Phil Hill
April 20, 1927 – August 28, 2008

We all have to die somewhere, and Phil Hill died on the Monterey Peninsula in August, after collapsing at Pebble Beach. He was the winner of the first Pebble Beach Road Race on Seventeen Mile Drive in 1951, driving a modified Jaguar XK-120, and he was very much an icon around that gorgeous stretch of California real estate. His victory at Pebble Beach in 1951 and his death there almost sixty years later, were like bookends, holding between them a great, great life, one which we might all hope to emulate.

The flood of tributes to Phil Hill as our only American-born F1 World Champion (in 1961), and as an American racing driver who did so much to put Ferrari on the map in the United States, have seemed so reverent and so afraid to speak above a whisper that future generations may not appreciate how much fun and how funny Phil was—usually intentionally, often unintentionally—and what an endlessly entertaining conversationalist he was.

There was something of the boy genius about Phil Hill. Long after disease had begun to erode his youthful racing driver’s physique, his brain was still young and apt to go off in flights of fancy involving all manner of subjects. After a morning’s drive in a small fleet of vintage Bentleys back in June of 2000, we sat with him at a picnic table by a beautiful lake in Tennessee’s Smokey Mountains National Park. As we ate our sandwiches, we listened to his very funny rendition of “Albert and the Lion”—a comic English poem by Marriott Edgar about a small boy who is taken to the zoo by his parents and manages to get himself eaten by a lion. The piece goes on for several stanzas as the bereaved parents try to negotiate some sort of grubby settlement for the little blighter, who actually got exactly what he deserved. Phil had it down cold—the accents, the mean-spirited parents’ wheeling and dealing, the lot.

When I was a beginner at Road & Track magazine, there was a persistent story that kept making the rounds. Early in the Fifties, Phil drove for Charles Hornburg, the West Coast Jaguar distributor.

Charles Hornburg was inclined to worry and fidget, and on an occasion when Phil, Charles, and Charles’s wife Gwen were driving across the country in a Jaguar Mark VII sedan, towing their Jaguar racing car, he got his opportunity. Naturally—as any well-informed car person would have predicted—the Mark VII began to overheat and Mr. Hornburg began to fret. Soon he suggested that the race car should be backed off the trailer and driven by Phil, to reduce the chance of damage due to overheating. This was done, and Phil set off in the race car which also began to overheat. Now there were two overheating Jaguars. Mr. Hornburg decided that he should drive the race car and the little caravan stopped again, to swap drivers. Phil, exasperated, leaped into the Mark VII with the well-bred Mrs. Hornburg, and hissed, “Gwennie, do you have the slightest idea what an asshole you have married?”

About ten years ago, Phil and I were asked to do a tribute to the late Luigi Chinetti at a Ferrari Club gathering at Watkins Glen. Luigi, the ex-racing driver who convinced Enzo Ferrari to build road-going coupes and convertibles as a source of revenue for his racing activities, was the original distributor for Ferrari in the United States, and had even run his own U.S.-based Ferrari team—the North American Racing Team (NART). He helped a number of young drivers, including Phil Hill, and I was pleased to be able to celebrate his memory in that company.

I drove to the assigned motel, and received a call from Phil while I was unpacking. “David? What are we supposed to do here?” “Well, Phil, I’d say that they want us to talk about Chinetti and his various contributions to motorsport as a former driver and Ferrari team owner, and the guy who brought Ferrari to the United States.” Phil barked, “How can I do that? How can I do a tribute to Chinetti? He was the enemy! His cars were always causing us problems on the factory team! We’d get team orders from Ferrari and we’d all be ready to rebel, and that useless Englishman, Mike Parkes, would say, ‘I think we should obey team orders and run the way they want us to.’ I’d say, ‘What about NART? Are the Rodriguez brothers going to run to team orders, or are they going to go absolutely as fast as they can go? And of course they’d go absolutely as fast as they could go.’”

I asked him, “Why don’t you tell that story? This crowd will love it.” Phil: “Oh, I can’t tell that.” Me: “Why not?” Phil: “They don’t want to hear stuff like that. It’s boring. I don’t even know what I’m doing here.” Of course, when we stepped to the microphones, he was the star, and his stories were brilliant.

In 1963, before the Mexican GP, we spent an afternoon prowling the Mexico City antique shops. Phil was looking for old player piano rolls and I was looking for old cameras. All afternoon I lamely badgered him not to continue driving for the ill-conceived ATS racing team, put together by friends of his led by former Ferrari engineer Carlo Chiti. I feared he’d kill himself in a bad car, and I begged him to let me try to find him a suitable ride for the Indianapolis 500. This, despite the fact that I had no clout whatsoever at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

He put up with my arguments for quite a while, then faced me and said, “Everybody does important things, like racing, to impress certain people. The people I want to impress won’t be impressed if I drive an Indianapolis car.”

Magazine Issue: Winding Road Issue 39