RARELY seen photos of Farnham racing legend Mike Hawthorn captured by his one-time team-mate Phil Hill have been released in time to mark the 59th anniversary of the UK’s first Formula One World Champion’s untimely death.
Farnham-based author, journalist and motoring enthusiast Doug Nye recently published the autobiography of his long-time friend Phil Hill, ‘Inside Track’, a project he had worked on in close tandem with the American racer for two decades and completed solo following Hill’s death in 2008.
The autobiography captures the thrills, spills and unbridled love of motorsport that encapsulated Hill’s career, including his own F1 World Drivers Championship win three years after Hawthorn in 1961, making him the first American and only American-born driver to win the championship to-date.
But less known about Hill is his passion for taking photos, particularly during his early career when he captured thousands of images of the golden era of motor-racing - many of which, covering the period 1951 to 1962, are now immortalised in two additional 480-page volumes accompanying his autobiography.
This includes never-before-seen images of Hill’s peers, from Stirling Moss to Jackie Stewart and Graham Hill - as well as the fateful year Hill spent as Mike Hawthorn’s team-mate in 1958 when, just weeks after waving his Scuderia Ferrari colleague through to clinch the World Championship, Hawthorn was killed on the Guildford bypass on January 22, 1959.
Doug told The Herald: “Phil was an extraordinary man because he was very well educated and interested in so many things. He was a perfectionist and a real craftsman, and no other world champion has been such a well-rounded bloke.
“He was very cultured, loved classical music, and was just a car guy through and through. But he also loved photography, and took thousands of wonderful photos in the 1950s and 60s.
“My promise to Phil when he became very ill with Parkinson’s Disease was that we’ll try to produce the finest World Champion Driver’s book there’s ever been, and we could do that because of the quality of his photography.”
Doug, who has reported on motorsport for some 54 years and published around 70 books on the subject, first met Phil at the height of his powers in 1966. The duo kept in touch for the next 50-plus years, and formed a close partnership in the mid-1990s to begin work on Hill’s autobiography as well as presenting a ‘car connoisseurship composium’ together in Naples, California.
“As a journalist on the racing circuit, Phil was one of the people I was absolutely in awe of, and then I realised that actually he was very friendly,” continued Doug. “He was just a terrific bloke and we got on like a house on fire.
“Every time they went out in a car they were literally putting their necks on the line. These blokes were warriors, they really were. But most of them, like Phil, were properly rounded human beings, not like the two-dimensional sportsmen you see today.”
As their friendship blossomed, Doug visited Hill’s lifelong home in Santa Monica on a number of occasions - and in 2008 he welcomed the legendary racer to his own hometown Farnham to visit Hill’s old Ferrari teammate Mike Hawthorn’s grave in the West Street cemetery.
Doug said: “Phil and Mike Hawthorn got on very well and in fact Phil was instrumental in Mike winning his championship. At the end of 1958 there were two races left, the Italian Grand Prix and then six weeks later the Moroccan Grand Prix.
“Phil was given his first Grand Prix drive by Ferrari in Italy, and his job was to go out as a hare and try and lure Sterling Moss and Tony Brooks in their British Vanwalls into going so fast that they would break their cars.
“It worked as Stirling’s car blew up, and Phil did that job so well that Ferrari asked him to do the same thing in Morocco and he did, again letting Mike through at the end to score the extra point and win the World Championship by one point.
“That was November 18, 1958, and just a few weeks later after announcing his retirement from racing Mike was killed on the Guildford bypass.”
Doug’s book is self-published and is available on a limited print run as a leather-bound ‘connoisseurs’ edition, a cloth-bound ‘collectors’ edition and more affordable ‘bookshop’ edition. For more information visit phil-hill-book.com .
(Photos courtesy of the Hill family archive)