The Ferrari champion who quit while he was ahead

As a rule of thumb, retired racing drivers are better company than their active counterparts, not least because they can speak with impunity and tell the real story, rather than the sanitised guff which routinely insults our intelligence today.

Take Phil Hill, for example, whose career ended on the highest of notes. After taking victory in the BOAC 500 at Brands Hatch in 1967, driving for Chaparral, Hill never raced again, although, typically, he never made any formal announcement of his retirement.

It is doubtful that anyone more intelligent ever stepped into a racing car, and certainly - despite excelling at circuits such as Spa-Francorchamps and the Nurburgring - Hill was always mindful of the risks in a sport then infinitely perilous. In the course of a long career, he somehow never once hurt himself, but over time lost many friends.

A sensitive and cultured man, he was also a wonderfully laconic raconteur, lacing his memories with the black humour characteristic of his generation. Whenever Phil showed up at a grand prix, we journalists would fight to sit near him at lunch.

Until his last few years, when assailed by the Parkinson's disease that would ultimately claim him, Hill could still drive a racing car like a man half his age, as anyone can attest who watched him at the Goodwood Revival, thundering round in a Daytona Cobra coupe, such as he drove there in the 1964 Tourist Trophy.

This was a driver of consummate ability - pole position by six seconds at the Nürburgring tells you all you need to know - but one somehow felt that, as with James Hunt, Hill savoured racing more in retrospect than when he was actually competing; without a doubt, that was so when it came to his feelings about Enzo Ferrari, for whom he drove so many years.

Living in Italy suited Hill well indeed, in part because he could indulge his love of opera with visits to La Scala in Milan to hear Maria Callas et al. He loved Ferraris, too, and it was in the red cars he became America's first world champion, that he thrice won Le Mans, but, like many others, he allowed that his relationship with the proprietor was equivocal: no one ever had Enzo's number better than Phil.

"The Old Man used to produce these annuals at the end of every season, and the only way you came off any good in them was to be on especially good terms with him - or to die. If you died - it had to be in a Ferrari, of course - you got your picture in colour, with big ruby lips painted on! Terrible, huh?"

Through the 1961 season it was clear either Hill or team-mate Wolfgang von Trips was going to become world champion. At Monza Phil won both race and title, but in dreadful circumstances, for his rival was killed on the second lap. "I didn't know he was dead, until I came into the pits at the end. I said, 'How's Trips?' From the way they evaded my question, I just knew right then..."

After touching wheels with Jim Clark's Lotus on the approach to Parabolica, von Trips's car had gone off the road, and up the adjoining bank. Fourteen spectators died, and, as after Alfonso de Portago's accident in the Mille Miglia four years earlier, there were calls from the Vatican that motor racing be banned: Ferrari found himself again under siege.

"The Vatican always pitched in on these occasions," Hill remembered. "In Italy they love racing, but after a fatality there's always this rush to blame the car, and those who built it - which was particularly unfair to Ferrari, because the one thing his cars never did was break.

"The whole thing was a big trauma. I was with Ferrari for days afterwards. It seemed like everyone in the country was milling around Maranello, and there's Ferrari, with three days' beard growth, and wearing bathrobes all day - he'd been through it lots of times, and I always felt he regarded his drivers like a general thinks of his soldiers. I guess he was fond of Trips, but... Ferrari was a great actor, you know. Did he go to the funeral? No, he didn't. He sent the old lady."

Ah, yes, the old lady - Laura, Enzo's wife, who in the early 1960s suddenly began taking an active interest in the team, even attending the races, a practice long since abandoned by her husband. Hill was mesmeric as he talked of the blend of glory, tragedy and farce that was life at Maranello back then.

Together with Richie Ginther, the third Ferrari driver, Hill attended von Trips's funeral. If it is a cliche that drivers raced for the love of it back in the day, it seems barely credible that in 1961 the world champion travelled to Cologne by train.

"Richie and I drove to the station in Milan, and when we got to Cologne, there was Amerigo Manicardi, who was in charge of Ferrari sales worldwide, and a really good guy. He had been sent to accompany Mrs Ferrari, and keep her out of trouble.

"The funeral was the worst thing you could ever imagine. It was raining and dark, and they had Trips's Ferrari sports car there, with a platform on the back, to carry the coffin. The kid who drove it kept slipping the clutch, I remember, and by the time we got to where the service was, it was about cooked.

"There was a reception afterwards, and Mrs Ferrari said to me, 'Pheeleel, are you going back now?' She'd decided she didn't like Manicardi, so maybe Richie and I would let her go back with us. 'Where are you going?' she said. I panicked - I said, 'We're going to... Stockholm!' She said, 'What a shame', and meanwhile Manicardi's doing all these winks and everything..."

Now Hill and Ginther retraced their steps, taking the endless train trip back to Milan, then climbing aboard Phil's Peugeot - "That's what a world champion could afford back then!" - for the drive to Modena. "Fortunately, that car had very high backs to the seats. We're going along, and suddenly Richie says, 'Duck! Duck! It's the old lady!' And we're supposed to be in Stockholm.

"The next day we get to the factory, and we see Manicardi. I said, 'Christ, Richie saw you at the last second!' He then told us that Mrs Ferrari had said, 'Manicardi, isn't that Phil Hill's car?' And he said, 'I don't know - there's nobody in it!' And she said, 'Oh, that's all right, then.' That was what it was like, living with Mrs Ferrari.

"Like I said, Manicardi was a good guy, and damn good at his job, too. And you know what? He had a heart attack, in his forties, and Ferrari didn't send one person to his funeral. You kind of revered him, you know, but he was hard to like back then."

A great driver, Phil Hill, and more than that, a great man. It's more than 11 years since he died; like all who knew him, I miss him still.