In 1961, Hill’s Ferrari team-mate, Wolfgang ‘Taffy’ von Trips, lost control under braking for Parabolica after making contact with Jim Clark‘s Lotus, crashing into the crowd, killing 15 spectators and fatally injuring himself.
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Matt Bishop
At Monza in 1978 Andretti’s Lotus team-mate, Ronnie ‘SuperSwede’ Peterson, was involved in a multi-car startline shunt, from which his car was punted into the barrier and caught fire. For a while Peterson was trapped in a burning wreck.
However, James Hunt, Clay Regazzoni, and Patrick Depailler, who had all been involved in the accident but had managed to climb out of their stricken cars uninjured, rushed to Ronnie’s aid and dragged him to what everyone thought was safety, albeit with minor burns and broken legs. But broken legs and minor burns usually heal. It remains one of the most heart-rending tragedies in racing history that, for reasons that may never fully be known but surely involved a degree of medical malpractice, he died in the night.
The next day – the day on which Andretti should have been celebrating the joyful culmination of his life’s work – becoming F1 world champion – instead he was utterly bereft. “Unhappily, racing is also this,” he muttered on the steps of Milan’s Niguarda Hospital, where his team-mate had just died. It was a simple remark, but it expressed all that needed to be said.
If you have not read Phil Hill: Yankee Champion, which he co-wrote with the prolific American sci-fi author William F Nolan, you really should. I will leave the last word to its haunting description of von Trips’ funeral in Horren, near Cologne, Germany.
Hill chased by von Trips during the 1960 French GP
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“Richie [Ginther, fellow American F1 driver] and I came up from Modena to serve as pallbearers. After the funeral mass at Hammerssach Castle, our procession formed outside. It was raining, but none of us wore raincoats. We walked, bareheaded, beside Trips’ casket, carried on his open Ferrari sports car. That dark-coloured Ferrari was driven very slowly behind a band, dressed all in black, playing Chopin’s funeral march. The pace was set by an ancient woman, also dressed entirely in black and carrying a symbolic brass lantern, and we trudged along the cobbled road in the rain for a mile, to the church, where another interminable mass was sung.
“The procession again formed outside the church for the final mile to the cemetery, while the rain was now beating down steadily, drumming on the flower-decked casket in the open car. The family chapel was on a high knoll, and we clambered up it, eight of us, slipping and sliding on the mud, bearing the heavy casket. There, at the chapel, the last service was performed, after which poor Trips was finally entombed. I have never experienced anything so profoundly mournful as that day.”
