With the rumblings of a startup F1 effort here in the US coming along, we thought about the only American guy to ever win the F1 championship, Phil Hill. He won it while driving for Ferrari and he did it in a very cool little piece of kit known as the Ferrari 156.
For the 1961 season the FIA changed the maximum displacement rule for F1 cars, moving the limit from 2.5 liters to a chainsaw-like 1.5 liters. This was a boon for Ferrari who already had developed a smaller engine for lower-class racing.
The motor, a V6, was a pretty interesting little nugget, and was far and away the mechanical class of the field. It was mid-mounted in the car and featured a 120-degree cylinder bank angle, dual overhead cams with two valves per cylinder, and a pair of Weber carbs doing the breathing. We don’t think it was a torque monster with a bore and stroke of 73 and 58.8 millimeters respectively. This little buzz box produced 190 hp, roughly 50 more than British racers who were stuck using an old Climax four banger. The original design for the V6 called for a 65-degree angle of the cylinder banks, but engineers found another ten horsepower by laying them open.
The chassis was built off of four main steel tubes serving as the major structure. The body was hand formed aluminum designed by Carlo Chiti. The car, as you can tell in the photos, was beautiful and quickly got the nickname of “the shark nose” because of its twin nostrils at the front. There was double wishbone suspension at all four corners, coil springs, Koni shocks and large sway bars front and rear. The brakes were vented discs and sat outboard in the front and in board at the rear. The transmission was a Ferrari five-speed unit.
The car weighed 1,015 pounds so even though they made less than 200 hp, they still moved out with some authority, as the competition found out. Ferraris dominated the season, losing only twice and both times to Sterling Moss in a Lotus product. Other than that it was all Phil Hill and his teammate Wolfgang von Trips leading the pack. Von Trips would be killed in an accident late in the season at Monza, thusly clearing the path for Hill’s coronation. It was a tough pill for Hill to swallow, but he forged ahead and sealed the deal for Ferrari.
Sadly, all of the original batch of 156s were reportedly rounded up by Ferrari at the close of the 1961 season, sent back to the plant and crushed. There were rumors of one being restored by a private collector some time ago, but the only example we know of for sure is the one sitting at the Ferrari museum at company head quarters in Maranello, Italy.
