Phil Hill, 81, US-born driver who won Formula One title

Phil Hill won the Nurburgring Circuit in 1962 with copilot Olivier Gendebien, driving a Ferrari. (File/Associated Press)

LOS ANGELES - Phil Hill, a reserved Californian who became a gifted race car driver and the only American-born driver to win the Formula One international auto-racing championship, died yesterday. He was 81.

Mr. Hill died at Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula of complications of Parkinson's disease, according to John Lamm, a close friend who is also editor at large of Road and Track magazine.

Mr. Hill won the Formula One title for Ferrari in 1961. He also was the first American to win the 24-hour endurance sports car race at Le Mans, France, a race he won two additional times. Among many other victories, he won the Sebring 12-hour race three times.

"Phil set the standard" for other American drivers who competed overseas, such as Dan Gurney and Mario Andretti, the late Shav Glick, a longtime Los Angeles Times motor sports writer, said in 2006. (The Italian-born Andretti, whose family emigrated to the United States when he was a teenager, won the Formula One title in 1978.)

Mr. Hill "also was a great representative of the sport," Glick said, adding that he was "quiet and not given to self-promotion, a very gracious man."

Mr. Hill won his Formula One championship at the season's penultimate race in Monza, Italy, after he had swapped the series lead all year with Ferrari teammate Wolfgang von Trips of Germany.

In the same race, Trips died in a crash that also killed 14 spectators. As a result, Ferrari did not participate in the season's final race in Watkins Glen, N.Y., and Mr. Hill was unable to celebrate his championship in his home nation.

Mr. Hill, despite driving with safety gear in his race car that paled by today's standards, never suffered a serious injury. He retired from driving in 1967 at 39.

"I had an amazing amount of luck to race for 22 years and not a drop of blood or a broken bone," Mr. Hill once said. Then he quipped: "Maybe I wasn't trying hard enough."

But racing was not always easy for Mr. Hill. According to Formula One's website, Mr. Hill was "profoundly intelligent and deeply sensitive," a driver "always fearful, and throughout his career he struggled to find a balance between the perils and pleasures of his profession."

At one point in the early 1950s he stopped racing for 10 months because of stomach ulcers, but he returned, and "by the mid-1950s he had become America's best sports car racer," the website said.

Mr. Hill leaves his wife, Alma; a son, Derek of Culver City, Calif.; a daughter, Vanessa Rogers of Phoenix; a stepdaughter, Jennifer Delaney of Niwot, Colo.; and four grandchildren.