Steve Parker Motoring / The Car Nut: PHIL HILL, FIRST AMERICAN "WORLD CHAMPION OF DRIVING," 81

America's first and still only US-born Formula One world champion, Phil Hill, died August 28th in a Salinas, CA, hospital as a result of respiratory problems complicated by Parkinson's disease. He was 81. (Hill driving his Ferrari to victory in the 1961 Belgian Grand Prix, the season he won the World Championship of Driving).

Hill passed on during one of his many annual globe-trotting pilgrimages from his home of over 70 years in Santa Monica, CA. This last trip was to the vintage sports car races at Laguna Seca Raceway and the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance, the world’s greatest and most spectacular collector car show, both on California’s Monterey Peninsula. Hill occasionally drove in the vintage car races there and was a much-respected Rolls-Royce and Ferrari judge at the Concours for decades.

Hill won the Formula One title for Ferrari in 1961. Other highlights in his career include winning the 24 Hours of Le Mans three times, the 12 Hours of Sebring three times, the Argentine 1000 Km three times, the Grand Prix of Italy twice and the Belgian Grand Prix. Hill's 1961 season stands as a monument to racing victories of the kind, for many reasons, we will not see again. (Phil Hill and wife Alma in 1975 at the Laguna Seca vintage races; the car is an Alfa-Romeo built in 1937 and is the very car which Hill drove to a win in the then-prestigious Del Monte Trophy Race, near Pebble Beach, in 1951)

Mario Andretti, America's only other Formula One world champion (1978), and who was born in Italy, said, according to Automotive News: "It's just terrible. One of those things you don't want to see happen. You want him to be around forever. He's one of those individuals who will leave a tremendous void in our way of appreciating the sport."

American driver Dan Gurney, a near-contemporary of Hill, just a few years younger and still building race cars and the Alligator motorcycle, and who also competed overseas, said Hill will always be remembered as America's first Formula One world champion. "I think in his heart, he was always very pleased about that -- justifiably. That's a terrific thing." Gurney remains the only person to have won a Formula One race in a car of his own design, the Eagle (1967, Belgian Grand Prix).

Hill was also a longtime columnist for Road & Track magazine, covering events and people and, of course, cars. Two other notable racing figures from Europe, Paul Frere and Innes Ireland, both of whom pre-deceased Hill, also wrote for that same magazine, and through their writings many American readers had their first taste of F1 racing and other motoring events “on the continent.” They learned they were not alone in their love of motorsports, and there was more to life than the Indy 500 and NASCAR.

Hill was inducted into the International Motorsports Hall of Fame in 1991, and the Motorsports Hall of Fame of America in Novi, MI, as the sole sports cars driver in the inaugural 1989 class.

He began racing cars at an early age, going to England as a Jaguar trainee in 1949 and signing with Enzo Ferrari’s team in 1956. He made his debut in the French Grand Prix at Rheims France in 1958, driving a Maserati.

(Two American racing legends, Jim Hall, creator of the Chaparral race car, left, and Phil Hill taking a break between driving stints at a 1961 event).

Click below for more photos and much more on Phil Hill's amazing and charmed life and career.

(Hill in his natural habitat, the driving position in a great old car)

He raced throughout Europe, the US and South America in an era when Formula 1 Grand Prix racing was made-up of wealthy men and women, whose fortunes weren’t lost or even grew during WWII, spending their own old money on the sport. They also hired drivers and got whatever help they could from engineers from some of the car-makers. Some of the European car-makers, particularly Jaguar, Ferrari and Maserati paid their drivers. Large sponsorships of any kind were almost unheard-of; today, the sport could not exist without them.

This was still a dashing and elegant time for racing. They built blazingly-fast cars which raced around on tiny, skinny little tires with drivers wearing sports shirts, not fire suits and who eschewed hard helmets, opting for “Snoopy-style” rubber caps and eye goggles. (Hill winning the 1961 24 Hours of LeMans in a 4.0 Liter V12 Ferrari)

Cars owned by Hill twice won the most-coveted prize in car collecting, the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance Best in Show. In 1955, it was his 1931 Pierce-Arrow 41 LeBaron Convertible Town Cabriolet, and in 1977 it was a 1927 Packard 343 Murphy Convertible Sedan entered by Hill and his wife, Alma. Many people around the world with much more money, more employees and access to more great cars than Hill could possibly have purchased have paid many millions of dollars to win just one Best in Show; winning two is an outrageous, even outlandish, accomplishment.

And all those millions couldn’t buy anyone the kind of class which Hill simply exuded, as naturally as someone breathing.

Huill retired from racing in 1967, and spent a very active retirement including continuing his lifelong love of classic automobiles and his collection of player pianos and other antique automatic musical instruments. He shared these “addictions” with another classic car collector and multiple Best in Show-winner at Pebble Beach, the late Jack Nethercutt, owner of Merle Norman Cosmetics, whose automatic musical instrument and car collection of over 100 classics is housed in a museum in the Southern California town of Sylmar, near Los Angeles, called the Tower of Beauty. (Phil Hill, left, and co-driver Olivier Gendebien won the 12 Hours of Sebring in 1961)

Hill was a constant at many of the world’s best Concours and most enjoyable driving events; seeing him there was a kind of regulator, or timepiece, of what the season was, as in, “If this is the third weekend of August, Phil Hill will be in Monterey and at Pebble Beach.” And when you made it there yourself that weekend, there he’d be.

Hill’s appearance at any automotive event lent a gravitas and importance which the event-runners could not buy; some might have paid Hill to attend, and handled his travel and hotel expenses, but Hill would attend only if it was something he’d go to on his own.

His business, Hill and Vaughn, was one of the world’s best and best-known Rolls-Royce restoration firms and was originally located in Santa Monica, CA, where Hill’s family moved after his birth in Miami, FL. Hill still lived in that same Santa Monica home where he grew up; the restoration business was sold over a decade ago, and never achieved the kind of success, or brought in the kind of customers, which happened when Hill’s name was on the door. His celebrity and reputation were such an important, critical part of the business that no other owner of the shop could succeed, in a business where trusted relationships count for everything. (Hill, exhausted but victorious just after the 1961 Grand Prix at Monza, Italy)

Hill was not very tall but remained movie-star thin and had a face which, when hit just right by the sun, looked as if he had just pulled-off a pair of racing goggles. Usually surrounded at races and shows by a gaggle of fans and car-lovers of all ages, traditions and backgrounds, he knew as much about Ferraris and Rollers as anyone else, and never hesitated to give his opinion and advice when asked one question or another.

Hill was not, however, America’s first world champion in motorsports. That honor goes to Jack Milne, a late Southern California motorcycle dealer (Milne Brothers in Pasadena), who won the world champion of speedway motorcycle racing in 1937.

Phil Hill put on no airs and never tried to impress with his voluminous knowledge of cars and racing. He wrote interesting and often introspective articles; Hill never wrote a mere “race report” for any publication. He dressed “country club conservative” and looked at ease and natural, moving smoothly through any event, at any locale. (This 1962 shot was taken at the Nurburgring, Germany)

Phil Hill was not some sort of quaint “throwback” to an earlier age of motoring and racing, someone affecting and putting on airs; he was a representative of those eras, an ambassador, if you will, one of the last living connections to Grand Prix racing in the ‘50s and ‘60s shot into the future, where we could appreciate him.

He was the real thing.

And in all of his racing, in some of the most dangerous years of motorsports, when race car drivers were almost expected to perish while pursuing their sport, Hill was never hurt in a shunt (wreck).

He is survived by his wife, Alma, two daughters, Vanessa and Jennifer and a son, Derek, who halted his own burgeoning racing career to assist his father as his Parkinson’s Disease progressed.

(Great thanks to John Lamm and the LA Times for some of the photos)