The 2007 Formula One season starts in Melbourne today and I only wish I could be there to see what a grand prix race looks like without Michael Schumacher in it.

I’ve been quietly mad about the fast cars since I watched Jack Brabham racing a Cooper-Bristol called the Redex Special at Mount Druitt, near Sydney, in the early 1950s. He used to race it speedway style, going sideways in the corners on the hot asphalt. I would have been a driver if I’d had the ability and the courage. As things were, I was doomed to be a fringe-dweller, but I met many of the drivers over the years, usually by shoving a microphone in their faces.

Almost without exception they spoke in monosyllables, as if there minds were elsewhere, still doing 200mph. But what united them all was their unquestioning bravery. It still does, no matter how businesslike the sport gets. You just have to find it natural to go that quickly.

In his championship year, I wrote and presented a television special in which Damon Hill said a lot of good things, but he was a guest on my weekly studio talk show when he said his best thing: “What’s the hurry?”

His frustrating last season was coming to an end. It would have been easy to blame a slow car: the Arrows had some promise, but it was a farm tractor compared with the Williams he was used to. There was no need for him to admit that his motivation was gone. But it was, so he said so. Self-deprecating candour is typical of him and the day had come when he asked himself this question, “What’s the hurry?”: the day to quit.

The great drivers are never suicidal. Damon had his world championship and was unlikely to get another. He had a wonderful family he loved to be with. He had reached the point where he could weigh his achievements against the risks of going on. He had reached the point where he had started to think. Possessing a good, well-stocked brain to think with, he could reach only one conclusion.

The German writer Ernst Jönger drew a distinction between the generals whose broad view of life helped them to fight well and the generals who fought even better because they were interested in nothing else. There was something to it. The principle can be applied usefully to the top rank of British racing drivers since the second world war.

Jim Clark, the most conspicuously talented even at the level where supreme talent is a common property, was fully focused on driving. So was Nigel Mansell when he wasn’t playing golf with Greg Norman. Mike Hawthorn was too much of a gentleman, James Hunt too much of a wastrel: they both had too much to them. Stirling Moss would have won at least one world championship if he had not been a patriot: for a crucial part of his career he condemned himself to the wrong cars just so as to fly the flag, and when he signed for Mercedes the small print said he had to come second to Fangio.

To my mind, and not just because I am Australian by birth, Jack Brabham was the most interesting of all the drivers because he won championships in a car he had designed — a car that revolutionised the sport. (If you see a list of world-beating Australian expatriates that leaves Brabham’s name out, throw it away: its compiler has no imagination.) But that made Brabham interesting as a driver. As a man, off the track, he lived in a motor-racing world. The interest of a man like Damon Hill, when he was still driving, was that he lived in a world bigger than his profession. Life eventually got into his mind even when he had the hammer down, and when life does that it brings the thought of death with it. You can’t get one of those cars out of second gear unless you feel immortal.

Not that a great driver is reckless. There have been some quite good ones who were, but they moved into the past tense at an early stage. Usually they got fired before they could get killed, or else just never made it into Formula One in the first place. An F1 car costs millions if you count its share of the development outlay, and the owners never like to see one of them scuffed up without good reason.

As a passenger in the front seat of a car you can afford to buy, I have been driven on the road or on an empty track by several of the F1 drivers. Three of them were world champions: Nelson Piquet, Alan Jones and Damon Hill. Derek Warwick’s career was cut short when Lotus backed out of his contract because Ayrton Senna wanted no rival in the team. (In his last year alive, I missed the chance to be driven by Senna in a Honda NSX: he turned up a day late at Goodwood, and I thought there might be another time.)

Warwick drove me on the highway from his hotel to Monza. The following year I watched him at Le Mans driving the Jaguar racing sports car at 240mph on the Mulsanne straight at dead of night, but his driving then didn’t look any faster than how it felt to me that day on the highway. It was like being the narrator in Nicholson Baker’s The Fermata: all the cars we went past seemed stationary.

Stirling Moss, with whom I spent a lot of time while he was teaching me to pass my driving test so that I could make a television epic called Clive James — Racing Driver, was an education in ordinary English motorway traffic: his little Peugeot threaded between the lorries like a magic bullet through an undulating canyon.

On the Adelaide Grand Prix circuit, which had been closed down for our appearance, Alan Jones drove me in a Lamborghini Diablo he had never touched before and hated on sight: top gear was the only one he could find except reverse, and I got several chances to study the Armco barrier as we slithered towards it at a hundred-plus.

Piquet sometimes looked like a madman on the track but on the road he drove as if he wanted to live, so that he could sleep with more women.

What united all the great drivers, when they were driving on an ordinary road with normal human beings, was that they made you feel safe even as the landscape outside the window turned into a smear. They were so in synch with the car that they could let it perform at its optimum while keeping all their attention on the road ahead. I even felt safe with Jones in the Diablo: he had to wrestle the beast, but he knew exactly what was going on.

The same went double for Damon Hill, who gave me the fastest ride of all. After the Hungarian Grand Prix in his championship year, we were hurrying to the airport to catch a private jet to Bulgaria. There was a police motorcycle escort to clear our side of the road so that Damon could keep his foot down. Though I pretended, on the soundtrack of the documentary, that I thought of nothing but imminent death, the truth was more complicated. He was too good at his job to take even the tiniest risk off the track. On the track, he upped the ante, as they all do until the day comes when they want to get up from the game and go home.

It might even have happened to Senna one day. All the talk about how his early death preserved him in his glory is just bad poetry. It isn’t the responsibility of the racing drivers to have our deaths for us. They have their work cut out leading part of our lives for us: the part, deep in our dreams, where the brave not only deserve the beautiful, but become the beautiful.

There was a morning in Adelaide when I was crouching beside our camera crew as they got a low panning shot of Senna’s McLaren coming out of the garage. There was traffic in the pit lane so he had to stop for a few seconds right in front of me. While the car yelled with the clutch out, he dipped his yellow helmet to my camera. I could have reached out to tap his visor. He gave me a little wave with the tip of his glove. Then there was the heavy crunch of the clutch coming in on the full 800 horsepower, and he was gone in a clap of thunder.

It must have been like that at Troy, when Achilles came out of his tent. But Achilles could only fight or sulk. A less classical and therefore more civilised breed of hero, Damon Hill, had a full life coming to him, and eventually he chose to lead it. It was his bravest day.

Of him I remember a hundred moments. In some of them he was racing, but in most he was being human: playing with his children, putting up with the sponsors, or — perhaps the most characteristic — pointing out, in the most polite possible way, that his team had bungled a pit stop, costing him the race and quite possibly the championship.

There was his flaw on full display: he was reasonable and well mannered when he should have been shouting and screaming. But he always let the car do that.

British challengers in a new-look F1

This year’s Formula One championship promises to be different from those of recent years, not least because it is the first season since 1990 without Michael Schumacher.

Rule changes mean that engine development has been frozen and the use of a single tyre manufacturer (Bridgestone) should also make the season one of the closest fought in memory. A number of new circuits feature in 2007. Spa, in Belgium, perhaps the greatest circuit of all, is back on the calendar, and the German Grand Prix is at the legendary Nörburgring instead of Hockenheim. Suzuka, in Japan, has been replaced by Fuji.

Jenson Button, the man with it all to prove and David Coulthard, the seasoned veteran, will be joined by two other British drivers on the grid. Lewis Hamilton makes his debut for McLaren (alongside reigning world champion Fernando Alonso, who defected from Ferrari). Anthony Davidson, a former Honda test driver, is given his first drive at Super Aguri.

Jenson Button

Team Honda

Age 27

We say With a new car, Button has a realistic chance of winning the championship. He’s keen and he’s fast

They say “I would be delighted to see Jenson go out there and be competitive — but I just can’t see that happening” — Damon Hill

Ladbroke odds to win championship: 20-1; to win British Grand Prix, 6-1

Lewis Hamilton

Team McLaren

Age 22

We say He couldn’t have asked for better mentors in Ron Dennis (McLaren boss) and teammate Fernando Alonso but is it too much too soon?

They say “He races like Michael Schumacher. When his confidence is brimming, there’s no stopping him” — former Jaguar boss Tony Purnell

Odds 16-1 (British Grand Prix, 10-1)

David Coulthard

Team Red Bull

Age 35

We say The Scot will need more than his legendary consistency and reliability to elevate the Red Bull team above the ranks of also-rans

They say “There’s no two ways about it, he knows how to race a car, and he’s as solid as can be” — ITV commentator Mark Blundell

Odds 100-1 (British Grand Prix: N/A)

Anthony Davidson

Team Super Aguri

Age 27

We say Davidson is a popular figure on the F1 circuit and his team plays the plucky underdog well but it will still take a miracle for him to make a podium finish

They say “He is keen and is the sort of driver who will grab his chance, so I think he could nick a point or two” — Damon Hill

Odds 500-1 (British Grand Prix N/A)

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