1,000 Greatest Drivers: Phil Hill
Much better than his reputation, but he was still better in sports cars than F1.
A lot of people give short shrift to Phil Hill and routinely rate him as the worst World Champion. For instance, he was the only champion who didn’t make F1metrics’s top 100 list. He was by no means the lowest-rated champion in mine though, as with a rating of .040, he did beat Jacques Villeneuve (.039), Mario Andretti (-.007), and Denny Hulme (-.042). Andretti got penalized severely because of the six seasons at the end of his CART career where Nigel Mansell and his son blew him out; other than that he’d be well over .1 I think. Hulme would be better if I only counted F1 races, but Jack Brabham thoroughly demolished him to such an extent in all other races that he came out as the worst, and even Damon Hill (.074), Alan Jones (.068), Graham Hill (.061), and Keke Rosberg (.058) aren’t that far ahead of Phil, so to act like he is overwhelmingly the worst F1 champion the way a lot of people do seems wrong to me (I still say Rosberg). Hill landed his ride with Ferrari after a bravura win at Le Mans a month and a half earlier, and it’s clear to me that Hill prioritized sports cars over anything else. He raced them before his F1 career, during, and after, and it seemed like to him anything he did in F1 was a bonus. He probably would have had a vastly more successful F1 career if his teammate Wolfgang von Trips hadn’t died. Not only did von Trips’s death hand Hill the title, he clearly lost his edge afterward and largely lost the desire to race. Even his Wikipedia page has the quotes “I'm in the wrong business. I don't want to beat anybody, I don't want to be the big hero. I'm a peace-loving man, basically.” and “I no longer have as much need to race, to win. I don't have as much hunger anymore. I am no longer willing to risk killing myself.” Since he had already won a title, why bother risking hurting himself for more? I get it, even though it makes his career look worse to people who don’t view it in the proper context. I do think he was better as a sports car driver than an open wheel driver, honestly way better. He and Olivier Gendebien were the only two drivers in the 20th century to win Le Mans and Sebring in the same year twice, but because he raced in F1 people overlook his actual career highlights (especially since that’s an era where you can definitely argue sports car racing rivaled F1 in prestige). I suspect the real reason people dump on Hill is the usual F1 bias against American drivers, and that’s just wrong, bro.
