by Dick Stewart

Created on: May 02, 2009

Phil Hill, the driver who brought new respect to American racers among their European colleagues, passed away on August 28th, 2008.

If you attended the Monterey Historic Races at Laguna Seca, you'd always see Phil contending for one of the group trophies, usually near the front, and more than likely in an Alfa Romeo these days. If you were familiar with his history, you would have known that he'd been racing in Monterey for nearly sixty years.

He won the trophy race his first time out in 1950, when the results counted for something. The next year featured a memorable win in another Alfa Romeo, a now-classic 8C2900B currently owned by Ralph Lauren that was already thirteen years old at the time.

This was when road races often had stretches of unpaved surface, and drivers drove unbelted, in polo shirts and slacks, with cork-lined helmets. If you've ever driven the 17-mile Drive in the forests above Pebble Beach, you'll understand what a feat it was in those early days to drive those roads at racing speeds and survive, much less win.

He'd already won races elsewhere, including a race in an MG-TC in July 1949, the first he'd ever entered. Adding the other career bookend in a pair unlikely to be duplicated, he balanced that by winning his last real race, in a Chaparral 2F at Brands Hatch in 1967.

In between, he is probably most celebrated for being the first American driver to win the Formula One World Driving Championship, having compiled the best finishing record in a series of races around the world. Some who do not know the full story unfairly count that achievement diminished by the circumstances, in which his Ferrari teammate Wolfgang von Tripps, trailing by one point in the Championship standings, died in a crash in the final race of the season, at Monza.

His career led him to success in many kinds of racers, including a stab at drag racing. In sports-racing cars, he was the first American-born driver to share a win at Le Mans (with Belgian teammate Olivier Gendebien). Perhaps the best long-distance sports car driver, he won Le Mans and Sebring 3 times, Argentina and the Nurburgring twice, and the Daytona Continental once. In an entirely different venue, he set a class land speed record at Bonneville in the MG EX181 streamliner, going 254 mph on only 1500 cc.

Contemporary racer and award-winning journalist Denise McCluggage points out that his mechanical empathy was such that he was often dismissed as conservative, when compared to other drivers who would flog an

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