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Phil Hill

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Phil Hill was telling me about a camera crew that had dogged his every step at Le Mans last year photographing him for a TV show; "Much to the consternation of the non-has-beens," he said lightly. That wry remark is typical of Phil. He has a sort of inner stereoscopic vision that gives him a two-way look at things. A view from within, and a view from without, and a lemon-rind sense of humor to sharpen all his references.

He well knows that any exterior look at his record since his 1961 World Drivers' Championship year might very well appear has been-ish. Sure he may be the only World Champion to have won Le 'Mans, he can hold the sports car lap record at Le Mans and at Spa, he can have been the first person to break nine minutes at the Niirburgring, et cetera, et cetera.

But where has Phil been lately? It's true that in Formula I racing since his championship year he hasn't amassed enough points to win a hockey game.

But if things seem to have slipped a little from that exterior view, there' is nothing in the interior view to correspond to it. It can safely be said that lack of success has not spoiled Phil Hill.

"The idea of champion has changed in my mind the last few years because I have been champion," Phil said. Not that it no longer seems important, but it is just different. There are "other stimuli" now.

But then our idea of things always changes with a changing viewpoint. There's many a difference between the Image and the Actuality. Being yesterday's Champion-being Champion, even - is perhaps largely a function of the attitude of others. Phil has refused to let others shape his imagt for him, though. Some people, he says, treat him with whaLhe calls "a certain sense of failure," as i they expect him to play out their idea of Has-Been, to wither and curl and not fight it out in the corners just because he can't make it on the straights.                               .

The "peculiar" way these people treat him alternately annoys and amuses him, but those with twin eyed vision of the world often alternate between amusement and annoyance.

Phil doesn't want people to commiserate with him over his misfortunes; he would rather havE someone laugh with him over them Even when things were at their worst last summer in the midst of the Cooper crises, Phil was getting a certain perverse enjoyment out of the patent absurdities of the matter.

It was true that Phil had a tough year, professionally and personally, with Cooper. He had had a tough time with ATS. But then, even Phil's good years have been tough years. Remember, his championship was won the day von Trips died. There were those who said because von Trips died.

But if Phil doesn't want anyone to agonize with him, he wants even less for anyone to agonize for him. He phoned me a few months ago in

a near apoplectic state about an article someone had written about him for a major magazine and sent to him to see before it was published. Phil was furious. The gist of the piece was that Phil's life had been climaxed at that moment in Monza when he was crowned with a shadowed crown, and that circumstances and people had ganged up on him since, and it had all been a Greek drama-drag downhill. "Who needs that kind of crap'?" he sputtered.

Actually, it was just a matter of a writer mixing up his own idea of what-it's-like with Phil's actuality. The same writer had reported that Phil had "burst into tears" after his own moment of triumph upon hearing of van Trips' death-which would have been, perhaps, the writer's reaction, but it was not Phil's. And the same writer, again actfng from his own idea of things, kept saying to Phil after the race certainly you are going to quit now, certainly you must give it up now, how can you go on? If it had been his script, the Champion would have agonized and soliloquized over Death, Danger, Man and Achievement and retired with an underplayed tension pulsing his jaw.

But Phil had absolutely no intention of giving up racing at the bittersweet moment of his championship. Nor did he have any intention of giving up racing at his worst ahead of Graham Hill and Jimmy Clark. That ain't no bad sandwich in which to be a filler. It could show anyone who wanted to look that a run of bad luck and bad cars haven't dulled Phil's competitive spirit.

"A series of races where everything goes wrong has a tendency to un sharpen you," Phil said. "And, conversely, nothing succeeds like success." Last season was full of un­sharpeners for Phil, but it wasn't all a loss. "1 had fabulous starts," he said with pleasure. "And that's one time in a race when the car isn't all of it. I always got off the line well and would be right in there for a few laps." And then, he added wryly, "start working my way to the back of the pack."

But that matter of trying. Phil had said it was, "gratifying, but not essential, to be better." Can anyone really give everything to something he doesn't believe is everything? Was the awareness tnat there was something more to life than racing a bite of the apple? Was knowledge that a world existed outside the pit gate speed-sapping? Was it corrosive of the will to win? We talked about that. Phil wasn't sure.

Probably Stirling Moss would think it was because he had explained his giving of his all (all but his life, as per Purdy's book) with: "You are either a racing driver or you are not." And now he is not. But his need to be has not diminished. Not at all. He still must get ahead of any car whether it is waiting in a patient English line to get into a dragster meet parking lot (he was fined for scraping another car in such a traffic-jam "dice") or scuttling Mini-wise up Park Lane.

Or, as Phil puts it in another Phil Hillism: "Racing would be a ball if it weren't so competitive."

"One has to be realistic in this business," Phil said. "You've got to know that someday you're not going to be doing it. You're not going to be a racing driver forever. A person is a fool if he isn't aware of that. It may affect his driving, but he must realize it or it will affect his living." This attitude, Phil admits, is a marked change from his early days. That early attitude he describes simply as "suicidal". Driving, push­ing, winning, trying-this was "Life". There was nothing else.

"When racing was 100% of my life I had nothing but contempt for those who 'dabbled' and I think that meant anybody who had any other interests at all" When old timers visited the pits or paddock he wondered how they could smile or laugh or talk when life had obviously ended for them. "You grow out of that, though. You realize that other things are holy, too. That people have not ceased to live because they have quit racing." And that problem again. Can a man not a true believer, not dedicated-can he drive as fast as he must?

"I don't know," Phil said.

He spoke of the Tourist Trophy race at Goodwood last September. He was driving a Cobra, and he enjoyed it. He equalled Dan Gurney's time in practice and it felt good. But before the race, some changes had to be made in his car and somehow the U - joint got put back out of phase. This played hob with the handling on right-hand bends. Phil, nonetheless, led the GT class for a number of laps, all the time "intensely aware" of how close the drive shaft was to the fuel tank. "I didn't know whether to 'press on' or 'nurse on'," he said. "- When I first started racing, the possibility of there even being such a choice wouldn't have entered my mind. It was blind, blissfully ignorant push. At Goodwood, I honestly don't know whether the bad handling on the right-hand bends slowed me all that much, or whether I just couldn't bring myself to bury my foot."

Phil finished the Tourist Trophy (sixth) in a car that had been a problem from the start. He could have justifiably parked it at any time, climbed into his silver BMW l800-TI and beat the crowd back to London. He did not. He never has. He probably never will. It's my opinion that Phil takes a rather existential view toward racing which permits him total commitment to it without really "believing" in it. It is there. It is what there is to do. The choice, then, is not in racing hard or not racing hard. The choice is racing or not racing. If you choose to race, unimportant as it may be in any Grand Scheme, you race. The absurdity of life shouldn't be a deterrent to living-and enjoying it.

And in the meantime, there is an awful lot of living to do. Phil's interests broaden every year, even deepen. His interest in old cars and his restoration of his Pierce Arrow is well known (he has a Twin-Six Packard which will get the treatment one day), but his restoration of player pianos is less publicized. Or, more accurately, "reproducer" pianos, because the ones that have captured Phil's devotion are fine grand pianos with an intricate machine "programmed", not unlike a computer, to accurately reproduce with nuances and phrasing-some of the finest piano virtuosi of the world. Certainly far more "accurate" than the recordings of the era, they are also more "stereo" than the finest modern sound system. After all, you're in the same room with the piano.

Phil has always been interested in music (jazz-musician Allen Eager once said Phil had the finest ear of any non-musician he ever knew), and there has always been a player piano in the family. But only in the past few years has the bug really grown to Kafka -esque proportions.

Now he is constantly on the alert for fine pianos with reproducer mechanisms (Duo-Art or Ampico) and for more piano rolls. (On the phone: "Well, it depends on what kind of Weltes they are. Are they those big red ones?") .

As for the pianos he has-well, he has three. (Last time I spoke to him he said: "Denise, I absolutely FORBID you to say I have more than three pianos!") So he has three pi­anos. Any more over that number he figures is eccentric. (Anyway, the extra ones are only for swapping and dealing.) "I'll never have more than three pianos I really care about," Phil said. And care he does. His pianos are the best-playing ones I have ever heard, and with his fine ear, mechanical ability and fussiness, he keeps them that way.

Looking for old rolls (if you have any-send him a list of them) has led him to find other old things music boxes, paintings, art nouveau oddments. His house in Santa Monica, which was once his late aunt's house, has been recently redecorated in a comfortable elegance that fits the Spanish heritage of the place as well as Phil's collectivist habits. He likes his house. He likes his nice big garage. And he invariably likes leaving them and he likes coming home to them.

And yet Phil is a little embarrassed by his richness of spirit. He is strangely reluctant-even shy about people knowing about his extra-race activities. He's afraid, perhaps, of being thought a little smug (he admits to being "philosophically pleased") over his awareness that racing isn't all of life, just a part of it. That he isn't really a Racing Driver. (That is what he does, that isn't what he is.) Nor is he a Piano Roll Collector or an Old Car Restorer. To close with another Phil Hillism: "There's more to do than you can ever get done when there is no need to do it in the first place."

Go, baby, go

Author: ArchitectPage