Phil Hill and the Ferrari 330 TRI/LM - the car in which he won the 1962 Le Mans 24 Hours with Olivier Gendebien.
As well as winning the F1 World Championship in a ‘Shark-Nose’
1500cc single-seater, American Phil Hill’s name is synonymous with
racing Ferrari sports cars from the early days as a West Coast professional
racer to multiple victories at Le Mans for the works team. In this book
he tells it how it was to drive at that time, as well as describing cars
from the earliest 815 to a 1990s 333SP.
Hill’s first Ferrari (purchased in 1951 for $6,500) was a 212 Barchetta, and over the next 10 years he drove just about every version of the marque in all the classic races of the period both as an entrant, a hired driver for private teams and a works driver, leaving the team after a disastrous post-Championship season in 1962. From 1963 to 1967 (his retirement year) he competed with the scarlet cars at the wheel of Ferrari’s top competitors such as the Shelby Cobra Daytonas, Shelby Ford GTs and the advanced Chaparral sports-racers - the antithesis to Ferrari’s traditionally designed, elegantly-formed cars. So he’s in a good position to review the magic of the marque both from a subjective (Hill is a life-long Ferrari and vintage car enthusiast) and objective (one F1 World Championship and countless race victories in all manner of cars) viewpoint.
The book is interlaced with superb photography by John Lamm of predominantly US-owned (and restored cars) together with period shots of Hill and his contemporaries mercilessly flogging barely-painted sports cars around road courses such as the Mille Miglia or Le Mans. Modern celebrity owners such as Ralph Lauren would not recognise their ‘babies’ after, say, 3 laps of the Targa Florio in the hands of the fiery Rodriguez brothers. Hill is interesting in his description of circuits at that time, comparing the relative security of the airfield tracks with the tree- and rock-lined road circuits such as the Targa. An airfield circuit would allow a driver to push the envelope lap after lap until at some point he overdid it and went off the track. The average gain in lap times made up for the one-lap shortfall. On a road circuit one single error could be fatal - and often was. Many drivers never understood these differing techniques that the (surviving) successful ones such as Hill, Moss and Salvadori did. The high-mortality rate of the time, and Hill’s constant exposure to severe accidents, is a recurrent theme of the book.
1965 - 66 Ferrari P2. This car won the 12 Hours of Reims in '65.
Strange omissions are the 250GT series of ‘Tour de France’,
SWB and GTO, as well as the 250LM, but all the other main sports cars
are present in four, six, eight and twelve cylinder forms. By the mid-fifties
Ferrari was producing cars in a confusion of types and models but in 1957
a single 3.0 litre ‘Testa Rossa’ V12 appeared at the ‘Ring
1000kms, and from 1958 to 1961 the model dominated world championship
sports car racing -despite some stiff competition from Aston Martin, Maserati
and Porsche. Hill won both the Sebring 12 Hours and the great French classic
three times in TRs, in fact he raced the cars eighteen times, winning
eight races outright. It’s this priceless experience that makes
the book so interesting, and its coffee-table pretensions mask the readability
of the prose. He’s as interesting on the pre-war 815, the car that
many consider the ‘first Ferrari’, as he is on the 333SP,
a $1,000,000 modern sports-racer that he drives very competitively despite
his years, or the Bartoletti race-car transporter of the early ‘60s.
With the dramatic increases in performance from 1957 to 1967 it’s fascinating to compare lap times of three 4.0 litre Ferraris at Le Mans. The 1957 335S does a 3 min 58.7 seconds in Mike Hawthorn’s hands, the 1962 330TRI pictured at the top of the page a 3 min 57.3 (Hill himself) and come 1967, Ferrari has moved the engine to the back, increased the power to 450 bhp and Mike Parkes does a 3 min 28.9 secs in the immortal P4. This is typical of the information found within the book, produced by the ever-thoughtful and analytical author.
Of all the cars in the book, Hill is prompted to stake his lottery-winnings on the 1957 four-cam, 390 bhp, 4.0 litre V12 type 335S. As he says, it “exemplified the sort of racing I liked best. No engine restrictions, no fuel mileage considerations, just you and a very powerful unblown engine in a chassis as good as that engine, working like hell to get to the finish line first.”
The 192 page book, priced at £45.00/US$80.00 (including p & p worldwide), is produced in large-format (330mm x 240mm). For further details visit www.daltonwatson.com
Text; Steve Wakefield/Photos; Dalton Watson
ClassicDriver.com