Year after brother's death, racer wins title

Last year, the Devil's Staircase threw Phil Libhart's life into disarray. His brother, Todd Libhart, died after a crash at the 65th-annual motorcycle hillclimb in Warren County.

The death is not something he has gotten over. Phil still misses him every day, the 42-year-old told The Enquirer last week, and family described the two as more than brothers, but best friends.

Despite thoughts about quitting, Phil rode up the dangerous hill again Sunday. He did it in less than 7 seconds and won the 2015 AMA Pro Hillclimb Championship Series – almost exactly one year after his brother died there.

For Phil, the race wasn't redemption, or triumph. His brother is still dead. But it showed Phil Libhart for who he is: a racer and a champion.

(Phil Libhart won the season series in the Xtreme class and John Koester won the season series in the Unlimted class.)

Read The Enquirer's Oct. 8 story, which profiled the Libhart brothers and another hillclimber who died at the race in 2011, below:

In a few days, Phil Libhart will race up a 390-foot dirt hill in Warren County. And he’ll do it almost exactly one year after his brother died doing the same thing. The 42-year-old will stand over a 10-foot motorcycle that looks more like a dragster than a bike. A large metal chain will cover his back tire to keep it from exploding, and his tank won’t be filled with gasoline, but nitromethane – a volatile liquid once used as rocket fuel.

The hill, which is so steep it’s difficult to walk up, will be covered in rocks and clumps of mud that fly into the crowd as bikes roar up. There will be thousands of people watching him, some perched on the side of the hill and many walking around with gallon jugs of beer.

In front of him, a teammate will fan a leaf blower in his face to keep the fumes from his eyes. He’ll try to make it up the hill in less than 10 seconds.

If that sounds dangerous, that’s because it is. This is the Devil’s Staircase, the last event of the year in the AMA ProRacing Hillclimb Championship Series. Phil’s brother, Todd Libhart, was the second person to die at the hillclimb in the last three years.

When asked why he races, the answer is clear: He loves it.

“The Devil’s Staircase is a race you have to experience,” Phil said. “You can be told about it, but you have experience it.”

All sports require a combination of skill, desire and guts. All sports can be dangerous. But not all sports require athletes to cheat death on a regular basis. That is what makes a hillclimb different.

And it is what makes those who do it their own breed of different.

Immediately after Todd died, it was Phil who had to call their mother and explain. It was Phil who made the funeral arrangements. It was Phil who decided that even his dog could not survive the blow. He put the pup down.Race officials, riders and experts consider both fatal crashes “freak accidents.” Neither death has brought major changes to the sport, widely considered one of the oldest in motor sports. But the Pennsylvania native will race on.“I know for a fact my brother would never have wanted me to quit,” Phil told The Enquirer. “It’s who I am and what I do. I know it’s risky business.”

“Even going back to work was difficult,” Phil said. “I felt like I lost half of me.”

The sport had destroyed so much, but he knew it was the sport that would have to save him. So he got back on the bike.

Phil struggled with the decision – should he race again? – even after he made it. He wasn’t sure his team, which also worked closely with his brother, would want to race.

After they said they would, his first run of the season in Tennessee did not go well. He regrouped and later posted the fastest time of the day.

“It was a huge emotional moment for all of us,” he recalled.

Then the circuit came to Pennsylvania, where the White Rose Motorcycle Club turned its hillclimb into a memorial for Todd. His mother, who did not see eye-to-eye with Phil about his decision, came.

She cried, and he won.

When Phil steps onto the dirt at a farm in Oregonia, an unincorporated town of about 2,300 people five miles northeast of Lebanon, he could win the national series. There are two different classes in the hillclimb series – Unlimited and Xtreme.

Phil leads one class and sits in third place in the other.

“It’s been a struggle. I still miss him every day,” he said. “Being in the points chase, that is giving me something to focus on.”

On Sunday, he doesn’t know how he’ll feel. Winning both classes is a rare feat, but he’s been thinking lately it all “seems pretty small.”

It’s been on other racers’ minds as well, said Amanda Campbell, director of hillclimb for the racing branch of the American Motorcyclist Association.

“Everybody is so close. It was really a hard hit for everybody in the series. A lot of people have been in the series five, 10 and 15 years. We are basically a travelling family,” Campbell said.

“If Phil wins, there will be tears from everybody.”

Todd and Robin Libhart married in December, 2013 – three months after they met at a hillclimb. Phil joked with his sister-in-law, “You know that means you’re marrying me, too?”

And so it went.

“The Libhart brothers were inseparable,” Robin told The Enquirer. “They were more than brothers, they were best friends.”

Growing up, they spent a great deal of time at their grandparents’ farm.

“We didn’t have a lot of money,” Phil said. “Riding bikes, that’s something we did all summer (because) it was something to do.”

As they grew older, weekend trips to the middle of nowhere to ride – with no cell phones, no distractions – became the norm. The brothers built their bikes for hillclimbs together, while they worked day jobs as a mechanic and HVAC technician, jumping at opportunities for overtime whenever they could.

The biggest payout for winning a hillclimb is $1,000.

In 2004, they stayed up for three days, working around the clock, to finish Phil’s bike for the series.

“Obviously, if I could have switched places with him,” Phil said, talking about his brother’s death. “I would have.”

With a sadness that overcame him, he spoke about Todd’s teenage children.

Robin and Todd had three children through previous relationships. The couple had conversations about the possibility of Todd’s death, Robin said, and for a brief time he considered quitting. But he loved it too much.

“I don’t ever want you to hate the sport,” Todd told her. “I love it as much as I love you.”

Now, Robin has a tattoo bearing Todd’s name on her back. A halo and angel wings surround it. She was there when he died and, on the way back to Pennsylvania, she told Phil not to stop racing.

Robin doesn’t think she’ll be able to go to a hillclimb again, but doesn’t hold race officials or anyone else responsible.

“It was an accident,” she said. “He died doing what he loved. I would have much rather lost him to that than anything else.”

Paul Kennedy is a mechanic for John Koester, one of the riders hoping to edge Phil out in the final standings. He was a race official last year, standing at the top of the hill, when Todd died.

“It’s a day I will never forget,” Kennedy said.

Last year, Todd’s bike flipped going over the top of the hill. He landed on his back and the bike’s handlebars came crashing down on his chest. His chest protector cracked from the lower left to the right side of his chest.

He initially told paramedics he was OK. When he stood up, he became dizzy and went into cardiac arrest on the way to the hospital. Todd died, the coroner ruled, primarily because of an extensive liver laceration and abdominal aorta laceration.

A sheriff’s deputy spoke with witnesses of the crash, and “all of them said it appeared to be an accident, nothing more,” according to a police report.

Kennedy has been involved in professional hillclimb for more than 15 years. He did not hesitate when asked about the risks inherent to the sport.

“I would have to say that it is the most dangerous (sport),” he said. “There’s just something about the humongous horsepower. You can’t compare it to nothing.”

Todd’s death confounded race officials. Mostly because, Kennedy said, the Devil’s Staircase is one of the safest hillclimbs on the circuit – despite the deaths.

The hill is wider, less steep and shorter than other tracks – sometimes by a great margin. But no fatalities have been recorded at any of the other tracks, according to AMA officials.

“That’s the phenomenon that we have always tried to figure out,” Kennedy said. “The only thing we can think of is the name had something to do with it.”

Bikers are defensive by nature. You are more likely to die driving to work than in a race, they’ll say. They don’t trust the media, and they don’t want anyone telling them what to do.

Trevor Andrusko knows this. The Atlanta resident is a driving coach for Porsche, but he also runs a photography and multimedia service for race teams, sponsors and media outlets.

It was in this capacity he witnessed a man die at the Pikes Peak Hill Climb in Colorado Springs, Colorado, last year. Racer Bobby Goodin was smiling as he crossed the finish line. Then he crashed, and chaos erupted.

In a first-person essay published on Motorsport.com, Andrusko criticized the event and its organizers for their response to the crash. He said if the immediate impact didn’t kill Goodin, the slow response would have.

“Pikes Peak is dangerous, has always been dangerous, and will continue to be dangerous. It is accepted, and almost expected, that someone may perish at this event,” he wrote. “I fear that this nonchalant attitude towards (sic) death has begun to evolve the prestigious exhibition of speed into something demonic and inhuman.”

To be clear, Pikes Peak is a very different hillclimb than the Devil’s Staircase. It is much longer, drivers race on pavement and it includes cars. But it’s one of the premier hillclimbs in the country, a name synonymous with the sport.

“That’s why I was so critical in that article,” Andrusko told The Enquirer. “To see something happen at an event that you looked up to, and it’s like, ‘Wow, what else are you doing wrong?’ They should be setting the standard.”

While Andrusko says he will never return to Pikes Peak, he’s not campaigning to shut it down. He is a driver himself, and understands the culture. It’s a culture, he said, where hillclimb riders “are another level of crazy.”

“When I’m not in the car, it’s boring,” Andrusko said. “We do this because it is very hard to do – it’s not easy. It’s not something everybody can do. And we do it because it’s dangerous. Because if it wasn’t dangerous, we wouldn’t do it.”

The Dayton Motorcycle Club, which runs the Devil’s Staircase and owns the land it operates on, declined to comment for this story.

The American Motorcycle Association’s Campbell admitted no new safety measures have been implemented since Todd died. In fact, no new safety measure were implemented after Shawn Farnsworth’s death here in 2011. She said officials examine the track after every race, even if there are no injuries. Other safety measures, such as a “kill switch” that shuts the bike off if a rider crashes, have been in place for years.

“That was the hardest thing for us is after the event to be able to look and see what we could have done differently,” Campell said. “And it’s really hard to determine anything.”

She said the way Todd crashed was similar to 15 or 20 other crashes on the circuit last year. When Farnsworth died, no one really saw it.

Farnsworth crossed the finish line, flipped over the motorcycle’s handle bars and smashed his head on the ground. The motorcycle landed on top of him and dragged him nearly 40 feet behind the hill.

When paramedics got to him, he was laying partially on his left side and stomach. Both of his legs were bent up in the fetal position. He was not breathing.

“Get me a bird,” a first responder said. “He is bad.”

Paramedics tried to insert a breathing tube in his mouth, but his teeth were clenched shut and bloody foam seeped out of his mouth. He started breathing just before he was flown to the hospital, but his brain swelled and was taken off life support a day later.

Yarrow Farnsworth, Shawn’s wife, was there. The couple’s two young children weren’t. They said goodbye to their father over the phone. Yarrow called it the “worst pain I’ve ever felt.”

Her sons, now 11 and 16, play football, snowboard and wrestle. They also race motorcycles, even competing in some amateur hillclimbs.

She recalled a 2007 event in Indiana. It was the first time Shawn saw – or heard – a Harley Davidson motorcycle made for a professional hillclimb.

“Every hair on his body stood up,” Yarrow said.

He turned to her, she recalled, and said, “I’m going to ride one of those someday.”

After Shawn’s death, Yarrow couldn’t attend a professional hillclimb without suffering a panic attack.

But, she said, if her sons respond the way her husband did to the roar of the hill motorcycles,she will not stop them from riding professionally.

Yes, she’ll tell them about her fears.

But she knows they understand.

“For the first year after Shawn passed,” Yarrow said, “my youngest child would come up to me every day before leaving for school and say, ‘Be careful mom, I only have one parent now.’ ”