Damon Hill, the F1 world champion who refuses to be Schumacher’s footnote

Damon Hill

Photo: Original: Martin Lee from London, UK / Derivative work: Danyele / CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	September 17, 1960 Hampstead
Occupation	Formula One Driver
Awards	Officer of the Order of the British Empire · BBC Sports Personality of the Year Award · Segrave Trophy

When Netflix assembled the voices for its new film about Michael Schumacher‘s first world title, the film-makers went to the obvious man. The producer Jochen Köstler told Bild that they asked Damon Hill and could not persuade him to take part. Hill has given no reason. The empty chair still says something about a career the sport keeps filing under another driver’s name. Hill won a world championship of his own, with eight victories in a season and a front-row start at every race of it, and he is still most often introduced as the man in the other car at Adelaide.

The weight of the surname arrived early. Hill was born in Hampstead, London, the son of Graham Hill, twice Formula One world champion, and Bette Hill, a former international rower. The family lived comfortably until Graham died in a plane crash, leaving his widow, two daughters and a teenage son in sharply reduced circumstances. Damon worked as a labourer and a motorcycle courier, and raced bikes before cars, under a copy of his father’s helmet: eight white oar blades on dark blue, the colours of the London Rowing Club where Graham had rowed.

The crash came in 1975, when Damon, born on 17 September 1960, was 15. He began racing motorcycles in 1981, and it was his mother, uneasy about them, who steered him towards cars with a racing course in France in 1983. He won six Formula Ford races in 1985, spent three seasons in British Formula Three, finishing third in 1988, and scraped through Formula 3000 while doing test miles for Williams. His Grand Prix debut came halfway through 1992 with a dying Brabham team, qualifying it for two races before the outfit folded.

Williams promoted him for 1993 as Alain Prost’s teammate, over far more experienced candidates. He won in Hungary, then in Belgium and Italy, the first son of a Grand Prix winner to win one himself. The next season made him a team leader with a single year of experience. Ayrton Senna joined Williams and was killed at Imola on 1 May 1994; four weeks later Hill won in Spain. He won the British Grand Prix, a race his father never took, and in the rain at Suzuka drove what he later described as “on a different level from how I’d ever driven before”. He reached the final round in Adelaide one point behind Schumacher. There, Schumacher’s Benetton ran off and hit the wall, and the two cars collided as Hill went for the gap. Both retired, and Schumacher was champion by a point.

After finishing second to Schumacher again in 1995, Hill finally had the car and used it. In 1996 he won eight times, never started a race off the front row and sealed the title at Suzuka ahead of his teammate Jacques Villeneuve, becoming the first son of a Formula One champion to take the championship himself. By then he already knew that Williams had replaced him for the following year with Heinz-Harald Frentzen.

The bigger teams would not pay what a champion expected, so he went to Arrows, a team that had never won a race, and at the Hungaroring in 1997 he qualified third, passed Schumacher on track and led late in the race until a hydraulic problem slowed the car and let Villeneuve through. At Jordan he gave the team its first victory, in the wet at Spa in 1998, with Ralf Schumacher ordered to hold second behind him. The following year was harder. Outpaced by Frentzen, he announced mid-season that he would retire and briefly considered stopping at once, and at his last race, in Japan, he pulled into the pits citing mental fatigue. He left with 22 wins, 21 of them for Williams.

The tidy reading of that record is that a good driver met a great car, and that the car won the title. Schumacher said as much in 1994, when he questioned whether Hill was world class. Hungary with Arrows and Spa with Jordan argue otherwise, since neither car had any business at the front. The opposite reading, Hill as the wronged man of Adelaide, is one he has made himself: in 2007 he said plainly that Schumacher caused the collision on purpose. Both versions cast him as the supporting character in someone else’s story. What they leave out is the part he chose to tell in his autobiography, Watching the Wheels, published in 2016, where he wrote about living with depression. It is the least heroic account of the three, and the most honest.

As president of the British Racing Drivers’ Club from 2006 to 2011, succeeding Jackie Stewart, he presided over the 17-year deal that kept Formula One at Silverstone and made its renovation possible. From 2012 he spent 13 seasons as a Sky Sports F1 pundit. That job ended after the 2024 São Paulo Grand Prix, weeks after he had criticised Max Verstappen’s driving; Hill has said he would like to believe the two were unrelated. In 2025 he moved to BBC radio’s coverage.

This year brought him back to the team that let him go. In February Williams named him an official ambassador, alongside Villeneuve, the teammate he beat in 1996. “Williams is truly a special place for me and where some of the defining moments of my career took place,” he said. When the team scored two points from the opening three rounds, he did not dress it up: “It’s a little bit disheartening,” he said on Channel 4, before adding, “They’ll get there. But it’s a work in progress at the moment.” In July, thirty years on from the title, he took the FW18 up the hill at the Goodwood Festival of Speed. He has also taken a stage show with the podcast host Tom Clarkson on a first UK tour in January and across Australia and New Zealand, ending in Melbourne in early October.

Hill is married to Georgie, and they have four children. Their son Josh raced single-seaters until 2013; another son was born with Down syndrome, and the couple are patrons of the Down’s Syndrome Association. He was appointed OBE in the 1997 New Year Honours. A keen guitarist, he can be heard at the fade of Def Leppard‘s “Demolition Man”, the opening track of Euphoria.

The documentary, Schumacher ’94, will go on replaying Adelaide without him. Hill, meanwhile, is wearing the badge of the team where he became champion for the rest of the anniversary season, and telling his own version of those years from a stage, to audiences who paid to hear it from him.

Tags: sports, athletes, Michael Schumacher, Formula One, racing drivers, Damon Hill, Schumacher '94, Williams