80 F1 RACING JANUARY 2020season, and the only way you came off any good in them was to be
on especially good termswith him – or to die. If you died – it had
to be in a Ferrari, of course – you got your picture in colour, with
big ruby lipspain ted on! Terrible, huh?”
Through the 1961 season it was clear either Hill orteam-mate
Wolfgang von Trips was going to become world champion. At
Monza Phil won both race and title, but in dreadful circumstances,
for his rival was killed on the second lap. “I didn’t know he was
dead, until I came intothe pits at theend. I said, ‘How’s Trips?’
From the way they evaded my question, I just knew rightthen ...”
After touching wheels with Jim Clark’s Lotus on the approach
to Parabolica, vonTrips’s car had gone off the road, and uptheretired racing drivers arebetter company
than their active counterparts, not least because
they can speak with impunity and tell the real
story, rather than the sanitised guff which
routinely insults our intelligence today.
Take Phil Hill, for example, whose career ended
on the highest of notes. After taking victory in the
BOAC 500 at Brands Hatch in 1967, driving for Chaparral,
Hill never raced again, although, typically, he never made any
formal announcement of his retirement.
It is doubtful that anyone more intelligentever stepped into
a racing car, and certainly – despiteexce lling at circuits such as
Spa-Francorchamps and the Nürburgring – Hill was always
mindful of the risks in a sport then infinitely perilous. In the
course of a long career, he somehow never once hurthimself,
but over time lost many friends.
A sensitive and cultured man, he was also a wonderfully
laconic raconteur, lacing his memories with the black humour
characteristic of his generation. Whenever Phil showed up at a
grand prix, we journalists would fight to sit near him at lunch.
Until his last few years, when assailed by the Parkinson’s disease
that would ultimately claim him, Hill could still drive a racing car
like a man half his age, as anyone can attest who watched him
at the Goodwood Revival, thundering round in a Daytona Cobra
coupe, such as he drove there in the 1964 Tourist Trophy.
This was a driver of consummate ability – pole position by six
seconds at the Nürburgring tellsyou a ll you need to know – but
one somehow felt that, as with James Hunt, Hill savoured racing
more in retrospect than when he was actually competing; without
a doubt, that wasso when it came to his feelings aboutEnzo
Ferrari, for whom he drove so many years.
Living in Italy suited Hill well indeed, in part because he could
indulge his love of opera with visits to La Scala in Milan to hear
Maria Callaset al. He loved Ferraris, too, and it was in the red
cars he became America’s first world champion, that he thrice won
Le Mans, but, like many others, he allowed that his relationship
with theproprietor was equivocal: no one ever had Enzo’s number
better than Phil.
“The Old Man used to produce these annuals at the end of everyNIGELROEBUCK’S
HEROES
FORMULA ONE
PICTURESAS A
RULE OF
THUMB,PHIL HILL
America’sfirstworldchampionHillwasarapiddriverandagreat
storyteller,whowasalwaysindemandafterhestoppedracing