A legend passes…
The Formula 1 world has lost one of its more colourful lunch partners. Christopher Hilton, the prolific book writer and former Fleet Street journalist, passed away unexpectedly at the weekend.
Chris was an established sports writer, albeit specialising in tennis, for the Daily Express when he was pitched into F1 at the beginning of the eventful 1982 season. He later turned those experiences into a book, one of many on F1 and other sporting subjects.
As a book writer his work rate put the rest of us to shame. He put this down to a regular routine in which he would rise early, write until lunchtime or thereabouts in his dressing gown, and then go out (properly dressed by now) for the papers, which he would digest over a pint in his local. Following this convivial repast he would return home to carry on writing until early evening, whereupon he would call time on the day’s work and take a long, hot bath.
Occasionally he would interrupt this routine to visit the LAT Archive for picture research, and this would usually involve lunch, during which he would provide delightful company. Thankfully he would give at least 48hrs notice of his impending arrival so that you could make alternative transport arrangements and mollify loved ones. Lunches with Chris almost inevitably occupied rather longer than the statutory hour, and would often involve you stumbling from the establishment rather later than expected and somewhat the worse for wear.
Most F1 fans will have at least one of his books. His prodigious output led to the inevitable accusations of hackery, and certainly many of his biographies relied heavily on secondary sources, but he always took the matter of accuracy and fairness very seriously, and he would never abuse the legal tenet that the dead can’t sue for libel. The majority of the previous sentence contains nothing that can be said about the author of a recent high-profile biography of a major F1 figure…