Paul Kimmage

At this point, on the eve of the 1996 season, Hill looked as full of tensions as ever. With his quick, jerky movements, his strangely empty smile and the intense, forbidding glare that darkened his face in moments of intense concentration, the public Damon Hill seemed uncomfortable in his own skin, mystifyingly uneasy with the accolades, the rewards, the affection and the admiration of the millions who were getting ready for another season of cheering him on every time he left the starting grid – Racers, by Richard Williams.

DAMON HILL is sitting in the front seat of a chauffeur-driven Jaguar, studying the two-page memo with his schedule for the day. It is a Tuesday morning in July 1996, five days before the British Grand Prix, and he is being driven to Brands Hatch by John, a sponsor’s representative, for a day of promotional activity.

“It’s pretty busy, as you can see,” John explains, “but it’s well organised and we should be wrapped by four.”

“Fine,” says Hill.

“We kick off with Reuters and then the first of the TV interviews. We’ll have Jacques [Villeneuve] in one garage and you in the other. We’ve got Auto, Sprint, M6 and FR3 and they’re all under orders to be ready for their slot.”

“Okay.”

“Then we’ve got some regional TV interviews and the written press.”

“Okay.”

“After lunch, there’s the promotional shoot for Rothmans; they want yourself and Jacques to do about 25 laps each – five laps alone, then five laps together – waving a Union Jack, punching the air and simulating a pit-stop and that sort of thing.”

“Okay.”

“We’ve also set up some photo shoots.”

“Right.”

“We were looking at something a bit different to catch the papers – something typically British in the week of the British Grand Prix.” “And what have you come up with?” Hill inquires, mildly alarmed.

“Well, we thought a London bus with ‘Silverstone’ on the front might work rather well,” John explains. “We’re going to put you at the wheel wearing a busman’s cap, you know, ‘Damon’s coming home’, that sort of thing.”

“It sounds more like On The Buses to me,” Hill observes. “No, I’m not doing it.”

“But Damon . . .”

“No bus.”

“But we’ve been planning this for . . .”

“I’m a racing driver, not a bus driver,” Hill insists. “I’m not going to set myself up for the rags [tabloid newspapers].”

“Okay,” John concedes. “What if we had you sitting in the back buying a ticket?”

“No.”

“Okay, we’ll shelve the bus for the moment . . . now, for the other shot. I’m not sure if you saw what they did last month at the European championships with the balloons.”

“No, go on,” Hill sighs.

“Well, basically we’re going to drape the car with the flag and have you standing in front. On the signal, we want you to raise both arms as 1,000 helium-filled balloons are released and the crowd cheers.”

The car falls silent. John steels himself for another firm rebuke. Hill shakes his head and turns to the writer sitting in the back.

“Do you see the sort of bollocks I have to put up with?” he says, laughing.

Eleven years later, I remind him of that morning as we sit down to begin the interview.

“Oh God,” he says, smiling. “I must have been very difficult to deal with.”

“Difficult? No, just different,” I reply.

THE MONTH is November 1975. Margaret Thatcher is the new Tory leader; the Queen has opened a pipeline to bring North Sea oil ashore; General Franco has died in Spain; Pele has signed for the New York Cosmos; Graham Hill, is sitting at the controls of a twin-engined Piper Aztec bound for Elstree aerodrome, just north of London in Hertfordshire.

Hill, 46, is Britain’s most storied racing driver. With his erect bearing, clipped speech, cad’s moustache and smarmed-back hair, he is the epitome of the dashing English gentleman racer. Four months have passed since his retirement and emotional lap of honour at the British Grand Prix and he has begun the next phase of his life as the proprietor of the Embassy Hill team.

Tony Brise, a brash young former karter, is his star driver. They have spent the week testing at the Paul Ricard circuit in the south of France. A wintry fog has enveloped the land on the night of their return to England and Hill is advised to divert to Luton airport as the plane begins to descend. But there are cars waiting at Elstree to take the six-man crew to an official dinner in London and he decides to press ahead.

His 15-year-old son, Damon, attends the school – Haberdashers’ Aske’s – adjoining the aerodrome. Home is a beautiful detached residence in Shenley, a short drive away. Damon is watching television with his younger sister Samantha when the news announcing the crash is flashed up on the screen. He walks ashen-faced to the kitchen, where his mother Bette is dining with friends.

“A plane has crashed in fog at Arkley golf course,” he says.

There are six funerals to attend in the week that follows, but the nightmare is only beginning for the Hills. Lawyers have uncovered irregularities in the paperwork with the Civil Aviation Authority. The insurance on Hill’s plane had lapsed and the families of the deceased are obliged to make claims against the Hill estate. Bette is left with no choice other than to sell her home and move to a modest abode in St Albans.

Damon leaves school and takes a job as a builder’s labourer, saddled with a grief that will burden him for years.

“I have spent more than half a lifetime trying to express the tragic moment” – Marcel Marceau.

“I’m curious that you have never written an autobiography,” I say.

“I wouldn’t know what to write,” Hill replies.

“But you’ve had such a fascinating life.”

“It’s not over yet.”

“No,” I concede, “but there are sportsmen half your age who have already written two.”

“Maybe I should do what Bob Dylan has done and make it into instalments,” he says. “I don’t know . . . I think that I’d want to write it myself and I just haven’t found the time yet. And also there are two sides to this: there’s the sporting story and what I did in my career; and there’s my life, which is a different story altogether. I haven’t worked out how I would separate them yet.”

“Why would you want to separate them?” I ask.

“We all have places we don’t want to go,” he says. “There’s a boundary where you say, ‘That’s as far as you go’, and I’m not sure who would want to read it. If I could write a book that explained my life, to me that would be useful, I would read it, but I don’t quite have the perspective on it yet.”

“What age are you now?”

“Forty-six.”

“And you don’t have perspective?”

“Well, I think I’m starting to get perspective. Now I can look at ‘Damon’ objectively and explain my actions and my character and put it into some context, so maybe it’s not too far off, but I think leaving a margin is important.”

“Okay,” I say, “let me push you towards the boundary and you can shout ‘stop’ whenever you want. I’ve read a number of previous interviews that suggested you are uneasy talking about your father?”

He doesn’t respond.

“Is that true?” I ask.

“I don’t think so,” he says.

“Tell me about the night he died.”

“I was watching television and there was a newsflash and I worked it out for myself. There aren’t that many private planes going to land at Elstree at that time of night and I had a gut feeling, a bad feeling. My mother was having dinner with some neighbours of ours and then the phone went and I thought, ‘That’s too much of a coincidence’. I could hear that she was being asked questions by a journalist and that’s when the penny dropped. It wasn’t a particularly nice experience.”

“You have two sisters?”

“Yes.”

“Were they also in the house?”

“Samantha, my younger sister, was. Brigitte was at a party and was met by a policeman . . . That’s the moment when your life turns from what seems like a carefree existence to one which is . . .” (There is a long pause as he considers the right word.) “. . . Damaged is the only word; your life is damaged and it throws a lot of questions into the frame. You become philosophical; you learn to adapt but it made me extremely sceptical and suspicious of life, and of people.”

“Why of people?” I inquire.

“Well, my dad died in an accident and he was also very famous so the events are not unrelated and so your life, my life, is a product of all those factors – having a famous father who dies tragically and unexpectedly at a time when we thought he was out of danger because he had just retired. And then there’s the realisation that because of some mistake by his lawyer the plane wasn’t insured and it’s a catastrophe because he has managed to lose not only his life but everything he had worked for, all the protection that should have been there for his family.

“And I’m young and I can work this out but there is still so much that you don’t understand. Suddenly, there are loads of people in your life – lawyers and friends – who try to untangle the mess and also the gannets who come in to see what they can find. At 16, you just want to have fun: you don’t want to deal with any of this shit and I think that shaped me.”

“How?”

“Well, you read about Damon Hill, the grand prix driver, and he’s thrown on to the world stage still trying desperately to find how he can . . . He wants to be as good a driver as he can but there’s all this other stuff in there . . . His father was a racing driver and he’s still angry and stuff like that.”

“Was the anger directed at your father or at life?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” he says. “I was quite an angry child for some reason and I think I felt confused about how to deal with [his father’s fame] because it affects your relationships with your friends when you’ve got a famous parent, so that was always an issue. And when he died I think to some degree I felt . . . free. So you’ve got all these conflicting emotions. I got on my moped and off I went. I was 16 and free.”

“The real test of a man is not how well he plays the role he has invented for himself, but how well he plays the role that destiny assigned to him” – Jan Patocka.

THE YEAR is 1981. Pope John Paul II has been shot in Rome by a Turkish gunman; Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer have kissed on the balcony at Buckingham Palace; Liverpool have won their third European Cup; John McEnroe has won Wimbledon. Damon Hill, a 21-year-old motorcycle dispatch rider, has just set eyes on a woman being dated by one of his closest friends. Susan George, or “Georgie” as she is known, is studying fashion at Kingston.

“I thought she was too good for him,” he explains, “and tried to impress her with a few of my jokes, but she was totally impervious. She seemed pretty formidable, impressive intellectually and in her ability to defend herself. I thought, ‘I’m going to have to work a lot harder’.”

They began dating. He started racing bikes. They moved into a tiny flat in Wandsworth and spent the next seven years punching 50p pieces into a very hungry meter until their marriage in October 1988. Damon had a bike race in Dijon that weekend and they spent the first night of their honeymoon at an insalubrious hotel near the train station.

“My first love in life and my real ambition was to race bikes,” he says. “I was so anti cars. I thought, ‘They look ugly and don’t lean over – what’s the point in that?’ Then my mother got me a deal to go to the Winfield [racing] school in France and without that I would never have made the switch to cars. I was surprised how much I enjoyed it. And then I looked at how much racing drivers earned next to bike racers and the penny dropped.”

The following year Damon and Georgie’s son Oliver was born. He has Down’s syndrome. “He was born in the evening and I was there for his birth and – not that I had been to any births before – but it struck me that something was not quite as you would expect it to be and, sure enough, when I went in next morning they had just broken the news to Georgie and she was devastated.”

“You say she was devastated. How did you feel?” I ask.

“I suppose I was kind of used to devastation,” he smiles. “I did not look on it as . . . There was Oliver. What could you say? He was Ollie and he was lovely and he got me immediately. I was possibly shocked as well because Georgie was upset and as with any unexpected situation you are left bewildered to a degree but you step up to the plate and go, ‘Right! We’ve got a child with Down’s syndrome now. What’s that going to be like?’”

I quote him a passage from an interview that Georgie gave last year: “As a result of Ollie’s birth, Damon suddenly became fiercely ambitious, determined to succeed for the sake of his son. We often joked that Damon would never have become a grand prix winner if it had not been for Ollie.”

“Was she right?” I ask.

“Well, you change when you have children, definitely,” he says. “You don’t waste time any more and it’s true that it changed my mindset and that I adopted a much more ruthless approach to my career which was, ‘Yeah, I will drive for you but I get paid’, and that was it. It was a job. And you drove whatever you got with 100% commitment to maximise whatever opportunities came along and to be honest, at 29, there weren’t many left.

“My dad was an inspiration. I knew his story: he didn’t have any money; he had managed to work his way up from nothing, so that kept me going. I had to make it happen, too. So lots of his theories on life were helpful – his determination, his character, his sense of humour. You don’t know whether to laugh or cry? I know the truth of that expression.” For three years, Hill toiled in the minor formulas and at the back of the Formula One grid in cars he describes as “the leftovers”, and then his fortunes suddenly turned with an offer of a test contract with Williams.

“A huge proportion of what happens in your life is completely beyond your control,” he says, “but you have to be ready when it changes and that’s where I was quite good. As soon as there was an opportunity I went ‘Bing! I’m in’.”

The “bing” happened in 1993 when he was promoted to the race team after Nigel Mansell’s decision to leave to race in America. The four-time world champion Alain Prost was the other Williams driver. Hill started nervously at the South African Grand Prix at Kyalami but impressed with his first championship points when he finished second at the next race in Brazil. In August, he stood on the top step of the podium for the first time at the Hungarian Grand Prix. The following year, at Silverstone, he won the British Grand Prix – the one race that had always eluded his father. The fans loved it. Britain had a new star. But Damon seemed reluctant to embrace his new-found celebrity.

“The rules completely change when you’re famous,” he says. “There are moments when it’s absolutely hysterical. My dad played it to the max. He loved what it could do. He loved being able to carry people on this fantastic sort of carnival ride. He loved being alive, my dad. He thought it was great that everybody recognised him and he was good at dealing with it.”

“You weren’t?” I suggest. “You didn’t embrace it?”

“No, I didn’t. I like my space, to be honest. I like to get away from it and don’t like being fussed over. I find it slightly awkward when people put you on a pedestal and he was a tough act to follow in that department – and my God, he got around! Everywhere you go, someone will show you an autograph of his or a picture on a wall. He just thought, ‘There is no point in being here if you’re not having fun’.”

“You’re more like your mother?” I suggest.

“People say that but inevitably we are amalgams of our parents and there were elements in the way he behaved and his approach to the job that I employed too.”

“Give me an example.”

“Well, I just think he was very . . . Mark Stewart did a very good documentary about him recently and it shows the pressure they were under in those days. I was watching on TV the day Jim Clark died; their buddies were being bumped off and my dad felt that pressure. He was very, very intense and could be quite crabby and would bite if you got too close to him, and I was like that.

“Sometimes people intruded on me when I was trying to concentrate and I’d let them know what I thought. They didn’t understand. They’d tell me to cheer up when I was just thinking or trying to concentrate, so those aspects of him were there.”

In a seven-year career at the summit of the sport Hill won 22 grands prix (eight more than his father) and the 1996 world championship (becoming the only son of a former champion to win the title). We said he was boring. We said he won because of his car. We made no allowances for his age (he was 36 when he won the title), how far he had come (motorbike courier) or the fact that he was pitched against two of the greatest drivers of all time in Prost and Michael Schumacher.

I remind him of a recent quote he used during a discussion on the measure of success. “A man with one leg can’t run as fast as a man with two legs, but his running might well be more Herculean in the face of his difficulties. But you can only measure him against his actual potential.”

“You were really talking about yourself there,” I suggest, “and the fact that you squeezed every ounce of your potential out?”

“You say that but I’m sitting here thinking, ‘Did I?’ There were thresholds, points where I knew absolutely that I could not have done any better but there were other times when I thought, ‘You didn’t do quite as well as you could’. It can be quite defeating to be confronted by someone who is persistently better than you. So how do you live with that?”

“You are talking about Schumacher?” I suggest.

“I could be,” he smiles. “He was good . . . so to be constantly beaten by someone like that can be quite demoralising so you have to say, ‘Listen, I’m doing my best’. But in the arena of Formula One, they are not interested in that. It was the same for my dad . . . He was regarded as a trier, determined, gritty. He got there out of sheer force of will.”

“Why don’t we admire that?” I ask. “Because what we are looking for is the magician,” he says. “We are looking for the miracle man, the superhuman, the perfect hero or heroine. We are never satisfied with just human beings which is what we all are.”

“But you never got suckered by any of that?” I suggest. “There was always a sense that you understood the game and recognised it for what it was.”

“I had the luck of having seen it all my life,” he counters. “It got taken away [when his father died] and I struggled to get it back, and didn’t get it back until I was 30, but I never wanted to need it, because you are trapped by it if you need it. And if you can say goodbye to the jet without crying you’re a free man,” he laughs.

A TUESDAY afternoon near his home in Godalming, Surrey. If you had never met Damon Hill and were asked to divine how he had become famous after 10 minutes in his company, you would probably choose poet or doctor or Nobel peace prize winner. His manner is much too gentle for a racing driver. And he is much too articulate. Where is the arrogant, jutting chin? The babes? The bling? What are you playing at Damon? Where have you parked your ego?

He is the same age as his father was when he died, and has spent the seven years since his retirement as a director of P1 (the shared access supercar club) and building some successful car dealerships. Or at least that’s what it said in my notes.

“Tell me about P1?” I demand.

“I’m no longer involved in that,” he says.

“What about the car dealerships?”

“No, I got out of that as well.”

“So what business are you in at the moment?”

“None.”

“None at all?”

“No, I’m involved with a couple of charities but that’s it.”

“Why did you get out?”

“People fight over money and . . . well, let’s just say it didn’t quite go as I’d envisaged and if I was doing it again I’d want complete control. But there’s another aspect as well, and the truth of it is this: if I haven’t got enough money by now, when will I have enough money?”

“The ‘How much is enough?’ argument.”

“Well, exactly. And of course it’s always lovely to have a bit more [he smiles] but I’m not on the Sunday Times Rich List.”

“You’re not?”

“No, I think I dropped off the bottom somewhere.”

“And you don’t miss working?” I ask.

“No,” he smiles, “I have always studiously avoided work. I’ve just been trying to look at life in a broader way. With a family [the Hills have four children: Oliver, 18, Joshua, 16, Tabitha, 12, and Rosie, 9], you have to expand your horizons because every child has got a different aspect to them, so you are constantly talking about things and about life and trying to make sense of it.”

“So where are the kids now in terms of what they need from you?” I ask.

“They have a variety of interests but what they want from me is . . . they just want me to be there so they can grab me and say, ‘I need you to help me with this question from school or to help me do this’. I was very conscious when I was young that my dad was away a lot, and then he suddenly wasn’t there, and that was a real concern when I stopped racing.

“I could have carried on globetrotting or gone and worked with a team but I didn’t want to be away. So just being there in their lives, cooking them breakfast, shouting at them to pick their clothes off the floor, I felt was crucial. And I’m lucky that I’ve made enough money that I’m able to do that.”

“That’s pretty selfless?”

“Well, it’s hard but, don’t get me wrong, I cleave out my bit for myself and sneak off to the golf course, or go surfing, which I absolutely love. I’ve realised what is important in life and that maybe pulling off the next deal is not as important as being around for the netball match.”

“Has Joshua shown any interest in following in your footsteps?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

“He has to pass his exams first.”

“What if he arrives home and says that he wants a motorbike?”

“Well, we all love to protect our children from the risks in life but then we also deprive them of the enjoyment.”

“Is that a ‘Yes, son’ or a ‘No, son’?”

“That’s a . . . I will reluctantly throw myself at the mercy of the fates or whatever is out there.” He smiles.