The story of America's first F1 world champion

Phil was the first American – and the first of only two thus far – to have won this pinnacle world-class road racing title. And amongst all Formula 1 World Champions he was only the sixth ever to have achieved that distinction after Nino Farina, Juan Manuel Fangio, Alberto Ascari, Mike Hawthorn and Jack Brabham.

Phil was widely regarded as having been far too intense, far too sensitive, far too highly-strung – and way, way, too intelligent – ever to have indulged in a sport as intense, emotive and in his day as desperately dangerous - as world-class motor racing. But he did. And he truly excelled.

He had first come to the world of motorsport as a wide-eyed young California-raised kid mechanic. He had worked on dirt track midget racing cars and had been sent to England in 1949-50 as a trainee, learning the tricks and techniques of servicing and setting-up Jaguars, and MGs, and SU carburettors. And during his stay here in England he had been brought to Easter Monday Goodwood, 1950, and it was here that for the first time he laid eyes on real, raucous, Grand Prix racing cars.

Here was the exotic world he had been reading about since childhood in his eagerly awaited weeks-late copies of ‘The Autocar’. At that time, as Phil recalled: “The limit of my ambition was some way, some day, to become mechanic to a top line racing driver…”. Yet eleven years later he would be that rare top-line racing driver, the 1961 Formula 1 World Champion.

But his great day, 60 years ago at Monza – when he led Ferrari’s home Italian Grand Prix from start to finish – was overshadowed by tragedy as his closest rival for the title, the German Count Wolfgang ‘Taffy’ von Trips, was killed in a ghastly lap two accident which also claimed the lives of many spectators. 

‘Taffy’ and Phil had fought a season-long duel for the Championship. ‘Taffy’ had won the Dutch GP, at Zandvoort, Phil the Belgian at Spa-Francorchamps. Their debutant team-mate Giancarlo Baghetti had won a fraught French GP for Ferrari at Reims, where both Phil and ‘Taffy’ had failed to finish. Trips had won the British GP in pouring rain at Aintree, where Phil fazed himself by aquaplaning on a deep puddle in the ess-bend and Melling Crossing. He would describe how “I saw this huge cast-iron gate post loom out of the murk and knew there was nothing I could do to avoid it. Then my tyres must have cut into deeper water – or shallower – or something – and the car flicked straight and we stayed on the track. A few years before that incident would have been instantly erased – gone just like an envelope dropped in a mail box… but by then I was old enough and had been racing long enough for it to stay with me…”. This thoughtful, vivid man backed off and finished second.

Another rain-affected race had followed in the German GP at the Nürburgring where Ferrari’s finest were outfoxed and out-raced by Stirling Moss in Rob Walker’s under-powered four-cylinder Lotus against the V6-engined ‘Sharknose’ Ferraris. Phil still qualified on pole there and became the first man ever to lap the Nordschleife circuit in under 9 minutes. But it was ‘Taffy’ von Trips who finished second and Phil third after both had spun in unison in Moss’s wake in the suddenly flooded final corner. 

Trips then started that 1961 Italian Grand Prix with 33 World Championship points to Phil’s 29. The race result left Phil with a total 38 points, of which only the best five individual scores from the eight contributing races could be retained. He emerged as World Champion by one point – from his fallen team-mate.

Introspective, thoughtful, always self-analytical, Phil agonised over what had happened that day, and how his title might be viewed. Yet as he explains in his autobiography ‘Inside Track’ he had won his crown on merit. The Trips accident had happened behind him. He had not seen it, even in his mirrors. But its circumstances triggered many a flash-back recollection for him – of standing on the Le Mans pit counter, six years earlier, waiting for his co-driver to hand over the car to him for his debut as a Ferrari factory team driver. And then the most catastrophic motor racing accident in history had erupted barely 20-30 yards before his eyes. His co-driver came in, and – with his mind in turmoil – he took over to make his Ferrari works-drive debut…

At Monza ’61 Phil saw Trips’s wrecked car as he passed the scene on lap three but knew nothing more, recalling: “I just concentrated on building my lead. Richie [Ginther, his team-mate] was keeping pretty good pace with me, and we just kept hammering on.

“Far into the race I glimpsed Ricardo Rodriguez [his debutant third Ferrari team-mate] in the pits in a cloud of smoke. Perhaps another valve-spring snapping – certainly an engine failure. My car was flying, then Richie began to fall away – and his engine had also gone. So I was alone out there for Ferrari, and for myself.

“I didn’t think about the Championship. Instead, I was listening intently to my engine, feeling its vibrations. Was that something new? No, just singing along unchanged. My mechanic Dino signalled ‘HIL-MOS-GUR’. Then Stirling retired the Lotus, and the signals read ‘HIL-GUR-MCL’ with Dan Gurney second in the Porsche and Bruce McLaren third in the works Cooper. And then the laps left wound down, and after the full 43 laps, trouble-free – I won my second consecutive Italian Grand Prix. I knew I’d done it. I’d just won the Drivers’ World Championship.”

In the days following the race some of the media suggested that after Trips’s crash and the deaths of 14 spectators, Phil should refuse to accept the title, or the Championship itself should be declared void that year.

He agonised over how to respond, if at all? “If I said one thing I’d have appeared callous and selfish. If I’d said another it would have seemed I was acknowledging that Trips should really have won – that I had just lucked into the title because he’d crashed. But I knew just how much I’d put into that season. Sure I had made some mistakes, but I’d got more right than I’d got wrong. But no way would I plead a case to justify myself. I’d always had a dread of saying anything which could be construed as being swollen headed. That was never my way, so I kept my thoughts to myself… and I just said nothing.”

Phil was one of the eight pall-bearers at poor ‘Taffy’s funeral in the family chapel beside Schloss Hemmersbach, his home near Cologne. It poured with rain as they carried him to rest. Phil: “I had never been so wet and desolate – certainly emotionally – as I felt then. 

“Later that evening I was invited back to the castle to see Trips’s mother. She was just fantastically composed, dignified and even comforting towards me. I think she regarded her son as a noble warrior, one who had cheerfully gone off to war, and now had not returned. She was kind of like a Spartan mother. Since leaving Italy I’d been in pain, with a constant stitch under my ribs. Now, as she spoke to me, I felt it just fade away…”.

Phil Hill was a fine – always thoughtful and considerate – friend and a great supporter of our Goodwood Festival of Speed and Revival Meetings, and he made his farewell visit here in 2006, with his racing driver son Derek and the 1958 Ferrari 250 Testa Rossa in which the great American star had notched the first of his three Le Mans 24 Hour race victories.

It was a true privilege to have known him. Phil passed away on August 28^th 2008, aged 81, but happily for all motorsport enthusiasts he left a fabulous collection of the outstanding motor racing photography which he had shot throughout his career, plus taped interviews recalling his entire story. And all is available today in his lavish autobiography Inside Track – produced to the highest standards to do him justice, and with the expressed intent of being the finest World Champion Driver’s autobiography ever published – or ever likely to be published.

For further details of this award-winning book, for a preview of Phil’s stupendous colour photograph from the 1950s and ’60s, and for dozens of impressed-reader appreciations, please see: Phil-Hill-Book.com

Photography courtesy of the GP Library.