After a half-hour stop in Puebla, the surviving drivers flew along a road lined with old eucalyptus trees and passed over the Río Frío Pass, the highest point in the race. On the far side they descended 10,000 feet through a series of switchbacks into Mexico City where 500,000 waving, singing peasants filled the streets for the anniversary of the 1910 Revolution, the Mexican equivalent of the Fourth of July. The crowd surged and seethed even after news that their countryman, Santos Letona Díaz, had died after driving his Jaguar XK120 into a bridge parapet. Nor did they heed the urgings of soldiers standing by with fixed bayonets. The throng parted reluctantly as the cars inched forward, escorted by motorcycle police. Young men ran alongside drumming on the hoods. Hill spent the night pounding dents out of the car body and fixing its leaking radiator.
The pace quickened with the mountains behind them. Over the next four days the drivers crossed broad parched plains as they pushed on to León, Durango, Parral, and Chihuahua. Hill had by now found the right tire pressure and fuel load, and he managed to stay just behind the lead pack where Ferraris and Mercedes fought. On the second to last day it looked as if he might move up a notch by overtaking Jack McAfee of Manhattan Beach, California, who was slowing as he struggled to see through a cracked windshield. Just as Hill caught up, McAfee’s windshield shattered. His sight restored, McAfee pulled away.
Meanwhile Kling, in a Mercedes Gullwing, went all out to catch Bracco, who led the race in a Ferrari. The final run was treacherous with sand blowing across the road, but Kling managed to erase an eight-minute deficit with a blistering desert sprint to win the Carrera. A crowd of Mexicans and Americans watched him nose ahead at a finish line set up at the Ciudad Juárez airport, across the Rio Grande from El Paso.
Mercedes had toppled the indomitable Ferrari team with obsessive planning and the renewed muscle of German engineering. Over the five-day race Kling averaged more than 100 mph. “We were so fast on some of the stages that even in a chartered DC-3 our director of motorsport, Alfred Neubauer, couldn’t keep up,” Kling said after the race.
Neubauer stood at the finish line in a suit and trench coat, smoking cigarettes and bear hugging his drivers. The Carrera was Mercedes’ first win in the Western Hemisphere and an important step for a company fighting its way back to the top after the devastation of war.
With his suspension nearly gone, Hill thudded his way to a sixth-place finish, earning $581. It was a striking rookie showing, particularly for a driver too unnerved to eat solid foods. His Ferrari was pockmarked from flying stones. Patches of paint were sandblasted off, leaving bare metal shining through. Bits of animal stuck out from the radiator grille. Hill stepped from the car, wind-beaten and dust-covered. Snowflakes had fallen on the high desert earlier that morning. A handful of drivers drank whiskey with Mexican blankets draped over their shoulders. They posed for pictures with a woman bullfighter. Strangers pounded them on the back. Photographers pressed in for portraits.
Hill had reason to smile as he shivered in the desert chill. For promising young drivers, a show of toughness counted as much as a win. Hill had proven his resilience with a gutty five-day run over some of the worst roads in the world. “If ever there was a racing event in which I felt I had countless times been close to wiping myself out, it was the Carrera,” he said.
He had shown that he was capable of exceptional mettle. If he could conquer his nerves, or at least control them, he might drive his way into the foreign circles that had enchanted him from childhood—and that he had glimpsed firsthand in Mexico.
When the 1953 season got under way a few months later, Hill went back to campaigning in regional circuits—Carrell Gardens and Pebble Beach in California, Sebring in Florida, the Phoenix Raceway in Arizona. He still saw himself as a misfit, and his tour did nothing to dissuade him. Americans viewed sports car drivers as suspect athletes engaged in a bastard sport, like surfers or bull riders. He celebrated his wins with lukewarm beers sipped by motel swimming pools, or with nothing at all. His disparaged standing seemed to corroborate his father’s view that racing was a waste of time, a dropout’s last resort. So, as much as anything, Hill raced for credibility. If he could go fast enough, he thought, he might earn respect.
It was a revelation to see the comparative stature of European drivers when Hill served as an alternate for an American team at Le Mans, the storied 24-hour race held 113 miles southwest of Paris. The drivers came from Europe’s most prominent families. They attended galas and cocktail parties thrown in their honor and lounged in hotel bars pealing with the sound of laughing women. Strangers bowed to them on the streets.
At Le Mans the drivers operated in teams of two, switching off in 2.5-hour shifts. Hill co-drove a little Italian-made Osca barchetta with Fred Wacker, a veteran of the American sports car circuit. They led their class after eight hours, but withdrew when their axle broke. The crew blamed Hill, saying he had ignored their orders to avoid first gear. “That might be and I remember feeling guilty about it,” he later said, “but I was at a time in my career when getting me to go slow was a difficult thing to do.”
During a particularly misty dawn, Tom Cole, an American driver sharing a 340 MM Ferrari with Luigi Chinetti, overturned and was killed at a tricky curve known as Maison Blanche. As much as anything Hill had seen, Cole’s death made vivid the perils he would face. “I began to brood over the whole business,” he said. “Cole’s death intensified my feelings in this regard, and while I could appreciate the new attitude I had found in Europe it did not cancel out the extreme tension and anxiety which was building up within me.”
He would find nothing to reassure him in the following weeks. Bill Spear, a thirty-six-year-old driver from Connecticut, had invited Hill to co-drive a Ferrari with him in a 12-hour race in Reims, France. They picked the car up in Italy and drove over the Alps with Spear and his mechanic, a Frenchman named Maurice, leading the way in a Bentley. Hill followed in the Ferrari.
The sun rose before 4 a.m. as they crested one of the highest Alpine passes and coasted down the far side. On the long descent Spear somehow lost control and the Bentley slid off the road and rolled down an escarpment. “It looked like a toy tumbling in front of me,” Hill said. He parked the Ferrari and clambered down the mountainside to find Spear and his mechanic pinned in wreckage. “Maurice had blood coming out of his ears and nose and he was moaning,” Hill said. “I couldn’t handle it. I went around to Spear and told him I’d be back with help. I went back up the road and talked to myself the whole way to prevent myself from flying off the road. I was so frantic about what to do.”
Within five miles Hill came to a village of stone cottages called La Grave, appropriately enough. It was now 4:30 a.m. He banged on random doors until he found a doctor who loaded a stretcher into the back of his Renault. They managed to remove Maurice from the wreck, but he died during the hour drive to Grenoble. Later that day Maurice’s wife arrived from Paris and demanded to know if anybody had prayed for her husband or administered last rites.
Spear survived, but he was unfit to race in Reims. Hill entered the 12-hour race with Chinetti instead. The brakes were erratic and the windscreen was puny. Chinetti’s helmet blew off on the second lap and they found themselves squinting into the wind at 150 mph. They lasted four hours.
Whatever his reservations, Hill returned to Mexico later that year for the 1953 Carrera Panamericana, again driving a Ferrari provided by Allan Guiberson. Richie Ginther, who had recently been discharged from his duties as an army helicopter mechanic, joined him as navigator.
Hill and Ginther flew to Mexico City and drove south to Tuxtla Gutiérrez. As they traveled the race route in reverse they notated blind turns and other danger spots in a logbook. Meanwhile, Jean Behra, the French driver who had crashed into a gorge a year earlier, was supposed to be making his own scouting trip. Instead he spent his team’s reconnaissance money at one of Mexico City’s best brothels, an establishment favored by high-ranking politicians.
Debauches were common
among the sport’s European stars, but it was not Hill’s style. He and Ginther had started as mechanics. They were clean-cut American gear heads, not carousers. In the heat of Tuxtla Gutiérrez they focused only on preparations—pumping the right fuel for the altitude, loading spare tires, welding a broken shock absorber.
They rose at 4 a.m. on the morning of the start, after an hour’s sleep, to adjust the gas level in the carburetor and make final refinements. In the darkness they drove the Ferrari to the starting line, a mile from town, where Hill made a last-minute check under the hood and noticed that their battery was unfastened. The bolts had jarred loose on the drive south. Ginther ran the full mile back into town to look for a battery box and returned empty-handed. Now in a panic, Hill sent Ginther on a second run to town while he tried to strap the battery down with fencing scavenged from a cow pasture. When that failed he found a parked car and tore out the needed parts with seconds to spare before the 6 a.m. start. “Richie comes staggering in all out of breath from his run into town,” Hill said. “I drag him into the cockpit just as the flag falls.”
They were off, sliding around corners and kicking up a thirty-foot tail of dust. Within minutes they had caught up to the front pack. Hill blasted by them in a single surge.
Now he was in the lead, running through patches of fog, with Ginther looking out for abrupt turns. “He’d yell ‘LEFT!’ or ‘RIGHT!’ at the last second and I’d get all over the brakes and scramble down three or four gears and we’d just by the grace of God make it around the turn.”
They held their position until popping two tires. While they replaced them and pounded out a damaged fender, a twenty-five-year-old Italian driver with soft, handsome features named Umberto Maglioli blew by in a powerful new 4.5-liter Ferrari. They overtook him in turn when bumps dislodged Maglioli’s radiator hose. In his rearview mirror Hill could see that Maglioli had painted the name of Quintus Fabius Maximus, a Roman general known for wearing down enemies, on the upper portion of his windshield.
The bloodshed began less than two hours after the start when a Ferrari driven by Antonio Stagnoli blew a tire at 165 mph and flew 180 feet off the side of the road. The car landed hard, flipped, and burst into flames. The navigator, Giuseppe Scotuzzi, was thrown from the car and died instantly. Stagnoli was taken to an Oaxaca hospital for burn treatment. He died the next morning. Nine more drivers would die before the race ended.
The death toll at the 1953 Carrera was not confined to the drivers. An hour after Stagnoli crashed, a Ford rolled off the road and landed in a riverbank without injury to its drivers. Spectators gathered for a look, spilling onto the road. Another Ford swerved to avoid a little girl and ran into a roadside banking, where it killed six spectators.
Hill had by now driven roughly 3,000 miles in Mexico over the course of two years without serious mishap, but his luck would run out the next day when he crested a hill on the mountainous leg to Mexico City and began a mean downhill turn to the right. Sliding to the edge, he realized that he did not have enough brake power to stay on the road. “I was mentally considering how far down we’d fall because at our speed we were sure as hell going over,” he said. “Some drops are sheer, down hundreds of feet, and you don’t stand a prayer—and we didn’t know about this one.”
Hill and Ginther spun perpendicular to the road and slid off the edge backwards, bouncing end-over-end for a hundred feet before coming to a hard stop against a tree with the roof caved in. Hill’s first thought was of how Stagnoli had burned to death in his car the previous day. After checking that Ginther was safe, he got out fast—so fast that he cut his shoulder on a sheath of torn metal. The two men scrambled up onto the road, where they found that a group of locals had removed the turn sign so approaching cars would have no warning. The culprits were standing in a hidden spot where they could watch the cars go over the edge. As Hill confronted them a Cadillac flew off the road and came to a stop near the same tree.
“We knew how deadly this spot was, so Richie and I shook off the guards who were trying to drag us into a first aid tent and went up on the road to flag down the approaching cars,” Hill said. “I had my bright red coveralls on and they could see us clearly; we’d wave as the guys came in, and we must have saved at least a dozen from going over the edge.” The crowd booed and hissed and shook their fists, but Hill and Ginther stayed on the shoulder for seventeen hours. When the last car had passed they hitched a ride to Mexico City.
The next day Felice Bonetto, a fearless Italian driver nicknamed Il Pirata (the Pirate), told the press that he would “be driving until I die.” He was leading the race an hour later when he failed to slow for a deep drainage ditch traversing the road in the farming town of Silao. The front wheels of his Lancia hit the ditch at full speed, flinging his car sideways into a lamppost. When Bonetto’s friend Piero Taruffi stopped to help he found that the impact had broken Bonetto’s neck. He was the third Italian killed in the first three days of the race.
Taruffi knew that he had to drive on, but it took him twenty minutes to compose himself and leave his friend’s body in the wreck. A short time later Bonetto was removed to a hospital where a wooden cross was placed in his hands and local women gathered to pray for the stranger who had died 6,000 miles from home.
Hill was long gone by the time Juan Manuel Fangio of Argentina won the Carrera in a Lancia D24. After their crash Hill and Ginther went to Acapulco where Guiberson had docked a yacht converted from a tugboat. They swam in the harbor and fished for sailfish. There were girls about. But even in that tropical setting Hill could not let go. The crash could easily have killed them. And there were nothing but curves in his future.
One late afternoon Hill sat on deck with a beer and watched a parade of rats trying to come aboard. One by one the rats crawled along the slip lines, only to fall in the water when they encountered a metal cone guard. But that didn’t stop them; they swam back to the dock and tried again. That night in his bunk Hill dreamed the rats were attacking him.
At twenty-six, Hill was on the brink of leaving the regional races behind. The faith placed in him by Chinetti and Guiberson had paid off as he racked up solid showings in races near the top of his sport. Success now depended more on his state of mind than his skills: the more he mixed with established racers like Alberto Ascari and Juan Manuel Fangio, the clearer it became that he lacked their coolness toward mishap and death. His hands and feet were willing, but his head faltered.
At home in Santa Monica for the off-season he tried to soothe his nerves by listening to Chopin and Rachmaninoff. In January he packed his goggles and gloves for the first event of the 1954 season, a 1,000-kilometer race in a Buenos Aires autódromo built by Juan Perón. A bad clutch forced him to leave his Ferrari by the roadside after thirteen laps. He rode to the pits on the back of a policeman’s motor scooter. As they neared the grandstand they saw an Aston Martin DB3 driven by Eric Forrest-Greene, a fifty-year-old Argentine raised in England who now sold Bentleys and Rolls-Royces in Buenos Aires. They could see Forrest-Greene heading into a spin as he exited the autódromo and continued onto a highway used as an extension of the track. It was not a grave mishap—drivers spun out all the time. But Forrest-Greene’s car hit a curb and rolled, landing upside down in a ditch. Hill slapped the policeman’s side, urging him to speed up so they could pull Forrest-Greene from the car. Frustrated with the policeman’s pace, he jumped off and ran the last fifteen yards.
“As I got towards the car, there was this tremendous ‘Whump!’ and it just exploded,” Hill later said. “There was burning fuel everywhere, including in the ditch. And somehow Forrest-Greene got himself out of the cockpit, crawled out of the ditch, climbed the bank, and emerged on the road, staggering towards me. He was burning from head to foot.”
A series of photographs, published two weeks later in Life magazine, showed Forrest-Greene lurching forward for help, his clothes wrapped in flames, while a handful of bystanders backed away. Moments later two policemen came forward to smother the flames
with a blanket and a uniform coat. Forrest-Greene was rushed to a hospital, where he died the next day. “It was hopeless of course,” Hill said. “I’ve never forgotten it. There is just nothing like fire.”
The specter of Forrest-Greene stayed with Hill. Two months after leaving Buenos Aires he was leading a twelve-hour race in Sebring, Florida, but dropped out with a faulty differential. Beforehand he had suffered from heart flutters and stomach spasms. Once again he could not eat solid foods. He wanted to keep racing but his psyche rebelled. Back in Santa Monica Hill consulted a family doctor who diagnosed an ulcer. If Hill did not remove himself from the stress of racing, the doctor said, he could hemorrhage. At the moment that he was poised to start winning on the big stage, Hill had finally lost control of his nerves.
At the 1955 running of Le Mans, Pierre Levegh’s Mercedes spun into the grandstand, killing eighty-three spectators. For Phil Hill, it was a barbarous introduction to the European circuit. (Getty Images)
4
The Road to Modena
IN THE SPRING OF 1954 Hill heeded his doctor’s warning and quit racing. For the first time in five years he was spared the gnawing pressure of competition. With both parents dead he lived in his aunt Helen’s house and worked as a part-time mechanic at Brentwood Motors, a foreign car dealership in Santa Monica.
His temperament was not suited to idleness. After tuning and restoring the family piano he gravitated to a more demanding project. Inside Helen’s garage sat her blue 1931 Pierce-Arrow convertible, the lustrous object of childhood admiration. Its aura had hardly dimmed, though it sat in disrepair. Hill and his brother Jerry had talked about reconditioning it for years.
Hill could not do anything about his unhappy childhood, but he could restore this bright remnant. As spring turned to summer he redirected his obsessive, tightly coiled energy from racing to automotive forensics. Day after day for ten full months he stood in the garage and diagramed each coil and spring’s place in the intricate greasy puzzle and taped his notes on the rafters. He labeled the parts, hundreds of them, and stored them in neatly stacked boxes. He bought a similar model to cannibalize for parts, and with help from specialists he rewired and restored the wood-lined cabin and restitched its leather seats. After months of cleaning, sanding, and rechroming, layers of blue lacquer went on and a detailer applied white piping.
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