The Winner Who Walked Away

In the '30s, when most Americans were struggling, Hill's life was peopled with servants, chauffeurs, music tutors and his indulgent aunt, who bought him a car when he was 12. He was, however, deprived in less tangible ways. Like the offspring of many wealthy parents, he was overprotected. He was not permitted to play baseball or football—he still harbors a fear of catching a thrown ball—nor could he date girls as early as his less affluent contemporaries did. His mother, Lela Long Hill, was, according to Hill, an austere, pampered and domineering woman who wrote and published religious hymns (Jesus Is the Sweetest Name I Know) and contributed money to evangelical crusades. Often she forced her son to stand with her for hours in the rear of a revival tent, listening to fiery admonitions. She was a contradictory woman, however, and in her youth was said to have had "a serious flirtation" with a famous Cleveland Indians baseball player, whose name the family has conveniently forgotten. Hill remembers his father only as a serious, unloving man whose advice upon sending him off to military school was, "Be a good little soldier." His father also trained him to greet women with a bow and a click of his heels, a habit Hill retains, "a damned reflex!"

"It wasn't until the car thing that I felt any worth," Hill says. "I've always expressed myself via the automobile. I guess I sensed that I was in an insane environment and that my only escape was in something that had structure. Cars gave me a sense of worth. I could do something—drive—no one else my age could do. I could take cars apart, too, and when I put the nuts and bolts back together again and the thing worked, no one could prove me wrong. That kind of technology was fathomable, made sense in a way people never did. Cars are easy to master; they hold no threat; and, if you're careful, they can't hurt you like people can. I have been a 'thing' person all my life."

Hill was the first of his age group to learn to drive, and when others followed he outstripped them again by his daring on the city streets and subsequently on the racetracks of Southern California. Without planning it, he became a sports-car racer simply to remain a step ahead of his contemporaries. "As a young racer I was a nut-case," says Hill. "My own worst enemy. I drove on instinct, not intellect. I would go out and go too fast and sort of scramble around making sure to react to danger rather than doing a heady job."

Hill had been sports-car racing for almost five years when, in 1953, he began to suffer stomach pains that were diagnosed as caused by an ulcer. He feels now that the ulcer was brought on by a suppressed realization that he was engaged in a deadly sport. Under doctor's orders he quit racing for a year until the trouble subsided and then returned, determined to pursue his career to its ultimate conclusion. By then he had become ambivalent toward a sport that he could do so well and enjoyed on an instinctive level but which, on an intellectual level, he increasingly began to see as destructive.

His driving style changed drastically from one of reckless instinct to one of meticulous discipline. He formulated the theory that a driver affects his odds to such a high degree that he could learn to drive on the edge of disaster without ever going over that line.

By 1961 Hill's anxieties surfaced dramatically when, after the depletion of Ferrari's Formula I ranks through fatal racing accidents, he and Count Wolfgang von Trips found themselves the drivers with the best chance to win the world title. Hill became obsessed with winning it, partly from an urge to excel, and partly from a desire to get approval from Enzo Ferrari, whom he described as "a hard bastard whose ambition in life was to build the greatest racing machine," and yet "a man I respected and from whom I wanted more than anything affection and for him to be a good daddy."

Hill's relationship with II Commendatore was every bit as charged as the one he had had with his own father. Hill was repulsed by Ferrari's "pompous, patrician superiority" so similar to his father's and by Ferrari's attitude toward his drivers. "To this day I do not know if he had any genuine feelings for us as individuals," says Hill, "or whether we were just tools tolerated as necessary evils. When one of us did win it was more as if Ferrari felt the victory was doubly his—he had not only managed to build the fastest car but one that was good enough to foil his drivers' destructiveness."

To some degree, almost every driver in the Ferrari stable saw their leader as a father figure. Ferrari sensed this, cultivated it and used it to push the men to greater efforts. The results were sometimes tragic. Says Hill, "There was something about the mood at Ferrari that did seem to spur drivers to their deaths. Perhaps it was the intense sibling rivalry Ferrari fostered, his failure to rank drivers and his fickleness with favorites. Luigi Musso died at Rheims striving to protect his fair-haired-boy status against the encroaching popularity of the Englishers, Peter Collins and Mike Hawthorn. And Collins, a favorite while living in the hotel within earshot of the factory, began to get a Ferrari cold shoulder when he got married and went to live on a boat in Monte Carlo. He was dead within the year. Time and again I felt myself bristling as Ferrari used Richie Ginther and Dan Gurney to needle me. And certainly Trips and I were locked in combat."

Ferrari fueled the rivalry between von Trips and Hill by refusing to name either as team captain during the 1961 season. He merely sat back and watched them fight it out for the championship that, in either case, would be his. Von Trips, the archetypical playboy-racer, was famous for a driving style as careless as his life-style. His compatriots called him "Count von Crash." Hill, however, was as disciplined and cautious on the track as he was off it. He talked about his fear of dying, a subject taboo among drivers. His fellow drivers dubbed him "Hamlet in a helmet." "I'm not sure I wasn't deliberately antagonistic," says Hill. "It was like my growing interest in piano rolls. I immersed myself in them so they would take away concentration from racing and prepare me for quitting. It was the same with my colleagues. I was painting myself into a corner with them and their attitudes so I would be forced into an action—quitting."

On Sept. 10, 1961, at the start of the Grand Prix of Italy, von Trips had his four-point lead over Hill for the championship. Midway through the second lap, von Trips tried to pass Jimmy Clark at 150 mph, nudged Clark's car with his own and plunged out of control into the crowd. Fourteen spectators were killed, as was von Trips. Still on the circuit, Hill was aware of the crash but ignorant of its extent, so he continued to drive an almost flawless race to victory and the world championship.