INTERVIEW: DAMON HILL

Interview

DAMON HILL

Gustav Temple meets the former Formula 1 world champion racing driver, to discuss his late father Graham Hill, playboy racers, handlebar moustaches, The Beatles, rivalry between racing drivers and enlightenment behind the wheel

ou sent me a wonderful clip of

Yyour father Graham Hill from 1964, where he’s discussing gear ratios before a race at Brands Hatch, dressed in a sharp suit. I thought that would appeal to you! I always thought my dad was a cross between Leslie Philips, David Niven and Terry-Thomas.

Well that’s The Chap summed up in three people, actually. I’ve never seen so much Brylcreem on one man’s head! He did have an amazing head of hair. There was this German cosmetics company who wanted to do a male range, and they called it Graham Hill. He definitely fitted that impeccable Savile Row look.

Perhaps more so than others. He’s wearing a mohair suit in that clip, with cufflinks and a

“Being dastardly and just winning at all costs, that doesn’t sit comfortably with me, and I don’t think it did with my dad. He drummed into me when I was growing up that cheating is only cheating yourself”

pocket square, for a quick meeting with his – what do you call that chap he’s talking to? That’s Tony Rudd, head of engineering at BRM (Formula 1 team British Racing Motors) and he went on to Lotus, but during the War he’d designed

Graham Hill discussing gear ratios with Tony Rudd

air intakes for Spitfires, stuff like that. He and my dad worked together very closely. That’s how my father became the first British racer to drive an entirely British-made car and go on to become world champion in 1962 – sixty years ago this year.

So would you have had a similar meeting to that one in the clip with your engineer, or was that something of the past? They only seem to have a couple of bits of paper and a pen in front of them. Sort of, yes, but in those days they had so much less data to go on. They’d get the feedback from the engine people and they’d say things like, ‘the power band is here, you need to be in these revs for that part of the circuit’, then they’d use their empirical understanding of these things to come up with a tactic. What’s most interesting is that they’re getting feedback from the driver. Now that all comes from computers and sensors in the car and the engineers work it out, then they tell the driver that this is what the data says. Whereas in those days, the data was the driver. In that clip, they were preparing for a race at Brand’s Hatch.

And at Brand’s Hatch there’s a Graham Hill Bend now, isn’t there? There is now, but back then it was called ‘Bottom Bend’! My dad would have been delighted that he got the bottom!

You wrote that your father grew what he described as ‘an RAF fighter pilot moustache’ when he was in the Navy, knowing full well that they didn’t approve of moustaches. Yes, there is a photo him from much earlier than the clip we spoke about, from after he left the Navy, in a sheepskin coat with a great big handlebar moustache. He’d come out of the Navy but he had

to keep going back for refresher courses every six months, and he knew it would wind up the officers.

It was a very subtle snub, because only people in the services would know that the Navy don’t approve of moustaches and that they only belong in the RAF. You compared Hill Sr. to Terry-Thomas in School for Scoundrels. Was there overall something of the bounder in your father, which perhaps helped him gain a reputation as a bit of a playboy racer? I think there was, yes. In those days words like ‘sauciness’ were more acceptable, in other words you could refer to the fairer sex in a way that might not be approved of today. He was definitely a funloving person, which offset the very serious job he was doing. I honestly think that the Navy taught him how to drink! In his own autobiography, he says that because he was a petty officer, he got double

the amount of rum that the ratings got. And so every day he’d get smashed on this quart of rum he was given. So the Navy left its mark on him. He wasn’t a huge drinker but he liked to party. If that race in the clip was the British Grand Prix at Brands Hatch, which it may well have been, on the Saturday night after the race they’d all go back to his cottage for a massive party.

He was friends with people like Prince Rainier and Princess Grace of Monaco, and he would often “I think that John Lennon got to a point where he rejected what was on offer, which was just to carry on being a Beatle. He seemed to be saying, there’s got to be more to life than that. To step back and see if he could work it out before his next move, that’s more or less what I did when I finished with my racing career”

be invited to come and sup champagne with them. He went on to win the Monaco Grand Prix 50 per cent of the time in the 60s, five times from 62-69.

When you embarked on your own career in motor racing in the late eighties, was the age of the playboy racing driver long gone? James Hunt was probably the last of the big playboy racers, then you had Nelson Piquet, Alan Jones, Keke Rosberg, but they were petering out by the time I got there. People like Ayrton Senna were very serious, while Nigel Mansell is a teetotaller, I think. Eddie Irvine liked to party and David Coulthard has a similar reputation. But it was done in a different way, in the sense that there wasn’t the media problem that they have now. You could go to a bar with a journalist and it would all be off the record.

From your anecdotes of team ribaldry on the racetrack and in the pits, one gets the impression that your rivals displayed much more aggressive macho swagger than you did. Were you ever described as a ‘gentleman racer’ and would you have been happy with this sobriquet? Yes, I used to hear that ‘nice guys don’t win’ thing a lot, and I just thought, I don’t believe that. I don’t believe it isn’t possible to be successful and be sporting. Being dastardly and just winning at all costs, that doesn’t sit comfortably with me, and I don’t think it did with my dad. He drummed into

Michael Schumacher with Damon Hill

me when I was growing up that cheating is only cheating yourself; if you don’t like something, you don’t go bleating to all and sundry about what isn’t fair. Although he was fun and did all those wacky things every now and then to ham it up a bit, underneath it all he was a grown-up. And he had a lot of respect for the other drivers. They all appreciated the other drivers’ skills.

It’s come back a bit to that today and they get on much better. But when I was racing at the tail end of the eighties, it was bitter. The Mansell era, and the Rosberg and Arnoux eras, and Didier Peroni – they all hated each other! My dad would not have liked that at all.

There always seems to have to be a duel between two drivers in Formula 1. Lauda/ Hunt, Senna/Prost etc. They all have one man to battle against. Yours was Michael Schumacher, wasn’t it? In our sport, two into one doesn’t go; you can’t have two people win a race. It invariably comes down to two of them, and only one of those can win it. The focus of each competition becomes almost like a boxing match. The press want to build it up, and they will take something that you said and they’ll keep asking about the other guy. Sooner or later something comes out that sounds a little bit challenging and you end up with these rivalries, blown out of all proportion. There’s not really anything you can do about it. I made the mistake of playing up to it a few times, and it nearly always bit me back.

There was a point during the Prost/Senna rivalry where Senna wouldn’t even use Prost’s name; he would just refer to him as ‘him’. And before that they’d been the best of friends. On the few occasions when people felt that my dad had been robbed because of some dastardly driving, he never rose to that sort of behaviour. He just wasn’t the kind of person to complain at all.

The term ‘sportsmanlike’ used to have a gentlemanly connotation towards your fellow competitors.

I think that now it means something else. There are a lot more challenging things in life than being beaten in a motor race. You’re lucky to be in the race in the first place.

Given the unusual circumstances of your career, after losing your father in an aeroplane crash when you were aged only 15, do you wonder whether things may have turned out very differently if he hadn’t died, and whether you would have become a racing driver at all? I think that’s definitely possible, the idea of pushing it to him. First of all, I don’t know if I’d have had the courage to tell him I wanted to go and race motorbikes, because I think I would have known the answer. I’d have to have wanted to do it really badly in order to convince him. My dad had enough support from his parents in what he wanted to do, but a lot of drivers didn’t. There was a guy called Dick Seaman who was told in no uncertain terms that he wouldn’t be going racing, but he went anyway. Sadly he was killed.

Then there were people like Jackie Stewart, whose mum said to him that if he went racing she would never speak to him again, so he raced under a pseudonym. James Hunt and Niki Lauda’s fathers both fought against them becoming racing drivers. So racing against the will of their parents set off quite a strong tension there. When my father was once asked, when I was a young boy, if he’d like me to become a racing driver, he replied that he thought I was too intelligent. So I rather let him down!

Many of the references in your 2016 autobiography Watching the Wheels are not those one would expect from a racing driver. You quote Shakespeare and Greek tragedians, among others. You took a degree in English literature after retiring from racing? Well, I hadn’t gone to university because I was racing. My kids were growing up and I thought, I can’t really expect them to knuckle down and do all the hard work of a degree if I haven’t done it myself, plus I was curious to see what it involved. And I liked the subject; I liked what I was learning. And then of course I got competitive about it and had to get the best score I could! I got a first, but I’ve no idea how; maybe a bit of compliance on my part. Had I written what I really wanted to write I might not have got a first.

Did you see a parallel during those ten years after you retired, when you hardly left the house, and John Lennon’s years in New York when his second son was born? You chose the title of your book from a song he wrote about that period, Watching the Wheels. Philosophically, the Beatles had such a huge influence on culture and generations, the message was very strongly towards how we can live more peacefully and be nicer towards each other, and I think that John Lennon got to a point where he rejected what was on offer, which was just to carry on being a Beatle. He seemed to be saying, there’s got to be more to life than that. To step back and see if he could work it out before his next move, that’s more or less what I did when I finished with my racing career.

I had an opportunity which not many people get in their life, which is to have a bit of money in the bank and a bit of time to think about things and decide what to do next. I think there’s too much emphasis on keeping busy just for the sake of keeping busy. Or trying to stay in the limelight in case people forget you. That didn’t make sense to me. Otherwise you’re just chasing some shadow of yourself. I certainly was asking myself the question, what might I have done had I not become a racing driver?

And did you find the answer? No, I didn’t!

You describe an out-of-body experience during the Japanese Grand Prix in 1996 at Suzuka, in the Williams-Renault FW18 that led to you beating Michael Schumacher, where you had a feeling of being physically removed from the action yet completely focused on the task. Do you think that feeling can be achieved by any other means than while driving a car at 200 miles an hour? You hear it quite a lot when people are in extremely stressful situations; there’s a point where they become

detached from what’s going on around them. I’m sure it’s some sort of survival mechanism in us. We’re so often prevented from fulfilling ourselves because we think about it too much, whereas if you remove the thinking and replace it with just the will to either win the race, or get the hell out of there, or whatever, then what we call consciousness becomes irrelevant. There is no longer any need to rationalise anything; your inner instincts are quite capable of doing better without you.

It sounds like the sort of thing that would help you if you were in a Buddhist monastery at the top of a mountain, but when you’re driving in a Formula 1 race, don’t you need your consciousness more than ever? I remember thinking to myself, I’ve tried my best, and I made this little appeal for what you might call ‘outside assistance’, and at that point there’s a kind of letting go, which is what a Buddhist monk might try and teach you. By holding on to things, you are interfering with the natural process. You’re holding on to some concept of yourself, and maybe there isn’t actually a self. What if you were just to be?

I’m sure a neuroscientist would have a much more plausible explanation. It would be easy to become too spiritual about it; I don’t believe that the hand of God came and lifted me along, or something like that. I think it is simply a phenomenon of our consciousness that we can experience these states, and they are out of the ordinary. Which rather suggests that we muddle along in a kind of fog of ordinariness the rest of the time, occupying ourselves with stuff that isn’t really important, but we’re happy enough.

In a book about Eastern philosophy, the writer was saying that most of us get two sunsets in our lives, in other words, only two of those experiences where we feel completely outside of ourselves. I’d say that’s right, because the other one I had was when I was sitting on a beach with my son, staring into the infinite horizon. Something else happened then, at the opposite end of the spectrum, as I was totally unstressed. The only similarity was that I must have completely let go of the idea of who I am or what I was supposed to be doing. And bingo, this extraordinary feeling. Either that or I’ve got brain damage or something!

But you may not have had that moment with your son, had you not gone through all the ups and downs of your childhood grief and your racing career? Can anyone expect to just go and sit on a mountain, without all the difficulties beforehand, and experience a feeling like that? Maybe it is one that one begets the other. If you talk to people who’ve had really rough experiences in life, they appreciate a peaceful moment much more than people who’ve had more plain sailing. n