A “SALON” IN R&T was ordinarily a photographic essay on a classic. But this November 1984 Salon was no ordinary one: The topic was the 1961 Ferrari Dino 156 F1 that Phil Hill drove to the Drivers Championship that year. No less than Phil was the story’s author. And the Salon’s images weren’t photos, they were beautiful illustrations by artist Hector Luis Bergandi.
Readers of a certain age (hem hem…) may remember Phil and the car from the January 1962 R&T containing his pictorial biography.
Phil’s—and Hector’s—Salon. Twenty-three years later Phil wrote in a Salon, “Drivers usually aren’t terribly sentimental about their old race cars, but I’m very frustrated that no examples of my 1961 Grand Prix championship car exist.”
Thus, R&T commissioned Contributing Artist Hector Luis Bergandi to remedy this paucity. By the way, Wikipedia notes, “Ferrari factory policy in the early 1960s meant that all the original cars were scrapped. Since then at least two replicas of the 156 F1 have been constructed. One was created for the film La Passione, which features the car as a major subject, and another was constructed by an enthusiast for personal use. A 156 replica is also exhibited in the Galleria Ferrari.”
The “shark-nose” Ferrari GP car. This and other images from R&T, November 1984.
A Good R&T Year—But Not for Scanning Today. My bound volume for 1984 is a particularly hefty one. Typical issues were around 200 pages, and attempts at scanning defy perfect imaging. Nonetheless, Hector’s art is up to this challenge.
The year 1961 was the first year of the 1.5-liter normally aspirated era. Hitherto, 1954-1960, F1 engines, almost invariably located ahead of the driver, displaced 2.5 liters.
The 120-degree V-6 chassis.
Front- or Mid-engine? Ferrari built both front- and mid-engine 1.5-liter cars. Phil recounted a test “at the Solitude circuit located near Stuttgart, a difficult sort of mini-Nürburgring. I had a front-engine Dino, also 1.5 liters, of course, and the difference between the two cars was startling.”
“An experimental air scoop—15 years ahead of its time,” Phil noted.
Phil continued, “As 1961 would prove, Von Trips and I could easily run neck-and-neck in equal cars, but after two practice sessions, one wet and one not-quite-so-wet, the mid-engine Dino was in the middle of row one, while I was back in the fifth rank. Trips won and I finished 7th; you didn’t have to convince me of the worth of rear-engine cars.”
At top, the 120-degree V-6; below, the 65-degree version compared.
For Monaco in 1961, Phil said, “Richie’s 156 at that event had a new engine with a 120-degree vee, which allowed it to be put lower in the chassis, taking the center of gravity down with it. The 120-degree spread also gave the engine better inherent balance than the 65-degree version.”
Bergandi posed Phil’s 156 at Monaco.
Phil offered a neat tidbit: “The coil valve springs were made in Pasadena by the famous Art Sparks, among whose many accomplishments was the creation of the 6-cylinder engine that won Indy in 1946.”
Comparing 2.5 to 1.5. Phil observed, “… we had suffered a drop in displacement of one full liter and, by Ferrari’s figures, nearly 100 bhp. We usually weren’t able to match the times of the year before, but the pole speed at Monaco was only 2.8 seconds slower, Zandvoort was down 2.5 sec, while at the high-speed course at Spa, we were down 6 sec, not bad considering it was an 8.7-mile circuit.”
Bergandi imagined a 1984 reuniting of Phil and the Dino 156.
“Then,” Phil continued, “we got to the Nürburgring and I managed to run the first-ever sub-9-minute lap at 8:55.2. Why the great breakthrough with less horsepower? For one thing it was a classic sort of demon lap, hairy every hundredth of a second, fending off all the little problems that attack you at the Ring…. Though there was less horsepower, I was able to put more of it down effectively.”
“It also helped tremendously,” Phil observed, “that the car flew so nicely and landed right.”
And that, Gentle Reader, explains why Phil was a World Champion and I am not. Nor I am an artist like Hector Luis Bergandi. ds
© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2024