Why Graham Hill was – and still is – Mr Monaco

“But I only realised the next day what a big deal it was, when we gathered at the top of the hill in our team gear and walked towards Ste Devote behind Graham and [wife] Bette. He was all smiles and the crowd’s reaction was incredible. It was then that it dawned on me what Monaco meant to him, and what he meant to Monaco.”

An earnest and impecunious Graham Hill used to bluff his way into the Steering Wheel Club and nurse half a pint so he could mix with, and listen to, racing’s establishment. Monaco must have been a motif and (no doubt embellished) stories of its glitz and glamour could only have inspired him. He was spannering for Lotus at the time, picking up drives when he could; nobody could ever accuse him of shirking, but good hotels, good food, success and adulation, all sandwiched between the crisp white Alps and the deep blue Med, was a strong, albeit distant, incentive.

Nobody, however, not even Hill, could have predicted how inextricably linked he would become with the Principality. The connections are freakish: first grand prix, last grand prix, five wins, overhauling Fangio’s record points haul (1970), his 150th GP start (’73) — all occurred at Monaco. But the relationship was more than simply statistics. He was the life and soul of motor racing’s biggest party. He revelled in the atmosphere. And the appreciation was mutual. Ayrton Senna, who won six times, never replaced Mr Monaco, even though his flat was a toy’s throw from Portier. Like all things for Hill, though, this symbiosis did not come easily. The apprenticeship was long, difficult, but crucial. For instance, he arrived in Monaco in 1958 for his and Lotus’ GP debut (having buzzed through France in an Austin A35!) only to discover that the transporter had broken down. This delay put practice lappery at a premium, and he and team-mate Cliff Allison did well to squeak onto the 16-car grid — 12 others were not so lucky. This effort, however, had not been without incident: Graham hit a kerb at the Station Hairpin and his Lotus 12 folded underneath him.

“I remember spending all night putting it back together,” recalls Allison. “None of the mechanics wanted to take responsibility for the welding; I’d done a course at BOC in Middlesbrough, and so I did it.” Hardly ideal preparation for your GP debut.

In the race, Hill kept out of trouble, and was perhaps heading for a points finish when a halfshaft snapped after 70 laps and a rear wheel parted company. He hopped out and collapsed with heat exhaustion — a rare display of weakness for this tough competitor.

“Graham was very determined,” says Allison. “I was testing a Lotus down at Brands Hatch once and watched him go round in someone else’s Aston Martin. He spun five times or so — at just about every corner. He really got cars by the scruff of the neck and hurled them about I certainly didn’t think I was watching a driver who’d win Monaco five times.”

And so we reach that ‘natural’ thing. Already. The Jimmy Clark versus Graham Hill thing. The gifted versus the grafter thing. The Scot was certainly blessed, able to go quicker than his rivals while taking little out of the car. He could drive around problems; if there was any adapting to be done, he would find it within himself. In contrast, Graham attempted to extract every last ounce from a car’s mechanicals, and was forever fiddling with its set-up in a bid to find an edge. But his record at the unforgiving, stop-start Monaco, one of the toughest tracks on car and driver, scotches the myth that he was an unfeeling car-breaker, that he was all arms and elbows as a driver.

His hat-trick victory showed another side to Hill: the charger. Forced up the chicane’s escape road by a hampered backmarker on lap 25, he dropped to fifth, having lost 30sec pushing his car back onto the track and restarting it. Forty laps later, he was back in the lead. Some of the shine was taken off this by Clark’s absence but, by Rudd’s reckoning, it was still Hill’s finest drive in a BRM.

His driver stated the car had not given him a moment’s anxiety, even though he had “hammered it”.

It wasn’t always so. His next two years were spent nursing cars home. His Tasman-spec P261 gave him plenty to cope with in 1966 (slipping clutch, low oil pressure, cutting-out engine and bad handling) as did his Lotus 33-BRM in ’67 (gearbox, clutch, low oil and low fuel). He was lapped on both occasions, but still finished third and second.

“Graham certainly knew how to bring a car home,” says longtime GP correspondent John Blunsden. “He was almost as good as Jack Brabham in that respect. Perhaps their mechanicking backgrounds helped them in this.

“There was no great expectation each year that Graham would win at Monaco. To be honest, the buzz was always, ‘Will this be Jimmy’s year?’ You knew Graham would qualify well, have a good run and be in with a shout — especially as he seemed to go better on the slow to medium-speed circuits. I think he found it harder to be quick at Monza than he did at Monaco.”

Early use by BRM of electronic sector timing proved Stewart to be far quicker than Hill through a particular Snetterton corner. Jackie braked early and gently in order to carry more speed into the apex and get back onto the power earlier. Hill, who preferred a much stiffer set-up, braked late and hard, put the power down later, but more aggressively. Asked if he would adapt his style, he pointed out that he was quicker over the full lap. He stuck to what he knew. Which continued to serve him well at Monaco. Hill had moulded BRM around himself; but at Lotus he ran head-on into the Chapman/Clark axis. He was man enough to take it on the chin and step into the breach when Clark was killed at Hockenheim in 1968 and a distraught Chapman absented himself from the team. Chapman reappeared at Monaco and was, understandably, in an odd mood. The atmosphere was strained, but Hill kept his eye on the ball to score his fourth Monaco win, thus ending Lotus’ seven-year Monaco victory drought with the first run of the 49B.

It was a strange race, Stewart non-starting because of a broken wrist, and 11 of the 16 starters retiring by lap 17. Hill provided an oasis of calm, while Richard Attwood provided the only spark of interest. Replacing Mike Spence at BRM, and with just one GP start since 1965, he gave chase in the torquey V12 P126.

“I wasn’t sure how to pace myself or the car,” says Attwood. “It had been reduced to an 80-lap race that year, but at the end I realised I had enough energy to do 90 laps, or 100.” Attwood, catching glimpses of the Lotus diving into Mirabeau, increased his pace throughout, setting the fastest lap on the last lap, but Hill controlled the gap. It was only when Attwood drove the 49B at Monaco in 1969, deputising for the injured Rindt, that he realised how good a car it was, and that Graham had probably had the ’68 race in his pocket throughout.

The stronger B, its Hewland ’box better suited to Hill’s preferred blockchanging style (eg fifth to second) compared to the sequential change (five, four, three, two) demanded by the 49’s original ZF unit, gave him a perfect platform from which to restore Lotus pride and win his second title, in 1968. There was, however, only one more GP victory in the tank: a fifth Monaco win, in 1969. That year, he drove craftily, banking on practice problems recurring to put out leader Stewart’s Matra and Chris Amon’s chasing Ferrari. This is exactly what happened.

Attwood finished fourth: “Graham was very confident about racing at Monaco, understandably so, and was able to drive very precisely. And perhaps his method of driving [braking hard and late, and skipping gears] helped here.” So Monaco suited his personality, his cats, his driving style and his approach to racing. Time, though, was running out and Chapman shipped him on to Rob Walker for 1970. Defying all prognoses, Graham was lowered into the royal blue Lotus for the first GP of the season. He finished sixth. He was fifth at Monaco, but not before he’d crashed in practice. A shunt on lap two of the ’71 GP put a further dent in the reputation. He would become the sort of well-meaning backmarker he used to slice by, yet he plugged on, his new team thankful for his experience, if not his speed, in 1973-74.

It wasn’t until he’d found the man he believed to be Britain’s next world champion that he felt able to retire. That 1975 Monaco walk was made easier by the warmth of the reception and his signing of Tony Brise on the Friday night. At the next race, after Brise qualified seventh at Zolder, his mind was made up: it was time to make way. It was the right decision. One that looked set to bear fruit in 1976. Only for time to run out on a foggy November evening. Unwittingly, Monaco and its favourite son had bade farewell.