to Cologne, there was Amerigo Manicardi, who was in charge of
Ferrari sales worldwide, and a really good guy. He had been sent to
accompany Mrs Ferrari, and keep her out of trouble.
“The funeralwas the worstthing you could ever imagine. Itwas
raining and dark, and they had Trips’s Ferrari sports car there,
with a platform on the back, to carry the coffin. The kid who drove
it kept slipping the clutch, I remember, and bythe time we go t to
where the service was, it was about cooked.
“There was a reception afterwards, and Mrs Ferrari said to
me, ‘Pheeleel, are you going back now?’ She’d decided she didn’t
like Manicardi, so maybe Richie and I would let her go back with
us. ‘Where are you going?’ she said. I panicked – I said, ‘We’re
going to... Stockholm!’ She said, ‘What a shame’, and meanwhile
Manicardi’s doing all these winks and everything...”
Now Hill and Ginther retraced their steps, taking the endless
train trip back to Milan, then climbing aboard Phil’s Peugeot –
“That’s what a world champion could afford back then!” – for the
drive to Modena. “Fortunately, that car had very high backs to the
seats. We’re going along, and suddenly Richie says, ‘Duck! Duck!
It’s the old lady!’ Andwe’re supposed to be in Stockholm.
“The next day we get to the factory, and we see Manicardi. I said,
‘Christ, Richie saw you at the last second!’ He then told us that Mrs
Ferrari had said, ‘Manicardi, isn’t that Phil Hill’s car?’ And he said,
‘I don’t know – there’s nobody in it!’ And she said, ‘Oh, that’s all
right, then.’That w as what it was like, living with Mrs Ferrari.
“Like I said, Manicardi was a good guy, and damn good at his
job, too. And you know what? He had a heart attack, in his forties,
and Ferrari didn’t send one person to hisfuneral. You kind of
revered him, you know, but he was hard to like back then.”
A great driver, Phil Hill, and more than that, agrea t man. It’s
11 years since he died; like all who knew him, I miss him still.adjoining bank. Fourteen spectators died, and, as after Alfonso de
Portago’s accident in the Mille Miglia four yearsearlier, there were
calls from the Vatican that motor racing be banned: Ferrari found
himself again under siege.
“The Vatican always pitched in on these
occasions,” Hill remembered. “In Italy
they love racing, but after a fatalitythere ’s
always this rush to blame the car, and
those whobuilt it – which was particularly
unfair to Ferrari, because the one thing his
cars never did was break.
“The whole thingwas a big trauma. I was
with Ferrari for days afterwards. It seemed
like everyone in the countrywas milling
around Maranello, and there’s Ferrari,
with threedays’ beard growth, and wearing
bathrobes all day – he’d been through it
lots of times, and I always felt he regarded hisdriverslike a general
thinks of his soldiers.I guess he was fond of Trips, but... Ferrari
was a great actor, you know. Did hego to the funeral? No, he
didn’t. He sent the old lady.”
Ah, yes, the old lady – Laura, Enzo’s wife, who in the early
sixties suddenly begantaking an active interest in the team,
even attending the races, apractice long since abandoned by her
husband. Hill was mesmeric as hetalked of the blend of glory,
tragedy and farce that was life at Maranello back then.
Together with Richie Ginther, the third Ferrari driver, Phil
attended von Trips’s funeral. If it is a cliché that drivers raced for
the love of it back in theday, it seems barely credible that in 1961
the world champion travelled to Cologne bytrain.
“Richie and I drove to the station in Milan, and whenwe got
Hill loved Ferraris andhis last season with the Scuderia was 1962,
the yearafter his title, driving thebeautiful 156 ‘Sharknose’
I AL WAYS
HE REGA
HIS DRIVERS
LIKE A GENERAL
THINKS OF HIS
SOLDIERS
”