{"id":54758,"date":"2018-10-10T16:22:31","date_gmt":"2018-10-10T15:22:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.motorsportmagazine.com\/issue_content\/a-champions-view-damon-hill-obe\/"},"modified":"2019-07-19T14:37:59","modified_gmt":"2019-07-19T13:37:59","slug":"champions-view-damon-hill-obe","status":"publish","type":"issue_content","link":"https:\/\/www.motorsportmagazine.com\/archive\/article\/april-2018\/69\/champions-view-damon-hill-obe\/","title":{"rendered":"A champion’s view: Damon Hill OBE"},"content":{"rendered":"

World champion 1996<\/strong><\/p>\n

Like many, I\u2019m eagerly looking forward to seeing how McLaren will perform with Renault power. Will it be the step forward for which everybody is hoping \u2013 and how will Fernando Alonso rate his new engine? Assuming that he\u2019s not already completely knackered by the time the season starts\u2026<\/p>\n

Ferrari was very strong for most of 2017 and I\u2019d like to think it will be able to build on that \u2013 assuming, of course, that the team doesn\u2019t withdraw from the sport before the first race!<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t see a great deal changing at Mercedes. Toto Wolff does a great job maintaining a consistently high standard \u2013 indeed the whole team is so efficient that it almost comes across as unexciting. Will Lewis come out all guns blazing? I know he\u2019s had a few ups and downs off the track over the winter, but I don\u2019t imagine that will distract him particularly.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll be interested to see the different ways in which teams integrate the new halos, to see whether any of them finds a way of doing it advantageously, and I\u2019m hoping the new tyre options will mix things up a bit, by creating a greater number of two-stop races. My biggest hope, though, is that we\u2019ll see some good, hard racing. There was some very close competition last season, but I wouldn\u2019t want a complete re-run: I hope the gap between the top three teams and the rest will come down.<\/p>\n

Other things to watch? Max Verstappen seems to get stronger by the year and I note that Kimi R\u00e4ikk\u00f6nen has finally taken to using social media, so I\u2019m looking forward to see what that yields. I\u2019ll keep a close eye on Williams and Force India, too: I wonder how long it will be before Paddy Lowe\u2019s influence starts to take effect at the former \u2013 and Force India continues to be a cracking little racing team. And, on top of everything else, Fernando will be chasing his Le Mans dream. It\u2019s not beyond the bounds of possibility that he\u2019ll win, is it? That would leave him only the Indy 500 to conquer\u2026<\/p>\n

DREAM TEAM<\/strong>
\nThis could be a quick way to lose a few friends\u2026 There\u2019s a case to be made for sticking the Mercedes engine in the back of a Red Bull, but I guess the simplest option would be to buy the whole Red Bull-Renault package. Christian Horner runs the whole operation very well, Adrian Newey is still a great designer and I think the Verstappen\/Ricciardo pairing is probably the strongest in the paddock.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39,"featured_media":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","categories":[],"tags":[167,179],"issue_decade":[121600],"issue_year":[121673],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.motorsportmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/issue_content\/54758"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.motorsportmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/issue_content"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.motorsportmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/issue_content"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.motorsportmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/39"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.motorsportmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=54758"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.motorsportmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/issue_content\/54758\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":223063,"href":"https:\/\/www.motorsportmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/issue_content\/54758\/revisions\/223063"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.motorsportmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=54758"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.motorsportmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=54758"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.motorsportmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=54758"},{"taxonomy":"issue_decade","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.motorsportmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/issue_decade?post=54758"},{"taxonomy":"issue_year","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.motorsportmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/issue_year?post=54758"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}