In April of 1956 I was deep in a lengthy round of reconstructive surgery, repairing the very serious damage I’d done to my face the previous October in a sports car race at Sacramento, California. The San Francisco Region of the SCCA had organized that race, and they invited me to serve as Honorary Emergency Control Marshal at the ’56 Pebble Beach road races—the last year the races were held on the famous Seventeen Mile Drive. A friend and I drove my repaired MG racing car from Hermosa Beach 340 miles up the coast to Pebble Beach. The MG still had no top, but was otherwise roadworthy, and we drove through fog and rain, absolutely loving every minute and mile of the journey.

I saw Phil Hill almost win that race in an ill-handling 3.5-liter Ferrari. The car’s behavior was so bad that they actually attached a heavy slab of lead to the rear suspension to stabilize it. This worked for a while, but as the car burned fuel its rear end became lighter and the handling became diabolical, allowing Carroll Shelby to win in a three-liter Ferrari Monza.

Eighteen months later, as a new employee of Road & Track magazine, I met Phil Hill. Road & Track had created an absolutely gorgeous trophy for the best American driver in international road racing, and Phil was the perennial winner. We working stiffs used to believe that if someone like Carroll Shelby or Masten Gregory had ever won that very desirable award, our co-owner, Elaine Bond, would have expired like the wicked witch in The Wizard of Oz.

In 1961 Phil Hill became the first American to win the F1 World Championship. Two years later he fell out with Ferrari and signed on with the ATS team—an under-funded collection of disgruntled former Ferrari people who intended to campaign their own ATS Grand Prix car, a V-8-powered Ferrari clone. They were a complete and total failure and Phil had a bad season.

I had the unmitigated gall to tell him not to drive the ATS, that the car was such junk that it could well kill him through no fault of his own. I even went so far as to suggest that I could perhaps find him a competitive Indy 500 ride, if he’d authorize me to do so. Nothing doing. (He may have recognized that this was pure bravado on my part, and that I had about as much chance of getting him an Indy ride as I had of becoming the next Pope.)

He looked me in the eye and said, “We all do things to impress certain people. The people I have always tried to impress would not be impressed if I drove at Indianapolis.”

Phil Hill just celebrated his eightieth birthday surrounded by friends, family, and admirers, at a great party in the building where Jay Leno keeps his car collection. Phil is battling Parkinson’s Disease, but Phil is a true World Champion, a genuine hero, and he will not go gentle into that good night.