Phil Hill, who in 1961 became the first American driver to win the Formula One world title, has died in California aged 81, his former Ferrari team said on Friday.

"I, as well as all employees of Ferrari, are extremely saddened by the news of the passing of Phil Hill, a man and a champion who gave so much to Ferrari," said Ferrari president Luca di Montezemolo.

The Formula One website said the Miami-born driver had died in California on Thursday at the Salinas-Monterey hospital of complications from Parkinson's disease.

Hill won only three grands prix in his Formula One career, all with the Italian team, and only two in his championship season when he was driving the 'shark nose' Ferrari 156.

Mario Andretti, in 1978, is the only other American to become the Formula One champion and Hill was the only American-born one.

He was crowned in tragic circumstances after the death of German team mate and championship rival Wolfgang von Trips at the 1961 Italian Grand Prix along with 13 spectators.

Hill's victory in that penultimate race of the season allowed him to win the title by a single point, with Ferrari pulling out of the final U.S. round at Watkins Glen.

A pallbearer at Von Trips's funeral, Hill said later of his victory: "I never in my life experienced anything so profoundly mournful."

Remarkably for the era in which he drove, marked as it was by regular fatalities, Hill never suffered a serious injury on the racetrack. "I can't have been trying hard enough," he quipped later.

The three-times Le Mans 24 Hours sportscar winner was, however, profoundly aware of the dangers of his profession and maintained a love-hate relationship with the sport.

"Racing brings out the worst in me," veteran Formula One writer Gerald Donaldson, in a profile on the F1 website, recalled him saying. "Without it, I don't know what kind of person I might have become.

"But I'm not sure I like the person I am now. Racing makes me selfish, irritable, defensive. If I could get out of this sport with any ego left, I would."

A regular Ferrari team driver from 1959, after the deaths of Italian Luigi Musso and Britain's Peter Collins, Hill retired from Formula One in 1964.