Lost Ferrari rides again

In 1961, Phil Hill was crowned F1 champion at Monza driving the Ferrari 156 –a race in which team-mate Wolfgang von Trips and 14 spectators were killed. Almost 60 years later, Phil’s son Derek Hill takes the wheel of a ‘Sharknose’ to experience what life was like for his father

It’s September 2019 and the Hill family is reunited with the 156 – this one a replica owned by the Europe-based American collector Jason Wright

PHOTOGRAPHY: ERNST SCHLOGELHOFER

The Ferrari 156 ‘Sharknose’ interrupted the British Formula 1 revolution led by Lotus and Cooper-BRM in the first year of the 1.5-litre engine regulations in 1961 and gave Maranello a potent, if brief, performance edge that my father Phil Hill, Wolfgang von Trips, Richie Ginther, Giancarlo Baghetti and others took full advantage of in that season 60 years ago.

While the British teams gnashed their teeth over the regulation change, Ferrari made hay with Carlo Chiti’s V6 that had evolved out of Formula 2 since 1957. Its spaceframe chassis was conventional, but that striking twin-nostril nose, the neat mid-engine layout and Enzo Ferrari’s unfortunate insistence that all 156s should be broken up once they became obsolete has guaranteed the Sharknose a special place in the illustrious halls of Ferrari F1 history. That my father became America’s first F1 world champion in the car gives me a unique and personal connection to it.

In September 2019, I had a chance to drive Jason Wright’s wonderful replica at Reims and Zandvoort for a documentary I have been making about my father since 2009, a year after his death. The tests and film shoots amounted to the most momentum I’d ever had with the project. I even had a production company and a big distribution company in New York working with me, and I thought it was really going to happen now. Then the pandemic hit and I just put it aside because I had other things that I needed to do.