Phil Hill

Racing driver

Born: 20 April, 1927, in Miami.
Died: 28 August, 2008, in California, aged 81.

PHIL Hill, one of the greatest American racing car drivers, was an introspective and cerebral champion whose celebrated driving career began when he took a neighbour's new Oldsmobile for a spin as a nine-year-old.

A classical music aficionado with an expertise in Italian opera, a collector of antique musical instruments, a master mechanic and a restorer of classic cars – Hill had a wide range of achievements even without his driving fame.

But along with his slightly younger American contemporaries, A J Foyt and Dan Gurney, Hill was a racing legend. If his name is lesser known than theirs, it is because, at the height of his career, he was more often racing in Europe and Latin America than at home, and because he never competed in the most famous American race of all, the Indianapolis 500. He did win the Sebring 12-hour race in Florida three times, in 1958, 1959 and 1961, but his other major triumphs were abroad. In 1958, he was the first American to win the 24-hour race at Le Mans, a victory he repeated in 1961 and 1962. He won the Argentine 1,000km race three times; the Grand Prix of Italy twice and the Belgian Grand Prix.

Remarkably, in an era when cars were far faster than they were safe, he made it through two decades of racing without a significant injury. In 1953, ten drivers died during the gruelling Pan-American road race in Mexico; Hill's car overturned, but he escaped unharmed.

In one of racing's grimmest calamities, Hill's teammate and rival, Wolfgang von Trips, died in a crash that also killed 13 spectators during the 1961 Grand Prix of Italy. Hill won that race, and with it the championship of Formula 1, the highest class of open-wheel racing. He remains the only American-born driver to do so.

"He raced at a time when people were dying left and right," said John Lamm, a friend and the editor at large of Road & Track magazine, to which Hill was a contributor of articles and photographs after his racing career. "And the only injury he ever suffered was in the Pan-American race. He was getting out of the car and cut his hand."

Not that Hill was oblivious to the dangers. In fact, he was known as a ruminative man, and he dropped out of racing more than once after questioning his reasons for competing at high speed.

Following the tragedy in Italy in 1961, a reporter asked him if he was going to quit.

According to an account of the conversation: "He thought a moment and then said: 'When I love motor racing less, my own life will become worth more to me, and I will be less willing to risk it'."

Philip Toll Hill Jr was born in Miami in 1927, but grew up in Santa Monica, where his father was postmaster. It was during a party at their house in 1936 that he first drove a car, slipping behind the wheel of a guest's new roadster and guiding it around the block.

When he was 12, an aunt helped him buy a Ford Model T, and thus began a lifelong passion for cars. His sensitivity to the inner workings of the automobile he was driving was especially helpful in the endurance races that became his forte, contests in which drivers less attuned to mechanics were prone to push a car beyond its capability.

"When it came to the automobile he was a purist," said Hill's son, Derek, a racing driver himself. "He was a mechanic by trade."

Hill dropped out of the University of Southern California to work on cars and occasionally to drive them. In 1949, a Jaguar dealership he was working for sent him across the Atlantic, to Coventry, to study maintenance. His career as a racer began in earnest when he returned; he drove privately owned cars, including several of his own, in sports car competitions.

In the 1954 Pan-American race, he and a partner, driving Hill's Ferrari, finished second, and the company invited him to drive a factory car in the gruelling marathon at Le Mans. Four years later, he and a partner won it in drenching rain.

Hill was the first American driver to win at Le Mans. (His co-driver, Oliver Gendebien, was Belgian.) Later that year, the death of Peter Collins created an opening on the Ferrari Formula 1 team, and Hill was asked to fill it. He drove for the Ferrari team through the 1962 season, finishing his career in sports car competitions for Ford and Chapparal factory teams and retiring in 1967. In 1991, he was among the second class of inductees at the International Motor Sports Hall of Fame in Talladega, Alabama.

In 1962, the year after his Formula 1 championship, Hill had a near disastrous accident during a practice run for a race in Sicily. His success and survival might well be explained by his reaction.

"The race organisers suggested today," the Associated Press reported at the time, that Hill "sit this race out after the jolt he received when his Ferrari left a curve yesterday and shot 164ft through the air.

"Hill agreed with the suggestion."

Hill is survived by his wife of 37 years, Alma Baran Hill, a daughter, a son, a sister, a stepdaughter and four grandchildren.