Hill with a Peugeot in a R&T ad. Now listen to the recording below.
Below, we give our readers a chance to hear a rare 33 1/3 rpm recording, sent to us on a plasticized square piece of cardboard which measures seven by seven inches. For the record, it is simplistic, it is advertising, and it is not particularly well executed, even for the late 1950s. But it offers us a unique insight into what was then a new world for Americans, that of sports car racing and strange foreign cars with even stranger names. Despite being scripted, it says something about Phil Hill we may not have been able to ascertain elsewhere. Most telling, even though it is obviously a bought and paid for commercial, it is honest, as honest as Phil Hill always was.
Click on record to listen to Phil Hill.
Note that there is a 20 second
pause at the start.
This rare audio record came our way via Serge Dermanian, a retired Ferrari restorer living in Nice, France. Shortly after publishing an excellent article by Philippe H. Defechereux, which used an ad in which Phil Hill was photographed with a Peugeot 403, we received an email from Dermanian who mentioned that he had a record to go along with the ad. He added that he would be glad to send it along. We hooked up our stereo phonograph, carefully played the ancient audio device for pickup to a digital recorder, and finally converted it to the digitized format for use on a computer.
In addition, on this old, scratchy record, we hear Road & Track Editor John R. Bond, almost a lone voice in the wilderness, who used the magazine’s power and platform to beg Detroit to build cars with good handling, quality, common sense and good gas mileage. There is a message here, then, and now.
Our thanks to Serge Dermanian for finding and sending along this rare recording of the late Phil Hill. Note that there is a 20 second pause before the actual voices are heard, so have patience.
To PHIL HILL, Automobilist (1927-2008)
Down shift and snatch a lower gear
Knowing neither forethought, premeditation nor fear.
Passion and instinct of the road racer;
The will to win, oh, destiny chaser.
We have ridden haply by your side,
In eloquent essays now ever abide.
You will live on in the swirling dust and glory
A century from now they will yet remember, and tell your story.
John Kuhn Bleimaier
THE STAR
(official magazine of the Mercedes-Benz Club of America)
In 1992, I attended a Ferrari get-together and memorabilia show at a hotel in Chicago. In the morning and before the show opened I came down to breakfast at the hotel restaurant. When I sat down at a table I noticed that Phil Hill was sitting alone, at the table next to me. I really wanted to just move over, introduce myself, and talk with him, but I didn’t. I respected his alone time and I think he looked over at me and acknowledged that.
An hour or so later the show opened. When I went in to the show I saw that Phil Hill was setting at a table and was there to sign autographs. There where a number of people in line to have him autograph books and other things that they had brought for him to sign. At one of the vendor tables, I purchased a really nice postcard with the Ferrari logo on it. It shows the prancing horse in a stain-glass frame, the same that is on the window, of the Galleria Ferrari in Maranello, Italy.
As I waited for the crowd to thin out, I then approached him with my postcard in hand. As I stepped up to the table, and much to my surprise, he looked up at me and said “Hey, didn’t we have breakfast together this morning?” I smiled and said “yes, but I wasn’t in the mood to talk” He laughed ! Then I asked if he would write something on my postcard. He said “sure, what do want me to say?” I told him that I had just recently bought a Ferrari 308 and that owning a Ferrari had been something that I had dreamed of since I was a child. I also said that I had many memories of his days driving for Ferrari and his winning of the championship.
He then wrote on my postcard, To Tim, you finally got your 308! Phil Hill
Thank you Phil, I will never forget (our breakfast together)meeting you, and shaking your hand.
Tim LaGanke
Novelty, Ohio
The recording of Phil Hill was quite interesting, but the recording-of-the-playback of the recording was quite poor. If you’d like to have an audio engineer clean that up for you, I could make you a much better recording.
I was lucky enough to sit across from Phil Hill at dinner in Bologna, and along with everyone at the table, he sang Happy Birthday for my 50th. It was a thrill spending the entire weekend with him for the San Marino GP with GP Tours in 2001.
He showed us all around Modena – factory Ferrari, Museum Etc., even to a Balsamic Cantina.
The stories he told of his days with Ferrari, like Racing for Ferrari in the 50’s and 60’s, test driving on the back roads near Modena, and driving overnight to pickup Mrs.Ferrari in Germany, only gave a glimpse as to the amazing life he lived.