Doug Nye – The other side of Phil Hill

Now during the 1990s I began working closely with 1961 World Champion Driver Phil Hill to produce in effect his definitive racing autobiography. Most significantly, it was to be illustrated absolutely lavishly because during the greater part of his fine career – in which he had won two Italian Grands Prix, the Belgian GP, the Le Mans 24 Hours (three times), the Sebring 12 Hours (three times), plus the Nurburgring 1,000km and Buenos Aires 1,000km (twice each), and had even won his very last race as a frontline professional, with the high-winged Chaparral 2F Coupe at Brands Hatch in 1967 – he had been a dedicated, and very talented, photographer.

He shot the most gorgeous colour photos of sights he had seen, and races in which he had run, “…to show the folks back home”. Most of his photography was on gorgeous, fine-grain Kodachrome film, shot on his beloved Leica cameras. Once he had shown his transparencies to the folks, they were returned to their Kodak boxes, and tucked into a dark drawer at his Santa Monica home. There they lay preserved for decades, only rarely brought out and shown occasionally to friends and favoured enthusiasts.

Although I encountered Phil during his active career, back in the 1960s, I didn’t really get to know him until he became a roving contributor and track tester for ‘Road & Track’ magazine during the 1970s. Despite his well-known reputation for being one of the most highly-strung and spring-loaded of all world-class racing drivers, he really was also the most wonderful bloke. Well-educated, well-mannered, comfortably competitive, he was also widely read and truly cultured. He was a fan of player-piano rolls and classical music, but it was his fascination with all things mechanical that had shaped his life. He was an absolute, dyed-in-the-wool, lifelong ‘car guy’.

He would later confess: “The automobile has been an absorbing passion throughout my life. Apparently the first intelligible sentence I strung together was something like “Auntie’s car in garage”. My Aunt Helen had this marvellous Packard Town Car that she’d not only bought new back in 1918, but she had actually had a fair amount to do with the details of the custom body made for it by Fleetwood in Pennsylvania...”

Phil was born in Miami in 1927, but after a tremendous hurricane there the family soon sought a more peaceful home in California: “We lived briefly in Hollywood then Pasadena, before settling in the cool Pacific coast city of Santa Monica. I was only four when my parents bought me piano lessons, but I was more interested in my mother’s Marmon Speedster. It had been one of a pair of New York Show cars; pioneer racing celebrity Barney Oldfield bought one, and my Mom had bought the other…” You get the picture?

Into the late 1940s Phil became an eager mechanic with a specialist imported car dealership in Hollywood named International Motors. To learn the intricacies of the latest British sportscars, they despatched him to England through the winter of 1949-50 on a service course, including weeks in the Jaguar factory, plus time at SU Carburettors, with Rolls-Royce and at MG in Abingdon-on-Thames.

An English trainee on the same course, Derek Dunt, became a firm friend, and into 1950 he introduced Phil to the booming British motor sporting scene. He took Phil to Shelsley Walsh, Prescott, the famous ‘Royal Silverstone’ British Grand Prix that May… but before that Derek had marshalled at Easter Monday Goodwood, and provided Phil with access passes.

Phil: “The Easter Monday race meeting at Goodwood was a landmark deal for me. There I saw real live Grand Prix cars for the first time, and some of the famous guys who drove them – guys I’d been reading about in the British magazines. The circuit used the perimeter track of a wartime fighter aerodrome… and we saw practice in drying weather on Easter Saturday, and then the races on a wet and windy Easter Monday.

 “The Sussex lanes were choked with traffic. The moment I switched-off… I heard the hard, gutsy whoop-whoop-whoop of a supercharged racing engine being warmed up.

“The sound was coming from the paddock. That was the first time I had ever heard a Grand Prix racing engine. Thanks to Derek’s magic passes I walked through the ticket check into the paddock and for me that was just a terrific experience… unbelievable…

“Back home I’d read everything I could ever find about Grand Prix racing and thoroughbred cars driven by the great race drivers of the period. While the weekly British magazines like The Motor and The Autocar provided all the up-to-date news, I’d been specially entranced by a series of beautifully written, very detailed books about the Siamese Prince Birabongse, who raced both pre- and post-war under the name ‘B. Bira’…

“I walked round a corner in the Goodwood paddock and – standing right there beside his Maserati 4CLT – was none other than ‘Bira’ himself. If ever there was good reason for me to get excited, this was it. And to record what I was about to see, I had taken along my Leica camera…”

Now spool forward throughout Phil’s subsequent racing career, through his post-racing life as America’s leading vintage car restorer, and come up to our 2006 Goodwood Revival tribute to him – and here’s Phil’s account of it:

“As I settled into the driving seat of Pierre Bardinon’s ex-works Ferrari 250 Testa Rossa, I went through my familiar old routine. I shuffled around to get comfortable, and instinctively checked out the steering position, foot pedals, rear-view mirrors, the reach to the gearshift… Everything fell into place more or less as I recalled when I co-drove this same car with Olivier Gendebien back in 1958 – when we used it to win the Le Mans 24-Hours for the first time.

“But now other things had changed. I was nearly fifty years older, and this time I wasn’t alone in the car. Sliding into the passenger seat alongside me was my son Derek, already established as a racing driver in his own right. Beside us stood my wife Alma, daughter Vanessa with her husband Davis and baby daughter Lela. We were surrounded by a jostling but friendly and smiling group of British and international photographers, with my friend Steve Dawson right up front, getting them organised and shouting in broad American “Ease up guys and we’ll all get the shot.”

“Feeling unusually self-conscious, I fired-up that familiar V12 engine. I selected first gear, succeeded in not stalling as I drew away through the paddock gate, then wheeled right onto the racing surface. I then accelerated away – up through the Ferrari gearbox with its pronounced rather noisy gear tone – for a few memorable laps before the 100,000 crowd – heading a cavalcade of cars which in so many ways had shaped not merely my career, but also my entire life.

“And while I can’t exactly say this unique experience made me feel young again, it certainly sent my mind back to Easter Monday, 1950 – 56 long years before – when in that self-same paddock I set eyes on a real-life Grand Prix car for the very first time.  And that was when the absolute limit of my ambition had been perhaps to get a job, one day, as mechanic to a famous racing driver…” (my italics – DCN – twelve years later, in 1961, he would become America’s first Formula 1 World Champion Driver, with Ferrari).

Well it took me – and others amongst Phil’s many friends – much longer than predicted to finish ‘his book’ for publication, and sadly he succumbed to a Parkinson’s-type condition in 2008, aged 81. But our motivation has always been to use Phil’s stupendous photography 1949-1962 – plus his intelligent and sensitive insights into top-class racing and what made him (and his rivals of the 1950s and ’60s) really tick – to create the finest World Champion Driver book there has ever been, or is ever likely to be…

‘It’ has now developed into a family of four alternative book editions entitled ‘Inside Track’ and sub-headed ‘ Phil Hill – Ferrari’s American World Champion – His Story – His Photography’. Amongst those four alternative versions the most lavish Connoisseurs Edition runs to three massive volumes alone.

‘Inside Track’ is, inevitably, costly but we guarantee tremendous value for any fan of that thunderous, evocative, desperately dangerous period of motor racing history itself. Apart from anything else – the large-format photography is a feast for any eyes…

Goodwood played a huge role in this extremely Anglophile, now much-missed, American star’s racing development.  Pre-publication discounts are available on ‘Inside Track – Phil Hill – Ferrari’s American World Champion’ right now.

So – if interested to learn more – may I recommend you at least take a glance at phil-hill-book.com, click onto one of the editions and hit ‘LOOK INSIDE’ – to view some sample page spreads. Then perhaps consider a small (but worthwhile) mortgage?

We feel that come publication no fellow enthusiast will be disappointed…

Photography courtesy of The Phil Hill Family Archive