Sport: The Other Hill

At a cocktail party two years ago, a pretty girl glided up to the handsomely mustachioed auto racer. “Ah. Mr. Hill?” she cooed. “I’m Graham Hill,” said the driver, smiling hopefully. “Oh, I’m sorry.” said the confused young thing, backing away. “I thought you were the famous Mr. Hill.”

The apologies are few and far between this year. With seven of the nine Grand Prix races that count toward a world racing title completed, the famous Hill—U.S. Racing Driver Phil Hill, who piloted his blood-red Ferrari to a world championship last year—is in fifth place, hopelessly out of the running. The new leader and likely champion is the other Hill, Britain’s 33-year-old Graham Hill, who has 36 points and a virtually unassailable 15-point lead over his nearest competitor in the complex scoring system.*

The clincher came last week in the Italian Grand Prix at Monza, where Germany’s daring Count Wolfgang von Trips flipped off the road last year, killing himself and 15 spectators. No accidents marred this year’s race. Blasting his dark-green B.R.M. (for British Racing Motors) into the lead on the very first lap, Hill poured it on for 86 laps, hitting 180 m.p.h. on the straightaway, taking the corners with precision. At the finish, he was 30 seconds ahead of the No. 2 man, the U.S.’s Richie Ginther, in another B.R.M. Hill’s average speed for 307 miles: a whistling 123.5 m.p.h.

Girls on the Back. Hill did not even have an auto driver’s license until ten years ago. He was content with a motorbike. “The only reason I learned to drive was that a car is more sociable,” he says. “Girls were getting fed up with sitting on the back of a motorbike.” Two years after he learned to drive, he thought it might be a lark to try out a racing car, went to a race driving school and plunked down $2.80 for a crack at a Formula 3 Cooper. Four laps at 80 m.p.h., and Hill, as he tells it, was saying to himself: “I must look into this.” He worked as a mechanic for no pay. living “on the dole” in his zeal to drive. He tried the Lotus factory, again as a mechanic, and in 1957 got a chance as a second-string factory driver.

It took Hill just one year to win his first world championship point, in the 1958 Italian Grand Prix, where he drove a Lotus to sixth place. “That wasn’t very difficult,” he says. “Only six cars finished.” In 1960, he went over to British Racing Motors, but B.R.M. hardly seemed the spot for an aspiring champion. Conceived as an answer to German (Mercedes) and Italian (Ferrari, Maserati) dominance of Grand Prix racing, the company built fast cars that blew up or broke down with embarrassing regularity.

Camera on the Course. This year the gremlins are gone, and Hill has shown his exhaust pipes to Ferrari and all the rest. In May, he roared off with a victory in the Dutch Grand Prix, went on to take second in the Belgian Grand Prix. His worst accident came at Germany’s Niir-burgring last month. Two days before the race, he was barreling after a Porsche in a 140 m.p.h. practice run when a camera mounted on the Porsche to film the chase came loose and dropped directly into his path. It sliced the B.R.M.’s oil pipe, and oil splashed back on the rear tires. The car spun wildly, skidded 100 yds., and tore through a ditch, virtually gutted. Hill suffered a badly bruised shoulder. Yet he was back in the driver’s seat on race day, and in pouring rain fought off all challengers to win by a hairbreadth 2.5 seconds. Said Hill: “Driving over a wet course is bad enough, but having cars in your mirror all the way is bloody exhausting.”

The prize of victory in last week’s race was a silver cup and almost $3,000. Counting his salary from B.R.M. and a champion’s share of driving exhibitions, lectures, articles, TV appearances and endorsements, he can count on an income revving to an estimated $30,000 while he is on top—not quite the $150,000 commanded by that other British ace, Moss, before his near-fatal crash, but impressive enough for a onetime grease monkey.

* Drivers are allowed to count their five best races, get nine points for first, six for second, four for third, and so on down to one for a sixth place finish.