Graham Hill and Monaco were made for each other. That raffish air, the fast life, the glitz, the glamour, no wonder it was his favourite circuit. Of his five wins there, he always rated his 1965 victory to be the finest – largely because he achieved it despite finding himself up an escape road a quarter of the way through the race.
Precision is the key to Monte Carlo. As Hill himself once remarked, there is nowhere to spin. If you get a corner slightly wrong, you run the risk of bouncing off hotels, nightclubs, telegraph poles or street lamps. Every yard of the 195 miles (314km) requires absolute concentration.
The 1965 World Championship was a stuttering affair. The first race had been on New Year’s Day in South Africa where Jim Clark had won in a Lotus. The second race – at Monaco – was five months later, but Clark was absent on Indianapolis 500 duty. Having won there for the two previous years, Hill was hot favourite and sure enough he put the BRM on pole from Jack Brabham, now driving a car bearing his name. Both Brabham and Hill had new team-mates, of whom much more would be heard in years to come. With Dan Gurney also at Indianapolis, the second Brabham-Climax was driven for the first time in a championship race by New Zealander Denny Hulme. And Hill was partnered by a young Scotsman, Jackie Stewart, who excelled himself to go third fastest in the BRM in only his second Grand Prix. Indeed on Friday practice Stewart had announced his arrival in no uncertain terms by actually going 0.2 seconds faster than Hill, but the BRM team leader regained the initiative in final qualifying on the Saturday afternoon. At the back of the grid – on their Grand Prix debuts – were two Hondas. Since the team had been guaranteed two starting places, the unlucky Jochen Rindt in a Cooper was excluded despite having lapped faster than Richie Ginther’s Honda. Ironically, Ginther retired at the end of the first lap with a broken driveshaft. Rindt’s time would come.
Hill led from the start, pursued by Stewart, Lorenzo Bandini and John Surtees in the two Ferraris, and Brabham. The BRMs began to pull away from the Ferraris at the rate of about a second per lap and appeared to have everything in control. Then on lap 25, Hill came out of the tunnel at around 120mph (193.1km/h) and as he started to brake in readiness for the chicane, he saw Robert Anderson’s Brabham approaching the chicane at a crawl, a universal joint having broken. Realising to his horror that Anderson was going to be occupying the chicane at precisely the same time that he intended to fly through it at 95mph (152.9km/h) and that there was only room for one car, Hill slammed on the brakes as hard as he could. He later wrote: ‘I made as if to go through the chicane and I left things until the point of no return, and then I saw that there was just no way I could get through without clobbering him. I came off the brakes for a second so that I could steer and changed direction down the escape road. Then I stood on them again and I left some rare old skid marks.’
The BRM ground to a halt well up the escape road. Hill quickly jumped out of the car, pushed it backwards on to the track, climbed in again and restarted the engine, all of which took some 35 seconds and dropped him back to fifth behind Stewart, Bandini, Surtees and Brabham.
Cursing his luck, Hill set off in hot pursuit of the leaders. ‘I was a bit cheesed off over the whole business,’ he remarked. ‘If I had come by a second later I would have been able to get through, but as it was, I just couldn’t get down to a sufficiently slow pace to follow Anderson through the chicane at his speed. It was bad luck that he just happened to be in that position.’
On lap 30 Hill caught Stewart, who had spun away his lead at Sainte Devote, and four laps later the youngster moved over and waved his team leader through. Meanwhile Brabham passed both Ferraris to take the lead, only to drop out with engine trouble on lap 43. Hill was now third behind the two Ferraris and began attacking them for all he was worth, repeatedly shattering the lap record. He got past Surtees on lap 53 on the short downhill stretch leading from Casino Square, and after sitting patiently on Bandini’s tail for 12 laps, he pounced on the Italian at the same spot. Surtees, too, overtook Bandini and actually closed to within two seconds of Hill but Hill reacted by setting another new lap record to reaffirm his position. Surtees’ plucky drive came to an untimely end on the penultimate lap when he spluttered to a halt having run out of fuel, but as only Hill, Bandini and Stewart completed the full race distance, he was still classified fourth.
So Hill recorded an improbable victory, born out of adversity, and one which emphasised why he was the uncrowned King of Monaco. Overshadowing even his own little excursion, the most spectacular moment of the race occurred at the entrance to the chicane on lap 80 when Paul Hawkins’ Lotus spun through the straw bales, went over the edge of the quay and ended up in the harbour in much the same manner as Alberto Ascari ten years earlier. Hawkins was unhurt, but as Hill could have testified, there were more practical ways of getting through the chicane in moments of crisis.