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Bernard Cahier, the son of a French general and a member of the Resistance who had enrolled at UCLA and married a sorority girl. Cahier’s gravelly French accent gave him a big advantage, particularly selling the two MG models, TCs and TDs, that were popular with American women. “You wanna Tissy or a Tiddy?” was his standard opening line.
    Compared to the flamboyant Cahier, Hill was an unexceptional salesman, in part because of his unhinged enthusiasm for esoteric mechanical matters. “I’d stop to talk at length about cars and certain drivers and about the advantage of one kind of suspension over another with almost every customer who came in the place,” he said.
    His jittery, overkeen manner might have vexed the management if Hill had not soon distinguished himself as a driver. In January 1948 he drove his MG in his first real competition, a rally at Palos Verdes, where he finished just behind his boss, an established amateur driver named Louis Van Dyke.
    In 1949 a mix of foreign cars—MGs, BMWs, Morris Minors, Simcas, Fiats, and Austins—began racing on a half-mile paved oval called the Carrell Speedway in Gardena. Hill cleaned up. “Attendance was heavy for a while,” he said. “People came out for the comical aspect, to see those funny little wire-wheeled cars being stuffed into the fences. I avoided the fences and on a good night I could earn $400 to $500.”
    California sports car culture was evolving fast and Hillmoved with it. He traded his MG for a newer model with rounder lines and a stiffer, sturdier suspension (the same model that James Dean bought a few years later after earning a part in
East of Eden).
He hopped it up with tricks learned in the dirty midget pits: he installed a supercharger and modified the powerplant, lowered the compression ratio and used larger inlet valves. He knew that worn tires got better traction with more air pressure, and he figured out how to adjust the leaf springs to keep pressure on the inside rear wheel. He finished it off with a red-and-black paint job with white stripes along the doors.
    â€œCertain guys had the touch, and Phil was one of them,” said John Lamm, a friend of Hill’s and a columnist for
Road & Track.
“He knew how to get that something extra out of an engine. It’s an instinct.”
    When there was no official race Hill and his friends organized their own illicit rallies. As the sun set over the Pacific, half a dozen would meet at Saugus, twenty miles north of the San Fernando Valley, and take off down dark canyon roads at one-minute intervals. They considered it safer at night because headlights alerted them to oncoming cars. They called their fifty-mile loop the Cento Miglia in imitation of the Mille Miglia, a thousand-mile road race in Italy. Afterwards they bragged and joked and drank beer at a roadhouse restaurant.
    With the MG’s windshield folded flat, the breeze whipped over the long hood, ruffling Hill’s dark hair and tearing his eyes. He felt as if he shared a nervous system with the car. He knew its moods and how to spur it on by dancing lightly on clutch and brake.
    Hill still considered himself a misfit, an incorrigible car wonk, but he was unknowingly in tune with a restless undercurrent.Like many Americans coming of age between the atomic bomb and the Beatles, he turned to acceleration as an antidote to restive estrangement. “I mean, man, whither goest thou?” Jack Kerouac would write in
On the Road
a few years later. “Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?” Like the Kerouac hero Dean Moriarty, Hill was alive to the road without much thought of where it might lead.
    Hill began dating a receptionist from International Motors. After work they drove his MG to Hollywood or San Bernardino for the twilight midget races. She sat in the stands eating hot dogs and talking with friends while he repaired midgets down in the pits. “I loved