Damon Hill

Damon Graham Devereux Hill is the only son of a Formula 1 World Champion to have also won the title. His father, Graham, won the 1962 and 1968 championships and Damon the 1996.

Never has a World Champion’s biography been more aptly entitled, however, than Damon’s From Zero to Hero. After Graham’s death in a 1975 flying accident, the Hill family were left in a difficult financial situation, so when Damon started work it wasn’t amid the glamor of the motor racing business but as a builder’s laborer and, later, a motorcycle courier to pay his way through school.

Born in 1960, the young Hill first competed on motorbikes and showed promise, but his mother Bette was worried about him racing on two wheels, so she convinced Damon to take a racing car course in 1983, when the future World Champion showed “above average aptitude” according to his tutors. He did not compete much in 1984, but set out along the time honored beginners’ route of the British Formula Ford in 1985, when he won no fewer than six races in a Manadient Racing Van Diemen to end up 3rd and 5th in the two English FF championships. He also came 3rd in the year’s Formula Ford Festival, contributing to Britain winning the team prize.

After an on-off disappointment with West Surrey Racing in the 1986 British Formula 3 Championship, Hill decided to go it alone and finance his motor sport himself. He borrowed £100,000 and eventually got a ride with Murray Taylor Racing, for which he put in a solid series of performances. He won once in both 1987 and 1988 for Intersport to finish 3rd in the title chase. Various stabs at Formula 3000 followed, with victories in 1989 for Footwork in a Mooncraft Mugen-Honda, Middlebridge Racing in their Lola T90/50-Ford Cosworth in 1990 and Jordan in its Lola T91/50-Ford Cosworth in 1991: and in 1989 Damon had his first go at the 24 Hours of Le Mans in a Richard Lloyd Racing Porsche 935 3.0-liter Turbo flat-6, which dropped out with engine trouble after 228 laps.

Formula 1 beckoned in 1991, when Hill became Frank Williams’ test driver while still plugging away at F3000. Then came his first real F1 chance with precariously financed Brabham, which had seen much better days under Bernie Ecclestone and, before that, Black Jack himself. Italian female racer Giovanna Amati’s sponsorship dried up, so three races into the 1992 F1 championship Damon took over her seat and, unlike the Italian, was able to qualify the Brabham for the British GP. It must have rankled when Williams, for whom Hill continued as test driver, won the race with their car driven by Nigel Mansell, while Damon came in last in the Brabham BT60-Judd. He also qualified the car for the GP of Hungary, where he finished 11th. After that, the Brabham team imploded.

Damon’s big break came when reigning World Champion Mansell set sail for the USA to compete in the country’s CART Championship, which he won at his first attempt, and Nige’s ’92 teammate Riccardo Patrese left for Benetton. Frank Williams suddenly promoted Damon to the number two car, with Alain Prost, back from his F1 sabbatical, as the team’s number one. That is when Hill first clashed with Michael Schumacher, then a Benetton driver.

Prost won the 1993 drivers champion-ship in the active-ride Williams FW15C-Renault, taking seven victories from 16 races but, after years of financial deprivation, scratching around for sponsorship and doing his best to make threadbare teams work, 33-year-old Damon became a Grand Prix winner. He didn’t just win one GP either, but three of them in succession—the Hungarian, Belgian and Italian—between August 15 and September 12 to make a major contribution to Williams-Renault winning the coveted constructors’ world title. And those first remarkable victories helped take him to third in the championship table behind winner Prost, no less, and runner-up Ayrton Senna.

Prost retired from driving at the end of 1993 and Senna was brought in as the Williams-Renault team leader, with Damon in the second car once more. Then tragedy struck on May 1, 1994 when the Brazilian crashed and died at Imola in the Grand Prix of San Marino. That dumped Hill firmly into the hot seat as Williams-Renault’s team leader. Schumi won the first four races of the season–including San Marino—but Hill came to life again and won the Spanish Grand Prix, then the British, which his father Graham never did. Michael tried to overtake Hill on the race’s parade lap and ignored the black flag, for which he was excluded from the results; the German was also handed a two-race ban, just when he was leading the World Championship. Damon won the Belgian, Italian and Portuguese GPs in quick succession, and then came the Australian. By this time, Michael had accused Damon of not being a world class driver, one of the German’s characteristic over-the-top jibes that brought their rivalry to the boil in Adelaide. Schumi ran off the track and hit a wall with the right side of his car while leading but kept going; Hill came up to pass the Benetton and the two cars “collided,” forcing both drivers to retire. After that, the man the German said was not a world class driver won the Japanese GP! But Michael took the title with 92 points to Hill’s 91. Amid all that turmoil, Williams-Renault still became World Champion constructor again, thanks mainly to Damon. Years later, Hill explicitly accused the German of deliberately causing the Adelaide accident.

The 1995 season was a carve-up, with Schumacher accusing Hill of “brake-testing” him in the pack at the French GP, the two crashing into each other at the British, Belgian and Italian Grands Prix. Even Bernie Ecclestone had to weigh in with a firm bollocking for the pair of them. It was a brawl of a season, with Michael winning the championship for a second time in his Benetton B195-Renault with victories in Brazil, France, at Hockenheim, in Belgium, at the Nürburgring, in the Pacific at Aida and Japan, while Hill was runner-up once again with wins in the Argentinean, San Marino, Hungarian and Australian Grands Prix.

The 1996 season was dynamite for Hill, who won eight GPs that year and the World Championship, 28 years after his father’s last title win. He never qualified off the front row of the grid, and also set four fastest laps. Yet amazingly, the World Champion was dropped from the Williams lineup for 1997! Hill had offers for 1997 from McLaren and Ferrari (!) but their money was not up to the reigning World Champion’s expectations, so he joined Arrows for what turned out to be an almost embarrassingly disappointing season: Hill came 12th in the title chase driving the A18-Yamaha. He left Jackie Oliver and moved to Jordan for 1998, when his number two was Ralf Schumacher, Michael’s younger brother. Predictably, sparks began to fly again with Ralf accusing Damon of dangerous driving at the Canadian Grand Prix and Hill saying the young Schumacher purposely took Heinz-Harald Frentzen’s Williams out of the race. With all that tension eating away at the pair of them, Damon was still able to win a wet Belgian Grand Prix, scoring a rare victory for underdog Jordan.

Damon only managed seven points in the championship driving the Jordan 199-Mugen in 1999, at the end of which he retired. He had won the 1996 Formula 1 World Championship for drivers, of course, plus 22 Grands Prix, took 42 podium places, 20 pole positions and set 19 fastest laps.

As well as his various business interests, Hill succeeded Sir Jackie Stewart as president of the British Racing Drivers Club, owners of Silverstone. He makes occasional appearances at prestige events like the Goodwood Festival of Speed and is a fine guitarist. He also formed his own band, The Conrods, with which he played from 1999 until 2003.