Underrated Damon Hill is one of Britain’s greatest

I am going to kick off this week’s column with a remarkable statistical coincidence: Lewis Hamilton, who has scored 105 Formula 1 grand prix wins and is therefore by some margin the British driver (indeed the driver of any nationality) who has amassed the largest number of F1 grand prix wins in motor sport history, has scored exactly the same number as have — combined — the second-, third-, fourth-, and fifth-most successful British F1 drivers as measured by that rubric, namely Nigel Mansell (31), Jackie Stewart (27), Jim Clark (25), and Damon Hill (22). Do the math – or, rather, the maths, since we are talking about Brits, not Americans.

Four of those five – Clark, Stewart, Mansell, and Hamilton – are often included at or near the very top of F1 insiders’, pundits’, journalists’, and fans’ rankings of F1 all-time greats, and rightly so. And Hill? He is widely respected, but he is usually ranked a bit lower down, alongside nine other F1 world champions who are, for various reasons, venerated slightly less reverentially than all the others: Giuseppe Farina, Phil Hill, Denny Hulme, Jody Scheckter, Alan Jones, Keke Rosberg, Jacques Villeneuve, Jenson Button, and Nico Rosberg.

Are they, in effect, F1’s unfairly underrated top 10? Answering that question properly would require researching and writing a lengthy book – perhaps I should do it one day? – but, since I have the time and space here and now to produce only a column, and since Damon Hill formed part of the remarkable statistical coincidence with which I began said column, I will focus on only the 1996 F1 world champion today.

Graham and Damon Hill at the 1967 Italian Grand Prix

Despite his being the son of Graham Hill, a motor sport legend who won the 24 Hours of Le Mans, the Indianapolis 500, five Monaco Grands Prix, three United States Grands Prix, and two F1 drivers’ world championships — a uniquely versatile magnum opus — any advantage that such parentage might have conferred on Damon was snuffed out at the age of 15, when his legendary father was killed in a light aircraft crash. Not only was the boy thereby suddenly and cruelly robbed of a dad he loved and admired, but also he, his sisters, and his mother were left if not destitute then certainly impecunious, so disorderly had Graham’s finances been at the time of his abrupt and untimely demise.

Moreover, Damon was devastated by the bereavement. As a result, his attitude to four-wheeled motor sport soured — perhaps understandably — and instead he embraced motorcycle racing. He turned out to be good if not great on bikes, but he loved them with a burning passion nonetheless, so much so indeed that he not only raced them but also rode them for a living, as a dispatch rider in London.

He never raced karts as a teenager and it was not until he was well into his twenties that he first raced cars — a bizarre chronology even then and a timeline that today would make initiating a professional car-racing career of any kind extremely difficult and an F1 career quite impossible. Moreover, he had no money. But what he lacked in funds he made up for in determination. He borrowed £100,000, he wangled a bit of sponsorship, and, at 28, he finished third in the 1988 British Formula 3 Championship, winning at Thruxton and Silverstone. He also sorted out a few drives in Ford Escorts and Sierras, MG Maestros, Saab 900s, Porsche sports-prototypes, and Formula 3000 Lolas. He was racing, but his CV was becoming eccentric.

What saved him was bagging the job of test driver for the Williams F1 team for 1991. Hard-working, intelligent, and studious, he impressed the Williams engineers – and, despite his failing to qualify the woefully uncompetitive Brabham BT60B six times out of eight grands prix in 1992, he was given an F1 race seat at Williams in 1993.

Hill’s Brabham spell led to a Williams drive despite several failed qualifying attempts 

He was 32 — and now his F1 career began. His team-mate was Alain Prost, already a three-time F1 world champion, and, although Prost won seven grands prix and the F1 drivers’ world championship — his fourth — Hill won three grands prix and he could have won more with better luck and fairer treatment. For 1994, following Prost’s retirement, he was to be paired at Williams with another all-time great, Ayrton Senna, but we all know what happened at Imola, only three grands prix into that awful season. It is through the prism of that tragedy, and that trauma, that Hill’s achievements in 1994, 1995, and 1996 must therefore be analysed and appraised.

In 1994 his team-mates were Senna, briefly, then David Coulthard and Nigel Mansell. No, he did not match Senna’s coruscating pace in the team’s at first very tricky FW16, but, once the B-spec version of that car had been introduced at Hockenheim, he raced it to four wins out of eight starts, outperforming both Mansell and Coulthard in so doing.

To be fair, he had also won twice in the original-spec FW16, at home at Silverstone and before that in Barcelona, and that Spanish Grand Prix victory, just four weeks after his still shell-shocked colleagues had lost the greatest driver in the world, was and is one of the gutsiest F1 drives, in adversity, that we have ever seen. Indeed, it is rivalled by very few other F1 drives in that regard, but one of them is Damon’s father Graham’s equally lion-hearted win for Lotus, in 1968, also in Spain, just five weeks after that team’s beloved superstar, Jim Clark, had been killed at Hockenheim.

Damon drove mostly well and often brilliantly in 1994 — his win in heavy rain at Suzuka, defeating Benetton’s Michael Schumacher in a straight fight, was stunningly impressive — and he should and would have won that year’s F1 drivers’ world championship at Adelaide had not Schumacher committed his first serious professional foul there. Damon coped with that daylight robbery extremely well, even though he was not only upset by it but also furious inside, and justifiably so.

In 1995 he raced less consistently, making too many mistakes, but he still won four grands prix — whereas his Williams team-mate, Coulthard, won only once — and he still finished a creditable second in the F1 drivers’ world championship. But in those days Frank Williams and Patrick Head expected to win F1 world championships, and anything less than ultimate victory tended to make those two demanding curmudgeons unapologetically choleric. As a result, they complained about him biliously, sometimes in public, and Hill ended the year distinctly morose.

That being the case, it is all the more impressive that, the following year, 1996, he performed superbly, winning eight grands prix, and, at last, the F1 drivers’ world championship. But it was not made easy for him, not least because halfway through the season he learned — via media reports, to add insult to injury — that his services would not be required for 1997.

In that year, 1997, he raced for Arrows, and in 1998 and 1999 for Jordan. Yes, he almost won in Hungary in 1997 for Arrows, and he did indeed win in Belgium in 1998 for Jordan, but in truth those years were incidental to his mission, which he had finally accomplished, against all odds, in 1996.

Nine years later, in the autumn of 2005, I asked him whether I could interview him for a big feature piece in the magazine that I was then editing. He agreed, suggesting November 29. That suited me too, so I booked a lunch table for the purpose at the Wharf Restaurant, beside the River Thames, in Teddington, west London. He turned up in a brand-new Aston Martin V8 Vantage, we sat down, and we began to chat. Only then did he reveal that he had chosen the date because it was the 30th anniversary of the death of his father.

He spoke well – thoughtfully and at length, as is his way – and at one point I asked him whether his F1 career had satisfied him. He looked suddenly tetchy – as is also sometimes his way – then he replied, firmly and emphatically: “Look, I won 22 grands prix and one world championship. I’m sorry if that isn’t good enough.”

Well, it was good enough, of course it was. He was an excellent F1 driver, and he absolutely belongs on the list of F1’s great Britons alongside Clark, Stewart, Mansell, and Hamilton, and, for that matter, Stirling Moss and his own dear father. If he was shaded by Alain Prost when they were at Williams together, and he was, we should remind ourselves that 1993 was as-near-as-dammit his F1 rookie year, whereas Prost, an F1 GOAT, was in his 13th season in F1. And, other than Prost in 1993, and apart from Senna in the three races that they did together in 1994, he beat all his team-mates – David Coulthard, Nigel Mansell, Jacques Villeneuve, Pedro Diniz, and Ralf Schumacher – albeit not Heinz-Harald Frentzen, whom he partnered at Jordan in 1999, by which time he was pushing 40 and had mentally checked out of F1.

And, for the record, his apparent tetchiness over lunch in November 2005 notwithstanding, he added to the answer he gave me that day, which addition I should by rights include here: “OK, I don’t think I could have won the 1996 world championship without a great car. On the other hand, I don’t think I could have done any better than I did.” I reckon that is a very fair encapsulation. Or, to put it another way, it is impossible for any driver to do better than winning the F1 world championship in any given year, and very few F1 world championships have been won in mediocre cars.

I know Damon Hill pretty well. In 2000 he invited me to his 40th birthday party, which was a hugely enjoyable fancy dress do, and I attended it in the garb of a Roman centurion. In 2001 he and I did the first leg of the Gumball 3000 in a Lamborghini Diablo VT, which he said reminded him of the Porsche 962 that he had raced at Le Mans in 1989. You will not be surprised to learn that he did almost all the driving. We have dined together often on grand prix weekends. He has attended dinner parties at my house, and I have attended them at his.

His wife Georgie and my husband Angel get on extremely well. His four grown-up children are all great: Ollie, Josh, Tabitha, and Rosie. Ollie has Down Syndrome, and over the years Damon and Georgie have invited Angel and me to various Downs Syndrome charity dinners, at which Damon has spoken movingly, compellingly, intelligently, and wittily. That should not surprise you, because that is the kind of guy he is.