Hamilton Maurice - Watching the wheels: my autobiography

WATCHING THE WHEELS

MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY

DAMON

HILL

WITH MAURICE HAMILTON

MACMILLAN

To Georgie

and all Hills,

past, present

and future...

I have known Damon Hill since he was a very wee boy. In my first season of Formula Three racing in 1964, I only saw the top Formula One drivers from a distance: most of them were my heroes. Damons father, Graham Hill, was surely one of them, and Graham and his wife Bette would often have their children at their side in the years that were to follow.

When I got the contract to drive for BRM, Graham was categorically the number-one driver. In those days, Formula One teams did a lot of testing and BRM used to use the Snetterton track in Norfolk. I was still living in Scotland, so I would either fly down or drive down and stay overnight at Graham and Bettes home. At seven oclock in the morning, three wee Hills would burst into my bedroom, jumping all over the bed, and they were of course Damon, Brigitte and Samantha. They were tiny tots but full of energy and fun. Its wonderful for me to look back on those days and its only because Damon has asked me to write this foreword for his book that many more memories have come to mind Samantha and Damon on top of my shoulders as I gave them a horse ride in the paddock is just one of many.

When Graham and I were racing together there was much more of a sense of camaraderie. All the Formula One drivers spent a lot of time with one another in those days as we had to travel together and usually stayed in the same hotels; it was a much deeper relationship than can be seen in todays F1 world. We holidayed together, laughed and cried together, particularly because so many racing drivers were losing their lives in those years.

So I saw Damon growing up, from a toddler to a young lad riding motorbikes, and I saw him entering the world of motor racing the hard way, with no father to help him and little money. When Graham died in an air crash while flying the plane, with his team driver beside him and his mechanics behind him, all of whom lost their lives, it had a huge impact on Damon, Samantha and Brigitte and, of course, Bette. It must have been a terribly depressing and upsetting time for them all. To pursue his dream, Damon therefore had to go out and secure sponsorship himself, just to survive in the sport.

I dont believe that being the son of a World Champion racing driver makes life any easier, what with all the travel, the sponsor events and the many commercial relationships that have to be serviced whilst also trying to be a good parent. Compared to other normal families, there simply arent enough hours in the day to spend with them alongside the racing, and having a famous father is yet another element that adds to these pressures. It can sometimes make you feel very proud, but at other times very lonely. Yet Damon has survived all that. He became a World Champion racing driver who had the wisdom to retire at the right time and is now a very talented television commentator and authority on the sport. Damon has done something that his father never managed, and that is to win the British Grand Prix, which must have been an extremely proud moment for Damon.

Today, he is a wonderful father and a husband to Georgie. Damon carries himself with great dignity and is a genuinely good man. I am very proud to have had the opportunity to be the understudy and teammate to Damons father, a man who not only won the World Championship, Indianapolis and Le Mans, but who also had the best wee black book with jokes that set people into tears of laughter, and I feel very privileged that his son has asked me to write this foreword.

I counted Graham as a great friend, and the fact that he won the World Championship, Indianapolis and Le Mans the only man to do so was a phenomenal achievement. Graham Hill would be incredibly proud of his son, and he would be especially pleased to see how he overcame such difficulties, particularly when his family life, which for many years had been so blessed, was put into turmoil when they lost their father and husband. Damon not only survived this, but has made a respectable life for himself, built with great dignity and love for the family unit.

Today, Damon is his own man. He lives his life to the full and protects and cares for his family with such love.

Well done, Damon.

Jackie Stewart

2016

For those of you who supported and followed my career back in the day, and wondered where the hell I went and what I got up to after I stopped racing, this introduction is a brief answer to that and an explanation as to why I havent written a book until now.

Winning a Formula One World Championship is a big deal. People dont forget it, and it defines you. You are introduced as the 1996 Formula One World Champion twenty years later, and thats very nice, but it doesnt tell the whole story of who you are. We all have our professional lives and our personal lives, but the professional life is very much a necessary front. Behind all those apparently very together facades lie the deeper concerns of life, relationships, fears, moral questions, doubts and needs. We are not the perfect and impervious heroes we like to project, and this is never truer than in the public arenas of sport, politics or the media. Being out front requires a certain degree of chutzpah or good bluffing abilities. Of course, there are a few who are not troubled by an ounce of doubt or insecurity, but they are the rare self-possessed individuals.

A confident person can be very alluring. My character was assessed in all kinds of ways during my career, but I dont believe anyone ever found me to have an overabundance of confidence. I wish I had that strut that some sports people have, but the truth is that I had been shoved into the limelight almost from birth and had developed a deep distrust of situations that I could not control. When Ayrton Senna was killed in 1994, I found myself in a rather unexpected place as team leader against a man called Michael Schumacher, who had yet to win even one Formula One World Championship. I gave it all I had, and more. I never doubted I had driving ability, but just how good was I? I was to find out soon enough, and so was everyone else.

Being at the sharp end is not just about whether you can drive. It also involves an uncomfortable amount of scrutiny, some of it very personal. If there is any weakness, someone will stick a chisel in and crack it wide open. It was a new and totally surreal experience. I had just wanted to drive, win and go home, but more is expected from sports stars. People want something extra, and I was not sure I had whatever that something was. I knew I had something missing. But what was it? Was it charisma? I was not a natural showman like, for instance, Graham Hill, and that spot had already been taken anyway. Or was it simply total confidence: the sense of a right to be there? I think it was more the latter, but it was also to do with the legacy of Graham Hill and the fear of intruding on hallowed ground.

For most of my formative years my father was a very famous person. Then he died in a terrible and unexpected way. This cast a huge cloud over my early years, and it also left what they call unresolved issues. I thought I could solve all these things by getting to the top. I thought, as many people do, that famous, successful people have got it cracked, but it isnt as simple as that. When I gave up my racing life, those issues started to catch up with me again.

Most people have good days and bad days. In sport, you just have to hope that you have a good day when you really need one, but sometimes you have really bad days for no apparent reason, and this is called being depressed. Depression is like being buried alive or having someone sitting on top of you all the time. You feel unbearably heavy. Its like carrying around a dead body; its exhausting. You just want to curl up and cry, but you cant. You are like a battery that has gone permanently flat, and there is no way, you think, that it will ever come back to life. Weve all been disappointed, been kicked out of the World Cup a few too many times, and it feels awful, but we get over it. Hope springs eternal; maybe well win in four years time? But depression is total despair: the thought the absolute rock-solid, certain conviction that we will never,