Ayrton Senna’s untimely passing 30 years ago thrust Damon Hill into the team leader role at Williams – and into a title battle which raged until the final round. But even though he would go on to win the world championship after the tragedies and disappointments of 1994, Hill faced a difficult journey of self-discovery…
WORDS MARK GALLAGHER PICTURES
MENTION DAMON HILL, ADELAIDE, 1994 AND THE MEMORIES START.
Usually with an image of Michael Schumacher’s Benetton B194 on two wheels following a collision with Hill’s Williams FW16B. Those who witnessed it will never forget – and Hill fans will never forgive – a cynical spur-of-the-moment act by Schumacher to win the world championship, eliminating his rival using blunt-force trauma.
Hill often gets asked about it but, whatever the emotion at the time, he has long since put that particular incident to rest.
Claiming the 1996 drivers’ championship will have helped, but so too the knowledge that it was not the only time Schumacher took his win-at-all-costs approach beyond acceptable limits. Think Jerez ’97, Monaco 2006 and Hungary ’10.
“He [Schumacher] was ruthless,” says Hill, who recently visited Adelaide for the first time since winning the 1995 Australian Grand Prix. “He didn’t show anger in the way that Ayrton [Senna] did, when Ayrton got out of the car you could tell he was fired up. This was a cool kind of ruthlessness that Michael seemed to have. A dispassionate approach to things which was ‘I have to do this, I’m terribly sorry, you might not like it but I’ve got to do it, nothing personal!’”
Having a world championship decided by a collision between rivals was nothing new. Senna and Alain Prost had seen to that in Suzuka 1989 and 1990, but 1994 was different.
When you mention that season the memories shift, to Imola, to life and death, to Ayrton Senna and Roland Ratzenberger. That the 1994 title was decided by an accident, an apparently intentional one, underscored a year most already wanted to forget.
This was Hill’s second season with Williams, his third in F1. If Ollie Bearman raised eyebrows by making his Formula 1 debut for Ferrari at the age of 18, think of Hill arriving in the paddock for the first time when aged 31 (Ratzenberger was 33 when he got his break, though he massaged his ‘official’ age downwards). Replacing Giovanna Amati after her sponsorship failed to come thro
