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phil hill

And How! Bob Temple at Palm Springs

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And How! features open and innovative formats for notices, articles and posts.

March 22, 1952, Palm Springs California. I was there cheering Roger on — wearing my specially-made Simca T-shirt that had amused Barlow when I came to his dealership earlier that same year.This is the first of the two Roger Barlow Simcas, seen here with mechanic Bill Pringle behind the wheel. Pringle raced this car in the event, while Barlow himself drove the new Simca special, #62, with right hand drive. Pringle finished second and Barlow fifth in the main event. Al Coppel won the class in his MG special.

As we have seen, Studebaker designer and part time photographer Bob Temple recorded sports car events at the Studebaker Proving Grounds and the Press on Regardless Rally in the early 1950s. Temple also went out west, and was there with Kodachrome for the Palm Springs races on March 22, 1952. Most remarkably, Jim Sitz was there as well and recorded all the cars on his invaluable set of index cards. He was therefore able to identify and comment on the cars and the personalities at the race. Our thanks to both the late Bob Temple and the very much still alive Jim Sitz.

Photos by Bob Temple courtesy Vintage Motorphoto
Story and captions by Jim Sitz

I had the good fortune to attend the March 22, 1952 event at Palm Springs, California. The photographs were taken by Bob Temple. I also had attended earlier events there in April and October of 1951.

The April 1951 event featured Jim Kimberly’s Ferrari 166 Barchetta and a young mechanic named Phil Hill, who drove his old Alfa 2.9. What a car! What a sound! The memory of Hill’s Alfa prompted me to follow his career. Race fans also saw and heard a Ferrari V-12 for first time on west coast. [Read more…] about And How! Bob Temple at Palm Springs

Phil Hill, On Record

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Phil 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. It is about four minute long. 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, and Hill explains his affection for Peugeot, which stems from his childhood. Most telling, even though it is obviously a bought and paid for commercial, it is honest, as honest as Phil Hill always was. [Read more…] about Phil Hill, On Record

California Classic: The MotorBinder Photo Collection

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MotorBinder Classic Photographs from the golden age of motor racing
By Roy Spencer
321 pages, softbound, 10.75 by 8.25 Horizontal layout
ISBN 978-0-615-97059-2
$64 Post Paid US, $84 PP international
Motorbinder.com

Review by Pete Vack

Although dedicated to his father Bev, (1917-1977) Roy Spencer’s stunning MotorBinder is a collection of photos that serve as a fitting tribute to the late photographer Gordon Martin, a former Motorsports Editor for the San Francisco Chronicle.

A wonderful action photo of Paul O’Shea and his SLS Mercedes just keeping ahead of the Aston Martin DB3 of Bob Oker at Riverside in 1957. This one is a full spread reproduction of a Ken Parker photo.

[Read more…] about California Classic: The MotorBinder Photo Collection

Gauld at the Monaco Historics

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Derek Hill sits in the Ferrari Dino his dad Phil used to win the Italian Grand Prix fifty-four years ago.



Story and Photos by Graham Gauld

You have got to hand it to them; the Monaco Automobile Club put on a real spectacle with their bi-annual Monaco Historic event held last weekend. Monaco has been a gem in on the International racing scene since 1927 when William-Grover Williams, an Englishman in Monaco, won the first Monaco Grand Prix in his Bugatti. This week it was time to forget about the modern computers on wheels that are todays F1 cars and wallow in the nostalgia of racing in the past. The Monaco event always attracts interesting cars and people; let’s meet some of them. [Read more…] about Gauld at the Monaco Historics

Denise McCluggage: The Tale of a Transporter

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Denise Transporter

[Denise McCluggage passed away on May 6th of this year. A great fan of VeloceToday, she contributed several articles; below is one of her best. We miss you, Denise.]

By Denise McCluggage

At the time whereof I write, the late 1950s, Modena was the real home of Ferrari. Maranello, a sleepy hill town, boasted the low, gated factory but little else. No test track, no museum, no shop. No tourists. No Il Cavallino, the posh ristorante opened in 1962 across from the factory on a slight rise set back from the road. Cavallino Bianco Bar, a working man’s bar of the type found in every Italian village, occupied the site.

Memory has me coming out of the factory gate and looking up at the bar. A few tables are topped with the ubiquitous Martini & Rossi umbrellas and scattered on the beaten earth before the dark entry. At the tables, singly and in pairs, sit somber working men in earth-brown coveralls. Some wear the odd pill-box-shaped hats common in a pre-baseball cap world. They wrap their hands around glasses of that clear stinging stuff called grappa. Or maybe a nearly purple Lambrusco, the local wine. There is nothing for tourists in this Maranello of the working man’s bar because there are no tourists. And that’s because there are very few of the tourist-spawning Ferraris; in 1958, if every Ferrari owner in the world chose to make the pilgrimage to the Emilia countryside where his car was built, the few hotels in Modena – down this winding road out of Maranello, down the long and lovely hillside – will likely have room for every one of them.

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Denise McCluggage: Ferrari Makes a Point

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copyright protected copyright Denise McCluggage By Denise McCluggage

I don’t know when Enzo Ferrari decided not to go to races in which his cars ran but to attend practice days instead, but such was his habit when I was covering the Grand Prix circuit. More often than not he was at Monza, sort of the home ball park, for the late summer Formula 1 races. And so as you see in this photograph shot at practice for the 1958 Grand Prix of Italy is “il Commendatore”, as he was usually referred to then, performing for my camera.
[Read more…] about Denise McCluggage: Ferrari Makes a Point

The Constant Search, Part 1

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By Brandes Elitch

Collecting Automotive Books and Literature

In 1982, a British book dealer named Charles Mortimer published a book called The Constant Search, Collecting Motoring and Motorcycling Books. Mortimer started his business during WWII, and spent half a century doing research for this book. At the time, he believed he had chronicled, in 40 different categories, everything published to that date on this subject. In addition to this bibliography, he included chapters on how to start a collection, whether to specialize or not, and how to store and display printed material. Mortimer started at the dawn of the automotive age, so this was an ambitious project. Today, I wonder if it would even be possible to chronicle all the published material on this subject in just the last 30 years. There weren’t a lot of new books about what we call “automobilia” in the sixties and seventies, but starting perhaps 20 years ago there has been a veritable explosion in published material. In this brief article, I would like to touch on some interesting aspects of automotive journalism and book collecting for the car enthusiast. My sense is that almost every car collector has also built up a book, periodical, manual, and literature collection, at least that has been my experience. [Read more…] about The Constant Search, Part 1

Michael T. Lynch on “The Limit”

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Last week we published an interview with New York Times writer Michael Cannell, whose new book has been greeted with great reviews. This week, Michael T. Lynch reviews Cannell’s book “The Limit, Life and Death on the 1961 Grand Prix Circuit”. It’s a review you will NOT want to miss.

Review by Michael T. Lynch

Author and journalist, Michael Cannell, whose sports writing has been seen in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Sports Illustrated and Outside, has written a book about one of the most dramatic seasons in World Championship Grand Prix history. [Read more…] about Michael T. Lynch on “The Limit”

Interview with Michael Cannell, Author of “The Limit”

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The book is out, the reviews are rave. The Boston Globe says “The Limit, Life and Death on the 1961 Grand Prix Circuit” reads “like a thriller”; the Wall Street Journal calls it a “well researched chronicle” and “an enthralling history of road racing’s golden era”; USA Today said it “deserves a spot in the library—if not, soon enough, on the DVD rack” Indeed, author Michael Cannell, a lifelong New Yorker who is not a car nut and who doesn’t even own one, sold the rights to the movie before the book was even written.

For us hardcore euro-car-nuts, much ado about an old subject. But Cannell thought that the story of Phil Hill and von Trips would resonate with today’s audience, and apparently he was right. According to the Hollywood Reporter, Spiderman Tobey Maguire snapped up the rights to develop the project at Columbia Pictures long before the book was published, perhaps in an attempt to keep ahead of filmmaker Ron Howard, who will begin shooting the Lauda/Hunt epic, “Rush”, in February. Then there is A.J. Baime’s “Go Like Hell”, also presumably in the process of getting to the big screen, not to forget that Wallace Wyss’s book SHELBY: The Man The Cars The Legend has also optioned its movie rights to a film producer.

VeloceToday will review “The Limit” in depth next week. But even before the book was published, Wally Wyss caught up with author Michael Cannell, and asked all the right questions. His interview follows.

Interview by Wallace Wyss

Wyss: Mike, what is your background? Are you a car guy per se?
Cannell: Strangely enough, I’m not a car guy. Quite the contrary, in fact. As a lifelong New Yorker, I don’t own a car. And I’m a pretty poor driver. It is a source of some embarrassment to me that I have shown up to interview great automotive figures in a compact rental car that I can hardly park. [Read more…] about Interview with Michael Cannell, Author of “The Limit”

Phil Hill, On Record

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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.

hill record.jpg
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.

Lynch at the Quail 2008

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We lost one of our finest when World Champion Phil Hill left us on August 28. He was enjoying cars and his many friends and admirers right up until the end. Phil won three races at the old Pebble Beach road course and also won the Pebble Beach Concours twice with cars he restored personally. Here, he poses at The Quail with former Ferrari President, Jean Todt, who managed Ferrari’s racing team during the Schumacher era. Credit: Marcel Massini

Michael T. Lynch reports on this year’s Quail Logde happenings.

The Quail – A Motorsports Gathering has now established itself as the hottest ticket of Monterey Peninsula automobile festival week. The tickets sold out back near the beginning of 2008 in a matter of hours. [Read more…] about Lynch at the Quail 2008

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