With the title wrapped up, Ferrari saw no reason to send his team to the final Grand Prix in Watkins Glen, New York. By skipping it, he denied Hill a chance to race before his countrymen as the new champion. “I was really sick about that,” Hill said, “for that day should have been the crowning glory of my career, the biggest day of my life.”
Instead, Hill went home to Santa Monica, where the World Championship barely registered. Americans knew about Grand Prix—they had glimpsed it in movies and magazines—but they just didn’t much care. It was a distant European fixation that earned far less notice than the Indianapolis 500.
The Hill–von Trips rivalry, so feverishly followed in Europe, was eclipsed in America by that summer’s home run derby between Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris. In a case of excruciatingly bad timing, Hill won the championship three weeks before Maris broke Babe Ruth’s single-season record of sixty home runs. If Maris was an overgrown boy gamboling on grassy fields, Hill was like the shaken survivor of a distant war.
In December, Hill appeared on an episode of To Tell the Truth, a game show predicated on the obscurity of the guest’s achievement. Asked in an interview if his life had changed, Hill said, “Not at all. If you mean do people recognize me and stop me on the street, they don’t.”
If Hill was an overlooked champion it was partially because he did not look the part. He was slight of build and grim-faced, with none of the swagger and easy bonhomie Americans expect from a winner. He seemed too articulate to be an athlete. Plus, there was a particular fragility about him in those months after the Italian Grand Prix, as if he were more affected than he let on. “Perhaps I am oversensitive,” he wrote in October, “but since returning to America this fall I have found that I am being treated with kid gloves.”
At home in the Spanish-style house on the drowsy outskirts of Santa Monica he listened to minuets and concertos on his player piano. The fingers of long-dead masters trilled the keys. These were ghostly concerts performed only for himself. When the music stopped, the house fell silent.
The greatest year of Hill’s life had found its bittersweet ending. Even in death von Trips had denied Hill the full satisfaction of winning. Over the short California winter Hill summoned himself. He would go back to Modena in the spring and try to do it all over again.
Epilogue
WHEN LAURA FERRARI saw Hill at von Trips’ funeral she asked how he would be returning to Modena. She disliked her escort, Amerigo Manicardi, and she was clearly fishing for a ride home with Hill. In a moment of panic Hill said he was continuing on to a business engagement in Stockholm, though that was not the case. The next day Hill was driving his Peugeot 404 from the Milan train station to Modena with Richie Ginther when they spotted Laura in an adjacent car. Both men scrunched down so she wouldn’t see them. Meanwhile, Laura had recognized Hill’s gray Peugeot. Is that Phil Hill’s car? she asked Manicardi.
“I don’t know,” Manicardi said. “There’s nobody in it.”
“Oh, that’s all right then,” she answered.
A few weeks later Ferrari’s lieutenants gave him a letter demanding that his wife stay out of the factory. They considered her disruptive. The grievance had simmered for years, but it erupted into mutiny a month after von Trips’ death.
Laura Ferrari had kept her distance while her son was alive. After Dino died, in 1956, she became a daily presence at the factory, where she ate sausage in the lunchroom with mechanics and lorded over financial matters. Throughout the 1961 season she attended races as her husband’s proxy, a scarf tied over her hair in the manner of peasant women. She spied for him at parties and in the pits. Tavoni and Chiti looked over their shoulders for her, suspecting she second-guessed their tactics and badmouthed them to her husband.
Enzo Ferrari refused to intercede when his staff confronted him with their letter of complaint. (They also demanded raises, which could not have helped matters with their notoriously stingy boss.) “If this is how you feel,” he told them, “there is the door. Here is your money. Out!”
Eight key managers and engineers walked out, led by Tavoni and Chiti, the two employees most responsible for the championship season. Guerin Sportivo, a weekly sports magazine, printed a cartoon of eight headless men leaving the Ferrari factory. Behind them stood Ferrari with eight heads bundled in his arms.
Within a year the eight exiles had formed a new race team, Automobili Turismo e Sport, or ATS, based on a farm west of Bologna with backing from Count Giovanni Volpi di Misurata, the twenty-four-year-old son of Mussolini’s finance minister and founder of the Venice Film Festival.
Ferrari tried to compensate for the loss by inviting Stirling Moss to Modena for a solicitous talk. He sent a coupe to the Milan airport for Moss to drive and greeted him with a double-cheeked kiss. Over lunch at Il Cavallino, Ferrari made an extraordinary offer: If Moss signed on, Ferrari would build a Formula 1 car to his specifications within six months. “He said, ‘I’ll make it,’ ” Moss said. “Whatever you want I’ll build it for you.” Ferrari may have been the only carmaker capable of making good on such a promise. His craftsmen could fabricate a new car in months, a fraction of the time it would take the British garagistas.
Moss was intrigued, but wary. Ten years earlier Ferrari had offered him a car for a race in Bari, Italy, only to reassign it to another driver at the last minute. Moss had nursed the insult for a decade. Still, he could see the benefit of an alliance. They might not like each other, but they could help each other win. More than anything, Moss wanted a championship.
In the end, Moss agreed to race a Ferrari, but only if it was operated by Rob Walker’s team and painted the dark blue of the Scottish Walker livery. That suited Ferrari perfectly. One of the best drivers in history, in the prime of his abilities, would race his car, but Ferrari would not have to pay him as a team member.
On April 23, 1962, a month before his Ferrari debut in Monaco, Moss entered a minor Formula 1 race known as the Glover Trophy at the Goodwood track in West Sussex. He was up dancing until 2 a.m. the night before, then rose, apparently unaffected, and prepared his pale green Lotus. On the eighth lap he pulled into the pits with his transmission stuck in fourth gear. By the time mechanics fixed it he had dropped to dead last. “What are you going to do?” a friend asked. “Have a bloody go,” Moss answered.
In his urgency to make up time he flew down straights at 180 mph and swayed into corners at 75 mph. “He’s pushing it,” a mechanic said. On the thirty-fifth lap Moss neared a twisty right-then-left maneuver called St. Mary’s Corner at 110 mph. His car unaccountably veered off the road, streaked across 150 yards of lawn, and smacked into an eight-foot embankment. A nurse held his hand for half an hour while mechanics sawed through the crumpled aluminum and removed his unconscious body. Blood smeared his face and dripped onto his white coveralls. The impact had crushed his cheekbone and shattered his left eye socket. That was the least of it. X-rays showed a severe bruise on the right side of his brain. He lay in a coma for a month with his left side partially paralyzed. In moments of delirium he spoke in French and Italian about women (Connie, vous êtes une belle fille. Vous êtes très sympathique) and racing (É molto difficile per un corridore—molto difficile). It was noted that his accent was far purer than when he was conscious.
On May 1, 1963—a year and a week after the accident—Moss returned to Goodwood to test his reactions. He still slurred words and he still struggled to focus his left eye, but he was prepared to consider a comeback. He clocked decent lap times in a Lotus—about three seconds slower than normal—but something was not right. He may have found his motor skills lacking, or maybe he simply lost his nerve. Moss would not have been the first convalescing driver to lose his appetite for the limit. Whatever the case, he issued a blunt statement to the press that evening: “I have decided to retire; I will not race again.”
Without Moss, Hill became the presumptive leader of the Ferrari team for the 1962 season. But there was little chance of him repeating as champion. Ferrari ju
dged the year-old Sharknoses obsolete, and discarded them in favor of a new version. “We must inevitably replace it if we are to continue keeping just a little bit ahead,” he wrote in his memoir. But Ferrari was not keeping ahead. Without Chiti, the new version of the Sharknose failed to measure up against resurgent engineering from the British teams.
Hill might have helped the new Ferrari management tune the new cars, but he found them unreceptive. When he suggested refinements, the mechanics made them reluctantly, or not at all. It was as if the clock had turned back five years: once again nobody would listen to him.
When Ferrari introduced a lighter, slimmer Formula 1 car at the German Grand Prix on August 5, Hill refused to drive it. “It will be a better car some day,” he said. “But it isn’t yet. It has not been tested enough.”
Tavoni’s replacement, an imperious twenty-six-year-old heir to a perfume fortune named Eugenio Dragoni, used Hill as a scapegoat for the team’s downturn, beginning with the Targa Florio in May. Hill’s throttle jammed during a practice run, sending him off a short cliff at 85 mph. Dragoni attributed the accident to Hill’s “hysteria” over von Trips’ death. When Hill had a persistent flu at the British Grand Prix in late July, Drag-oni interpreted it as a lingering psychosomatic reaction.
Hill denied that von Trips’ death had left an emotional scar. “I knew where I was psychologically,” Hill said, “and I was no more nor less ‘impressioned’ by Trips’ death than I had been by Collins’ or Portago’s or Musso’s or Behra’s or Hawthorn’s.”
After one race Hill overheard Dragoni reporting back to Ferrari by phone: “Your great champion didn’t do a thing.” Hill had never felt appreciated in his nine years with Ferrari, but by 1962 he found his position insufferable. He dined midsummer with Chiti, the defector, who was full of promising predictions for the new team. A spy reported their meeting to Ferrari, who likely punished Hill by assigning him inferior cars. It came as no surprise when Hill left Ferrari at the end of the 1962 season to join Chiti’s team. That too was a disaster. Chiti’s new Grand Prix car was not ready for competition. Gearboxes, oil pumps, and fuel tanks failed, one after another. Hill’s best finish in 1963 was eleventh in the Italian Grand Prix.
In 1964, with his reputation slipping, Hill accepted a pay cut to join the British Cooper team for one humiliating season. His seat didn’t fit, forcing him to lurch awkwardly over the steering wheel and preventing him from driving from the shoulders as he preferred. The overheated cockpit gave him blisters. In Belgium his car caught fire during practice. A few days later the engine ignited on lap 14 of the race.
These mishaps were not his fault, but they shook his confidence. For the first time he began to commit serious driving errors. He was sparring with Brabham in the German Grand Prix when he fumbled a gearshift and trashed an engine. This time he accepted the blame.
Only three years removed from the championship, Hill’s season became an embarrassment. On his first practice lap at the Austrian Grand Prix, held on a bumpy airfield in Zeltweg, he misjudged his speed going into a curve and skidded into a hay bale. The car hobbled back to the pits with a dislocated front wheel. John Cooper, the team owner, screamed at him, long and loud, within earshot of the other drivers, mechanics, and spectators. Hill crashed in the same curve during the race. The car erupted in flames just as he got out. Cooper fired him.
“There comes a time when every race driver becomes emotionally unsuited to this type of driving,” Cooper said. “Hill has reached this point. There may be some kind of driving Hill can still do. But I don’t know what it is.”
Hill never regained his form. He raced sports cars for a few more years before retiring in 1967. “I had a premonition I was ultimately going to kill myself,” he said, “and more than anything I did not want to be dead.”
He was among the last drivers of his breed to leave the sport. Within a few years racing became much safer with the introduction of crash barriers, seat belts, and cockpits designed for quick evacuation. The sport also grew far more concerned with money and media. In 1968 Lotus made a deal to display the Gold Leaf cigarette logo, and it traded its traditional racing green for the brand’s gold and red. Within a few years virtually every car carried a sponsor’s logo.
Shortly before retiring, Hill assisted in the production of Grand Prix, a 1966 John Frankenheimer movie based partially on his own experiences. He advised the director, drove camera cars, and appeared briefly on camera. In a case of art imitating life, a main character, played by Yves Montand, spun off the Monza track and died, just as von Trips had five years earlier.
At age forty Hill returned to Santa Monica, where he lived as an eccentric bachelor in the house left by his aunt Helen. He surrounded himself with antiquities—player pianos and thousands of piano rolls, trumpet-speaker phonographs, and a restored violano, a mechanical instrument that reproduces violin and piano music. He started a business restoring old cars and spent evenings listening to classical music alone or with small groups of friends. He was back where he started, with music and mechanics as his primary companions.
Hill never expected to marry. The impression of family life left by his parents was too distasteful. But at age forty-four, he wed Alma Baranowski, a spirited blonde teacher. They met when she accompanied a group of former students who came to see his cars. Hill had been busy restoring a 1927 Packard when they arrived. His hands were slathered in grease and he wore an old sweater. “I opened the door,” he recalled, “and thought, ‘Thank you heaven!’ ”
When Alma’s father died, Hill flew with her to Arizona for the funeral. Her parents were Lithuanians who had left Europe after the war and settled in Phoenix, where her father worked as a laborer. A reception was held in the simple, sturdy house he had built himself. Alma’s mother sat by the open casket stroking her husband’s forehead and greeting guests. “They were mostly these big truck-driver types who’d worked with her husband,” Hill said. “They were crying and she was consoling them. She hugged and kissed these guys and, I remember, amid the tears there was laughter. She threw her arms around me and kissed me and I kissed her.”
Those kisses unlocked something in Hill. His own parents had never shown affection. He had attended their funerals—and those of dozens of drivers—with steely restraint. He had always lived in a state of withholding, which served him well as a racer. Now, for the first time, Hill unclenched and opened himself to the warming prospect of love and family. In the following years he became an attentive father to Jennifer, Alma’s daughter from a previous marriage, and Vanessa and Derek, the children he had with Alma. He became the kind of father that he never had.
Hill’s inner development had outward expression. It was clear to his friends that his demeanor had lost its coiled tension. “When he married Alma his whole personality changed completely, his whole being changed,” said Bruce Kessler, a driver who had known Hill on the circuit in the 1950s. “He was a different person. He was totally relaxed.”
Even amid the happy mayhem of family life, von Trips was never far from Hill’s mind. His handsome presence hovered like a shadow. Hill was asked about him frequently in interviews and at vintage car shows, as if their histories were still entwined.
Von Trips’ fame grew with time. Nearly fifty years later, admirers still gathered at the mausoleum on September 10, the anniversary of his death, and they continued to leave flowers on the grassy shoulder of the Monza backstretch where he crashed.
Years after they married, Hill took Alma to Burg Hemmersbach to walk beside the ochre castle walls and view von Trips’ personal effects—jazz records, driving shoes, photographs, oil portraits—housed in a museum on the estate grounds. When heroes die young, Alma said to the curator, they remain forever young and handsome in our minds.
At the end of his life Hill suffered from Parkinson’s disease and multiple system atrophy, a degenerative neurological disorder. He was confined to a wheelchair in late August 2008 when Alma drove him up the coast to the Concours d’Elegance, a
vintage car show held annually on the Pebble Beach golf course. After an event on Thursday evening Hill said that he wanted to see the road circuit where he had won the Pebble Beach Cup, his earliest triumph, fifty-eight years earlier.
They drove in evening light with Hill directing Alma in a faltering whisper past tents and polo fields. “He was very, very strange that night, and he wanted me to keep driving,” Alma said. “And he got so upset with me, because it wasn’t what he was looking for.” Hill may have been searching for the road as he remembered it, the gravelly track darkened by overhanging cypress trees where he first earned a reputation for a precocious grasp of speed.
The next night, when Hill had trouble breathing, Alma called an ambulance to take him to a Monterey hospital. He died twelve days later at age eighty-one. A service was held on September 10, the forty-seventh anniversary of his bittersweet triumph at Monza. His favorite classical compositions were played as guests filed into the St. Monica Catholic Church, followed by “Jesus Is the Sweetest Name I Know,” the hymn his mother composed in 1925. The cemetery cortège included the 1931 Pierce-Arrow that Hill drove while sitting on his aunt’s lap. His coffin was covered by a laurel wreath arranged to look like the ones he wore on the victory podium.
Of the two men, von Trips may have left the more enduring legacy. Two years before he died he bought a pair of go-karts in Florida and shipped them to Burg Hemmersbach. He had planned to build a kart track where young Germans could learn to race. In 1965 his mother fulfilled his wish by opening a track less than a mile from the family home. It was leased to Rolf Schumacher, whose son Michael took his first laps there in 1973. Michael Schumacher would become the greatest Grand Prix driver of all time. He won five of his seven championships with Ferrari, returning the marque to dominance after a fallow stretch following Enzo Ferrari’s death in 1988.
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