Damon Hill: The Long Interview

Damon Hill is not like other racing drivers. He's fame-shy, yet media-friendly. He's recognised in the street, yet unstarry. He's exceptionally bright and full of thought-through opinions on a huge range of topics, yet he didn't really 'get' school. He's the man who took on and beat the world's most uncompromising racing driver, Michael Schumacher, while keeping things together as a husband and father throughout his F1 career.

A bundle of contradictions then? Not at all. Just a man with a passion for driving racing cars as fast as they would go and who just so happened to win a Formula 1 world title along the way. That epic 1996 battle seems as good a place as any to start our conversation...

...

In 1996 your title win, after three years of fighting Michael wheel-to-wheel, made sales of Autosport hit an all-time high. It sold nearly 100,000 copies the week after you won. That's astonishing for a weekly specialist motorsport title. It had become obvious that there was a real hunger for a dedicated F1 magazine, so it's fair 
to say that you were one of the main reasons 
F1 Racing was launched.

That era was a peak for the sport's popularity as a whole, wasn't it? We'd had the whole drama of the Ayrton Senna and Michael Schumacher rivalry and of course Nigel [Mansell] pumped it up just before that with his title in 1992. There was that dreadful thing at Imola [the deaths of Roland Ratzenberger and Senna in '94] and it piqued interest in the sport. It's a horrible fact of life, but it's true.

"In '96... Williams were the best team, with the best car and the best engine. What's not to like about that?"

Hill's battles against Schumacher et al raged from 1993-96, his Williams years. In 1993 he took three wins; in '94 he was part of a title showdown; '95 was a tough fight against an uncompromising foe, after which '96 was a slam-dunk, with eight wins and nine poles in the brilliant FW18.

Was your championship actually relatively straightforward after two pretty turbulent preceding seasons?

It was very straightforward, yeah. I was experienced by then. That was my fourth full season in F1 and I was properly settled into Williams. It was the first time I had a car that was properly adapted for me - including my size 11 feet! Adrian [Newey] made a very nice car for me.

Is it true that Williams re-made the monocoque for you?

Yes, because of my size 11s! Racing drivers are mostly below six feet tall and their feet are tiny. So nearly all footwells are cramped. With the three pedals we had then they're even more cramped. You very rarely have enough space between the clutch pedal and the throttle to brake cleanly, or even to rest a foot. So it was a luxury to get this car. Adrian made an effort to make it fit - it was a peach.

In '96... Williams were the best team, with the best car and the best engine [a Renault V10]. What's not to like about that? Jacques Villeneuve was a good team-mate. We could enjoy ourselves. We'd had so much stress for the previous few years that '96 was actually the enjoyable one out of all of them.

Did Williams feel like a comfortable place to be?

Yes, it did mostly. It felt pretty good. They knew I was more experienced than Jacques [a rookie in '96], and that I'd be the person they could rely on. There were circuits we went to that were new to Jacques. I was the old hand by that time - 11 years older than Jacques. The mature driver in the team.

Going back to Schumacher, what do you remember of the intensity of that rivalry?

It was all created by the press. It was no more intense than my own intensity or anyone's intensity when they compete. There was this added dimension to Michael, which was his own body language, attitude and the fact that he was with a team [Benetton] who seemed to be constantly attempting new tricks. That set me up as a kind of 'nice boy' who wouldn't dare to dream of doing anything naughty.

Much is left unsaid here. Throughout 1994-95, paddock rumour was rife that the Benetton team was using a variety 
of hidden electronic systems to enhance its performance.

Did you and Michael have any personal relationship beyond the racetrack?

No. I went once with him to the Barrier Reef, in Cairns, Australia, in '93. We went scuba diving and I just couldn't get to know the guy. He seemed impenetrable. Maybe he took his approach to the sport too professionally.

"Michael was incredibly talented, incredibly quick and incredibly smart in the way he went about his competition."

When he was younger, he sometimes seemed timid about expressing himself in English...

His English was amazing - better than my German! He was very bright, but in my opinion he bought into all the wrong things. I'd look at him and think if I had his talents 
I wouldn't be doing what he was doing. You didn't need to!

You mean some of his dubious on-track ethics?

No, his whole approach to racing. You always want to win and I didn't like getting beaten by him, but it was more than just not wanting to lose. It was wanting to prevail against what I considered to be a rather cynical attitude to the competition. I thought it was spoiling the competition.

Did the Schumacher era come to dictate how F1 operated?

People will always try to win and they'll try things on. That culminated in 'Crashgate' in Singapore [when Nelson Piquet Jr crashed deliberately to help Renault team-mate Fernando Alonso's strategy in 2008]. That led to us having driver stewards. They would have thought very differently about a lot of the things that happened in Michael's era.

I was a driver steward in Monaco for one Michael 'moment'. Not when he parked during qualifying at Rascasse in 2006, but in 2010 when he was going through the field and passed Alonso on the last lap, just after the safety car.

Some people admired what he did there, even if he was subsequently given a 20-second time penalty.

He was quite clever, but there was the sense that there was a gang of them who were able to get away with whatever they wanted. There was a period in the noughties where people lost faith in the sport. They couldn't believe what they were seeing. Kind of: 'It can't be that easy to win everything, what's going on?' There was some bad history there, I think.

Your battles with Michael gave us one of the great F1 rivalries. What did that feel like from the hot seat?

It felt very uncomfortable!

He was a pretty tidy driver, it must be said.

He was, so I picked a bad one there didn't I? I picked a fight with the wrong bloke. Michael was incredibly talented, incredibly quick and incredibly smart in the way he went about his competition. You could say I was his first victim. Actually, you could say Senna was his first victim.

But he blew our minds, didn't he? Seven world championships? No one would even think about seven. Not even Prost. I'm sure Prost thought 'four world titles - no one's going to beat that' [Juan Manuel Fangio already had five by then]. But Michael looked at things so differently to the rest of us.

You mention Senna. You were team-mates for a tragically short time. How well did you know him?

I knew him like everybody else did. He was a famous person who was very charismatic. He was a proper star in the sense that what he did cultivated this aura. That was just what he did - not because he sought celebrity somewhere else. He expressed himself entirely through his will to win and that's what people saw in him.

I just saw that intensity in the team. He was there to win. But he was troubled about what he saw. He could be wrong about some things - he wasn't cunning, you know. He wanted to fight for the principle of something being fair. Make it fair and then we can see who's the best.

"Everybody questioned their involvement after Imola. I've lost team-mates before. My dad lost rivals in racing. You go through a loop of emotion. But I enjoy it; what else would I do?"

Do you think he was being driven by a sense of injustice when he died at Imola in 1994?

There were a lot of factors that weekend. Emotions were running high. There was a lot of stuff in the mix. And that's the tripwire. Get as passionate as you like, but it's dangerous and you have to keep your emotions under control. Have the passion to win, but don't let it get ahead of you. This is the challenge.

Someone like Jackie Stewart talks about 'mind management'. And then you look at, say, Max Verstappen: if he had a weekend like he did in Monaco this year... if he'd been racing in Jackie's day, he might not be around any more.

Occasionally Ayrton showed his anger on the track towards his fellow competitors using his car. We saw it with Michael, too. What he did with Rubens at Hungary [in 2010, squeezing Barrichello within millimetres of the wall at full speed on the start-finish straight] was absolutely unjustified. You've got to keep a cool head. That can be difficult because passions run high when you're a racing driver: 'don't come near me when I've had a bad race.' It's hard to come down from the emotions.

Did the Imola weekend make you question your involvement in F1?

It wasn't the first time. Everybody questioned their involvement. I've lost team-mates before. My dad [double world champion Graham Hill] lost rivals in racing. You go through a loop of emotion. But I enjoy it; what else would I do? Would I have been able to walk down the street and feel fulfilled? Maybe it's a lack of imagination. You look at life and things happen anyway.

When you were racing you were married and had children. Did that affect your approach? Did it prevent you from being as uncompromising as some of your opponents?

I don't think it's ideal. I had a very, very strong wish to be around for my kids. My dad and mum were away a lot when I was as kid. We had Oliver in '89 and Josh in '91. I was just coming into F1 and had two kids. That was tough on Georgie [Damon's wife], having to care for them, plus all the emotions and fears and the anxieties of my racing. And having a bear with a sore head around the house after a bad race. It's not ideal to have a large family when you're a racing driver.

Your memories of that time are obviously pretty vivid. What does it feel like looking at F1 now? You're closely involved as a commentator for Sky - where do you see differences between then and now?

Well, you have to remember, our Williams team then was about 150 people. All sorts of surveys have been done by anthropologists who'll tell you that the optimum number for 
a group of people, in which individuals still feel like 'someone', is 150. Now the bigger teams are 600 people or more, and it's not possible to have that 'optimum'.

It's gone beyond that feeling that you're in a happy band of fellows and girls who are racing. It's such a big organisation now. The stakes are not necessarily higher, in terms of wanting to win, but higher from the point of view of the investment that companies have made.

The driver is now a diminished part of that equation. Mercedes can't afford for the team to get bad PR, and this is the biggest difference. Technology is also very different. Drivers love tech. They love the buttons and knobs. It's impressive technically and it's a big attraction of F1 - interest in what engineers are up to and how they compete to produce highly technical pieces of equipment that perform better than everybody else's. They're under such pressure, too, and that's a draw of the sport that's not publicised enough.

The financial side of F1 is another level of interest. The difference now is that the commercial side of it is far bigger than the pure sporting element, which is to do with people. In my day, the rivalries were the bigger part - seeing how somebody would fare when pitted against somebody else.

Have we lost a bit of that?

What I'm saying is, when it brews up into a rivalry, it's quickly damped down because it can't be allowed to dominate. Nobody wants to see animosity, but rivalries are crucial. It's the essence of it. Seeing two people desperately wanting to beat the other, if they're evenly matched, whether it's tennis, golf or boxing or athletics, it's what people want to see.

Ours is a funny sport, isn't it? It's always been difficult to define and identify the strengths and the weaknesses. I look at certain individuals who might have been good for the sport, like [Juan Pablo] Montoya, and they can't survive.

Do you think that was more about not being comfortable at McLaren than because he'd had enough of F1?

I think it's to do with the requirement that teams have to be corporate, to present a nice face - you know, corporations don't tend to like controversy. They like things to go well. If they seem to be going well, they're promoting harmony. That is a contradiction in F1. It's not what people sit down to see.

"When you become an F1 driver you're on the front of magazines and people want to know your story. It can be flattering, it can be head-turning and intoxicating."

Let's return to your career. It had an unconventional trajectory: the acceleration from being an F1 test driver to a frontrunner in less then two seasons. Did that feel like 'woah!!'?

Of course! It accelerated ridiculously - and you'll be able to read about that in detail in my book soon [Hill releases his autobiography in September]. But you would not say to an aspiring racing driver: 'Look what Damon Hill did, that's the way to do it.'

I was sucked into the vacuum left by Mansell [who quit Williams after winning his title in 1992] and Frank was left without an experienced driver. But I'd done the graft as a test driver and impressed them enough.

What does that do to you as a competitor, or as a human being? Is there a lot of introspection?

It was a bit of a shock, yes. I'm not somebody who necessarily wants to be put on a pedestal and treated like a superstar or something. I just don't get that. If people want to be nice to me and give me money, that's fine! But I don't want to play that 'fame game'.

When you become an F1 driver you're on the front of magazines and people want to know your story. It can be flattering, it can be head-turning and intoxicating. We're all vulnerable to our ego: it does us good if we are thought to be good in our particular profession. So PR is important, but it's not something I'd ever set out to acquire. I just wanted to get my hands on 
a bloody good racing car and win races.

Having the Hill family name, did you feel like you were part of a generational thing? Did the name help - or hinder?

It's impossible to answer. I have no way of knowing who or what I might have been if my father had not been Graham Hill. And so in many ways I learned quite a lot. I went into the same profession as him, but he'd carved it out for himself. There was no history of racing in our family. So, I would say it had to have helped, having Graham Hill as my dad.

Did you feel a need for speed early in life?

Definitely. I was very lucky. I went skiing when I was younger, and that experience of whizzing along was amazing 
- something I'll never forget. I don't know where it came from or how it started. Like when you get on the slide for the first time: 'Faster, Daddy, faster!' - you know.

Racing must have been in the genes if nothing else?

Whatever I did, I was always going to be up against my dad, whereas Schumacher, Senna, Prost... who do you compare them to? You compare them only to the people they raced against. I was always compared to my dad. Now we do it retrospectively, was Moss better than Clark? We don't know.

But something I'd like to emphasise - and there's not enough emphasis on this in Formula 1 - is the pleasure 
I got from racing cars. I loved racing bikes as well.

I didn't like it at first, but I got into it. I liked racing. I liked driving fast, the competition, getting your hands on a steering wheel and pressing the accelerator and going round corners fast. We don't talk about that enough. We talk about politics, money, deals, whether somebody's knocked someone off. The driver's voice is not heard. It's unlike any other sport.

I like surfing - and that's all about the experience. It's all about the incredible buzz you get from surfing a wave. Now, 
I got an incredible buzz out of driving. But we don't talk about it. The problem is, who can relate to what we do? Anybody 
can get on a bicycle, hit a golf ball, play tennis. I suppose 
the counter to my argument is the success of a show like 
Top Gear, which is about hooning around in a car.

Should we do more to talk about the thrill of driving?

Prost or Jackie Stewart would talk about the poetry of driving. You'd hear a lot of that. People used to be really into it.

But it's become really difficult to see it, now. You can see it in MotoGP - you can see what they're doing. In the '60s you could see cars drifting. I was watching the 1964 Indy 500 recently on YouTube: Jim Clark was going round the banking sideways - drifting around. Not fast as they are now, but they look exciting. So, the point is, we don't talk about the driving because you can't see it. You can't see what they're doing.

How would we fix that without turning back the clock?

Since we got wings, you're not going to see drifting in the same way. There are a few circuits where they do some good camera angles that show it - coming out of the fast corners in Russia, when they have to turn and brake. But a lot of those circuits that we built after Imola [1994] had certain stipulations: no banking, no increasing-radius corners and stuff.

You can't go round redesigning circuits. Some of it is the design and some of it is simply slip angle. The cars next year may be different, but they are so long now with such a tiny contact patch, that the amount of slip angle you can tolerate is tiny. The moment they go out of line they're off. You could make it a squarer car that you could turn almost 360 degrees, like a kart. That'd be good, but I'm not an engineer - it's my imagination.

After your championship win, you had an abortive season at Arrows, but then you went to Jordan for 1998 and won its first grand prix. That must have been a special experience?

It was brilliant to win Jordan's first GP, yes. I'm almost as proud of that as I am of winning the championship. The question had always been asked: how good was I? Did I have better equipment? Jordan didn't have the best equipment. 
We were good at Spa that year and there was a bit of luck, but... I nearly won with an Arrows in 1997!

That whole Jordan era when Eddie was in his prime looked like a lot of fun.

Eddie goes about his life trying to have as much fun as possible and trying to make as much money as possible. I brought them the focus they needed to forget all the other shit and realise that they were there to win. I can put my hand up and say: 'I showed them how to win.' They had the ingredients, but they didn't know how to use them.

It's just knowing why you're there. We're weren't there to take pictures with Page 3 girls. That was part of it - it brings in the money so we can win. By then, I was on my last lap, so it was good to get that win.

In hindsight, your F1 career was compressed - just seven seasons - which is very short compared to, say, Jenson Button who's currently in his 17th season in F1.

At one time I had one of the highest winning averages in F1 - maybe I should have stopped then. During the eighties I was trying to get somewhere by racing. Jenson was in F1 when he was 21. Rubens, Michael, Kimi... they were in their early twenties when they got in, so they grew up in F1. They are 100% F1 drivers. They haven't got another life, they've never had another life. I'd had another life before F1 and I'd almost given up and gone somewhere else by the time I started. It wasn't a career you'd put out as a model to follow.

"The reason you're talking to me now is because I won the championship. It lasts a long time, but you only realise it when you stop racing."

Is it true that you lived in a caravan for a while, while you were working your way up the racing ladder?

No! I had a caravan when I raced bikes, but didn't live in one. Although I used to live in a basement flat with slugs in Clapham which was probably worse than a caravan. I never dropped out of civilisation, but I did 
a few jobs that required my physical labour when I left school. I didn't buy into the school thing at all. Didn't grab me.

That's interesting, because, if we may say so, you're uncommonly smart for a racing driver.

There have been some very smart racing drivers. I think it's because my mind comes from a different angle. I never had the Lewis Hamilton attitude of: 'I want to be a racing driver when I grow up.' All I want to do if I get an opportunity is to do the best I can with it. Whether it's bike racing or anything else.

There's a competitive streak in me which is impossible to deny. I try to fight it because it can be destructive. You'll never win them 
all, but it's quite strong. Cycling is good for me now, because 
it burns a lot of energy and it always wins in the end.

Do you still have that competitive streak?

The growing-up process means drifting away from always wanting to compete, because you realise that it's better if we co-operate. Competition is good if you want it to produce a result. But if it's constantly about downgrading other people you're working with because you want other people to remind you about how good you are, I find that rather sad. The attitude of: 'I have to prove I'm quicker than you or richer than you' - I don't want to be caught in that trap.

So how does that square with winning the Formula 1 world championship?

It's a quandary!

You must have felt some of those emotions as you were winning? You must have thought you were the best?

No! Because how do you measure it? I won the title that year. So there were two guys with the same car and I did a better job than the other guy. That's the cream on the top. But there were many years trying to get there. So '96 was my reward for the other stuff, trying to get there. The race wasn't 1996 alone - the race included every fucking day up until that point. You don't think you're the best.

When did it sink in that you'd become world champion?

The reason you're talking to me now is because I won the championship. It lasts a long time, but you only realise it when you stop racing. You reach a period when you want to get away from it. Sky constantly remind me that I won a race here or there. I reply 'I know, that's me, I was there!' It gets better.

Given all that you've said, what does winning feel like? Is winning the title a different feeling to winning a race?

It does feel different, yes. When you win a race you know you're the cat that got the cream. You look around at Mika Hakkinen, Michael, Prost, and everybody wants to win it. You know they can beat you and they know they can beat you - but they didn't. It was kind of a sneaky feeling.

There are days when you drive brilliantly and you just know you were the best that day and they can't complain. Those were little pockets in a way. There are so many factors for being in the right place at the right time. There's definitely luck involved.

When you stopped racing, you weren't one of those guys who hung around. What's it like when you stop F1 and quit racing completely?

My experience was that my dad stopped racing and then he died [in a plane crash]. I had a family and I didn't want that to happen to them. I didn't want to be doing stupid things. It was really a conscious decision to live as long as I could. I've been very lucky. I made it through racing, so it was a conscious decision to stay away. 
I sort of went cold turkey. I didn't do too many crazy things, although I think you become used to a certain level of adrenaline and it can be quite difficult to live without that.

How did you scratch that itch?

Exercise was good. Biking and staying fit. Then I got a desk job at the BRDC [he was British Racing Drivers' Club president from 2006-11] and everything turned to shit. Going up and down the motorway. Sending emails. Desk job!

You never fancied the 'live in Monaco as a tax exile' thing?

I would love to live in Monaco, it's sunny. No tax... but, I don't know. I'm not sure what the quality of life is like in Monaco. Everybody I know is here. I'm sure you make new friends, but we've got a lot going on in this country which is quite a rich place culturally. Also, I've got a son with learning difficulties and it wouldn't be too easy to go to a place like that with another language. So, que sera, sera. I don't regret anything like that. Have you been there outside a grand prix?

It's very quiet...

Nice climate.

Do you still play guitar?

I still play guitar in the kitchen. I have a beaten-up old Gretsch, a semi-acoustic. That keeps my fingers going. Every now and then I get inspired, but I'm not a guitarist. Like all these things, people who are good at it are good because they're good. I'm not. I just do it for pleasure.

For the record, what was the name of the first band you played in?

It was called... my friend came up with this name which I repeated rather stupidly and then it stuck. We were called Sex Hitler and the Hormones. Irony doesn't always travel that well.

You were a punk band, right?

Yep. It was 1977 or '78. I was a bass player. I was about 17.

Twenty years on from your title you seem a contented man. But do you miss racing?

No. What happens is, you think 'let's have a go at that'. Then you remember it's uncomfortable, dangerous, hot and sweaty. The other day I did some karting at Sandown Park for charity. Our team won. I didn't - but I had a fantastic first lap going from 17th to fourth. These days, that's fine for me.