#86 - Damon Hill: Overcoming loss, achieving success, and finding one's identity

Foreign.

Hey everyone. Welcome to the Peter Attia Drive. I'm your host, Peter Attia. The Drive is a result of my hunger for optimizing performance, health, longevity, critical thinking, along with a few other obsessions along the way. I've spent the last several years working with some of the most successful, top performing individuals in the world, and this podcast is my attempt to synthesize what I've learned along the way to help you live a higher quality, more fulfilling life. If you enjoy this podcast, you can find more information on today's episode and other topics@peterattiamd.com. Hey everybody. Welcome to this week's episode of the Drive. I'd like to take a couple of minutes to talk about why we don't run ads on this podcast and why instead we've chosen to rely entirely on listener support. If you're listening to this, you probably already know, but the two things I care most about professionally are how to live longer and how to live better. 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Again, the podcast will remain free to all, but my hope is that many of you will find enough value in 1 the podcast itself, and 2 the additional content exclusive for members to support us at a level that makes sense for you. I want to thank you for taking a moment to listen to this. If you learn from and find value in the content I produce, please consider supporting us directly by signing up for a monthly subscription. My guest this week is Damon Hill. Damon is the 1996 Formula One World Champion, and even by the standards of Formula One World Champions, Damon's career was incredibly interesting and took place during a brief but intense, tumultuous period in Formula one. He was Ayrton Senna's teammate during the tragic year in which Senna's life was lost and he went on to have legendary battles with Michael Schumacher. Now, you might be thinking, if you're not a Formula one fan or a racing fan, why would you listen to this episode? Well, I want to address that up front and say that this is really not an episode about driving. Basically, the driving, the racing, all of that is really a substrate or a vehicle through which we discuss the journey of Damon's life, which was given a tragic jolt when he was 15 years old and his father, the legendary Graham Hill, two time Formula One world champion, died in a plane crash that he was flying. And I think it becomes very clear when you read Damon's incredible autobiography, Watching the Wheels, which I can't recommend highly enough, how much of an impact that had on Damon. Something that, to this day, it's clear, has still shaped and forged so much of who he is. He's very open in this biography about his depression, and it was when I read his book for the first time about a year ago that I realized I just had to interview Damon. And this interview did not disappoint. He was incredibly open, incredibly forthright about the struggles that he has had, the inadequacies that he has felt, and the journey that he's been on to basically break the cycle that he felt he would have passed on to his kids had he not figured this out. Of course, we do talk quite a bit about racing, and we go into great detail, and I think that in many ways, Damon's account of what happened that tragic day on May 1, 1994, when and Senna died at Imola, is probably the best account you will ever read. In fact, I make the point to Damon that it's really his book and his account of it that probably changed my mind about the events of that day. I could go on much longer about what we discuss in this episode, but I think this is one of those ones where you just have to sort of take my word for it and listen to it Again, if you're not a racing fan, I don't think it matters. This is really not a racing story. It's a human story that's cloaked in a racing story. And, of course, if you have any interest in motorsport, especially F1, I think the. The nuance and detail of his career will be illuminating. So without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with Damon Hill. Damon, thank you so much for making time on what is obviously a very busy weekend for you.

It's not as busy. I'm not actually working for sky, which is my usual job, so I would have to be normally in quite early, but I'm working for F1 1 on a promotional basis, so I. I get a little bit of extra leeway, so. But even so, you hit the ground running when. When you're in Formula one and just come from a promotional event for. For Formula one, and then journalists want to talk to me because there's. Lewis is probably going to stitch up his sixth world title, so they want to know what other world champions think of Lewis's performance. So you have quite A few other various things you get involved with.

Well, I'm going to resist every urge to go down that path, which I would love to go down and talk about all the nuances of the current day, the grid versus, you know, your air and stuff. But we'll get to that in time. I honestly just want to start by saying something which is, your book is incredible and I can't recommend it highly enough to everyone. So your autobiography, Watching the Wheels, which came out three years ago, is kind of one of these books that's sort of about racing, but sort of not.

First of all, thank you very much for saying that about the book. I'm very pleased I wrote it and I'm pleased because it's reached people who have experienced, maybe they've been experiencing depression in some way or they've had some difficulty in their life. And I just wanted to make it clear that it's never plain sailing if you achieve success in sport or achieve success in the world. A lot of people like to gloss over the difficult bits, and I didn't want to make it sound like it was harder than it was to race, but I couldn't ignore the fact that I'd been through an experience and part and parcel of my experience as a racing driver was wrapped up with my emotional life and having to dealt with the fact that my dad was a racing driver and then he died when I was 15, and then I became a racing driver and it seemed to me very muddled up. So I couldn't just sit down and write a book about how I became a world champion, because actually, where does the motivation for that come from? And how do you differentiate that between my motivation and my dad's motivation and how much of it was to do with wanting to do something for the family name and how much of it is purely yourself? So how the hell do you untangle this stuff? And I think a lot of people also go through these questions. It's a normal thing to do.

It is really not so much that you're a Formula one world champion. In fact, that is a very small chapter of a book of a long book. It's about a 360 page book and there is literally one chapter devoted to the 1996 season. What's amazing to me is the sort of the degree of introspection that comes into this level of examination and the things that you tie back and forth and back and forth, which hopefully, as we get into this discussion, I'll remember some of those things. But it would be hard for people Listening to this, who don't know much about you to go anywhere to begin other than to start with November 1975. I'll give a little bit of background just for folks, but only for the sake of time. But I'd like you to spend as much time as possible explaining your father's a legend. I remember when I was watching old Formula one videos with my, with my wife and the first time she saw Graham Hill, she was sort of like, wow, that's like a really good looking movie star. And I said, yeah, yeah, he looks like a movie star. But you realize, like, he's a Formula one driver. In fact, he's the only person to have won the Triple Crown of motor racing. Which of course prompts the. What is that? You know, then I get to explain there's two ways you could technically win this, and he won it both ways. Maybe just tell people a little bit about who your dad was and why he was so significant to the sport of motor racing.

Well, he was, as you say in the sport, a legend, achievements wise, but I think also charismatically and also in terms of being. Playing up to the role of how the public expected him to be and reveling also in being that person. I think he got to know himself because curiously, when my mum first met him, she said he was very quiet and very shy and not the person that we got to know eventually as a star of the sport and all. Also someone who was very well known as a great raconteur, a great after dinner speaker, someone who dressed impeccably. He had all his shirts made in Savile Row and his ties and he.

Was like, not a hair out of place. The mustache, the size, I mean, just the mustache.

Right, the mustache or mustache. Various ways of pronouncing it, depending where you come from. But he would, yeah, trim it in, you know, to, you know, millimeter perfect. And that was his trademark because in the, in the early days they didn't have a closed face crash helmet. So you could see the guy's face. And there, there it was this guy with a, you know, the Wacky Races, you got Dick Dastardly and you got, you know, all the stereotypes of that type. You know, you have. David Niven was very suave with a pencil mustache and they'll say Errol Flynn. And so he was kind of in this mold, if you like. I don't know whether he was trying to be that person, but he certainly, he didn't have to pretend to be anyone else. He had the attributes to be that person, and I think he loved being that person. And so he created interest in himself as a person out off the track. And I think he was a lover of life. He loved meeting people, he loved communicating, and he loved finding out about everything, every aspect of life in every different strata of society. And, yeah, he went at it in 100%.

What is your earliest memory of him? So you were born in 61? 60. 60.

September 60.

He won his first Formula One title in 62, if I'm not mistaken. There are lots of pictures of you as a kid around.

I don't remember that.

Yeah, of course, like. But the legends of the sport, right? I mean, so if you go on.

Google and you go Damon Hill, and there's a photograph up there at my christening with Bruce McLaren, Sterling Moss, my godfather, Joe Bonier, Taffy Von Trips is there, my dad's there, Tony Brooks is there. They all came to my christening. So I grew up in that. That was his world. And when do I remember that? What was the first thing I remember? It's very, very difficult to pinpoint it. I can't, because I would have been taken as a very young child to race events, and I probably didn't. Didn't even know what was going on. I probably heard the noise, and that's about it. But I think it becomes apparent when you go to school, when you go for the first time, you meet kids who have heard of your dad and you haven't, in a way, you know, you kind of. It's just dad who you're talking about. And then you become. Yeah. And actually the teachers are very conscious. So I think you picked that up, that there's something unusual about your dad. And then you start to look at the world through a different prism.

By the way, it was Jim Clark in that photo.

Oh, was it? Yes.

Yes. How could we have forgotten Jim Clark?

I don't know how I did.

Shame on us. Yeah. Which speaks to another interesting point of your dad's era, which is how many of those guys died in a car? And I think I've talked about this before on the podcast. Probably my favorite documentary on all of F1 is called one. I think it came out about five or six years ago.

Yeah, I remember that one.

It is just such a beautiful depiction of those transitions in that era that your father lived through, that Jackie Stewart lived through, that these guys lived through. It is kind of a miracle that they came out alive.

It is. Statistically, I think they knew that they had. There were 26 drivers in those Days on the grid. Some years it wasn't unusual for them to lose two. And that's like 12 to 1 chance of surviving.

And then you start stacking that year.

On year, year on year. I mean, when my dad did Indianapolis in 1966, two years before that, two guys were killed in the race and they carried on racing. It was 1964. It's just terrific. And he just, you know, so two years later he's doing the race. I mean, so he would have known the history of the race and he had got that he wasn't going to be cowed attitude. I think that they had. I sort of put forward the theory and I don't think it's anything. It's not my personal theory, but I think it's quite well understood that if you were born during the war era and you grew up during the war era, my dad would have just missed active service. He'd had to do national service after he left school. But you would have grown up knowing that guys just a bit older than you would have been flying Spitfires or bombers or going fighting the Germans and risking their lives for everything. And you wouldn't. People were not expected to make a big deal of that. So driving racing car was seen as jolly japes, you know, seen as in a lot of fun and you got paid and you could get killed, but, you know, it's better than having to go and get shot at with Akat guns.

It was such a different era and I was actually, for totally unrelated reasons, talking with my driving coach today about something, and I mentioned that I was going to be speaking with you today. And he said, you know, I wonder what his thoughts are on the following. So he was telling me about how when he was doing 24 hours of Daytona a few years ago during the race prep, one of the organizers said to all the drivers, he said, look, guys, you all are young enough that you don't know what it was like when your probability of dying here was very high. But I want you to pretend for a moment that it is that dangerous and act accordingly to the other drivers. And what he was really getting at was in the era that your father raced in, there was a bit more of a gentlemanly approach to racing.

Well, I think it was. You could describe it as that. I think there was a respect for the other competitor because you knew that person was prepared to take the chance of being a racing driver and accept the risks that ensued. But it didn't mean they liked it at all. It was awful for them. It Was. It was dreadful. And I think Jackie Stewart made it very clear in his book that going to a guy's funeral and seeing the family every other week or whatever, twice a year, or, you know, guys you raced against, they must have felt slightly responsible themselves. So I think the gentleman thing was, is more appreciation that they didn't want to be the guy responsible for losing someone else's life. And I think that is. That was quite strong in their. In their day.

It's interesting you bring up Jackie Stewart, of course, who retired after 99, not 100 Grand Prix, even though he had one more in a season. And he sat that out after Sevair died, his teammate. That's interesting because it'll kind of come back to your retirement in a way, which was drawing a line in the sand and saying, at this moment, I don't have the desire to do this anymore. Even though you guys were separated by decades, it's still interesting to me.

It still was dangerous when I was doing it. Don't forget, it was only a few years after Ayrton was killed that I was still racing. So I think the risk factor, you are rolling the dice. You know that the more times you do this, the chances of something going wrong increase. And the comparison has often been drawn to gamblers. But of course, when you're gambling, you lose money. You don't necessarily get paralyzed or killed or burned to death. I am interested in this issue of humans being able to put danger to the back of their mind. And we recently watched the amazing El Capitan film Free Solo. I mean, it's uncomfortable to watch in the documentary. Anyone hasn't seen it, they have to see it. Yeah, it's incredible because it's. And I forget the guy's name, terrible remembering names. But this very interesting character who pulls it off, he is described and sort of describes himself as a bit of an oddball. They go into his background, his family upbringing, and reasons why he might have had a difficult upbringing. And maybe was. Was that a reason for him taking these risk, effort to identify himself or impress his mother or show off in some way, or what is it? What was the motivation for doing this incredibly dangerous thing? But whatever way you cut it, he managed to put fear in the back of his mind. You could not have done what he did without being able to go, okay, I'm going to put the palpable, tangible fear we. We all could identify watching this documentary. This guy clinging to the side of a rock with nothing to help me. It's just terrifying to watch it but he managed to do it with.

But so did you, and so did all the drivers of error. But let's think about this. Let's think about Imola in 94, and let's not even think about Imola. Let's think about Monaco the next race. I mean, it had been 12 years since Villeneuve died, and then in one weekend, you see three of the most devastating things. It's only a miracle Ruben didn't die. Right, but Ratzenberger dies, Senna dies in.

Your car, and then Monaco and Wendlinger.

Yeah, exactly. So it's impossible to say that you were getting in a car thinking you're. I mean, you're immune to. I mean, this is about as dangerous a time as ever to be an F1.

Yeah, it was. There was a freakily high incidence of accidents that meant the driver got hurt. So it suddenly was raining. I think Niki Lauda described it perfectly, said, you know, that God had had his hand on F1 for all this time, and now he just took it off. And that seemed to be what it was. It was like, okay, brakes are off, guys. You know, you've had a good run, and now we need to rebalance the odds. And it was just happening one weekend after the other, even in testing as well. And, you know, you had people like Pedro Lami's accident, and actually before that, even Johnny Herbert was really killed, and Martin Donnelly, who was my teammate in Formula 3, and then he got killed at. In Jerez. And so.

So did you. I mean, when you were in that car, were you. What were you blocking out of your mind?

The possibility that it would be me, I guess. I don't know. You just, you know, it's there, but it makes you concentrate better. See, if something goes wrong with the car, there's nothing you can do about that. But if you make an error, then you pay the price, and that's your fault. So you. You know, you do concentrate a lot harder when you know that the risk of injury is great.

Well, before we come back to that, let's go and finish the story again. For folks who aren't familiar with. With your father, it all changes. November of 1975. November 29th, if I recall the date. I think the way you describe it in the book is really, really difficult to read truthfully, because you don't gloss over the little details of the night. You're watching TV with your sister, your mom is in the other room, and you hear something on the tv.

Yeah. And I think what. It. What it tells me and what I'm hopefully I'm telling also connecting with other people who've had similar experiences. You know, we don't get over things like that. It's the worst thing that you can imagine happening. I'd like to think that, you know, I think a lot of therapy is about people getting over those experiences, but I don't think you can possibly ever unremember the emotions. What you can do is you can recognize that those emotions had a relevance there and then at that time. And if you've locked them away and haven't revisited them and kind of exercised them, then they come back to you in other situations when you're not conscious of why you're feeling those. Those emotions at that time. So they can be reduced in that way. But if I want to go back to that moment right now, I will get the same sensations that I had back then.

And I don't want to put you through that. I can feel it in reading the words, let alone hearing you say them. But for folks listening, I mean, you know, your father was in a plane crash, and one of the things that stood out in reading it was how vividly you remember your mom screaming. That strikes me as, like, incredibly palpable. Everything that you just said a moment ago about the challenge in processing that and all those things. How old were you when you finally realized that was the case, that those are unresolved issues that can't just be forgotten?

Yeah, I think not until I stopped a couple years after I stopped racing, I think, because one of the issues, as I just mentioned before, is that your mind, you know, who am I? Am I different to my dad? Because if I'm different to my dad, I have to live longer than him. And I was 42 and he died when he was 46.

Yeah.

So there's anxiety, creeping anxiety that comes with this. You know, you're following a pattern, and you don't want to follow a pattern because it's a bad pattern to get into. So you have to differentiate that. You have to change course somewhere. That was one of the big pressures for me as a driver, was I had a family. I didn't want to put them through what our family had gone through.

You talk about that on a couple of occasions in the book, which was. And I don't know if it was deliberate, but you keep making the point you weren't afraid of dying for the sake of your life, but you were very afraid of it for what they would go through, because obviously you'd experienced it.

Yeah, I Think I would. I mean, if it would be at all possible to be angry with oneself if one had he died. You don't want to be. Yeah, you don't want to do that. But at the same time, in humans in all kinds of situations, whether they're in the military or they are in the emergency services or they do some other job, that we as adults put ourselves in the firing line somewhere at some point, and our children maybe are too young to appreciate that, but when they become older, they'll appreciate. They will also see that there is a. We can't go through life in cotton wool. You know, we. We have things we have to do as humans to fulfill ourselves. I would hope that by taking chances, I mean, when I say taking chances, I mean calculated chances that. That have a benefit somewhere, somehow, that my children would also not be afraid of doing those things.

So, speaking of fear, I can't imagine what it's like for your mom to lose her husband when she has three young kids. Teenagers, I guess. Yeah. Your sisters would have been teenagers as well at the time, right?

Yeah, my eldest sister was 16, but my younger sister was only about 11.

And you're already at this point into motorcycles?

Yeah, for fun riding in the fields and in the woods on small motorbikes and off road bikes. I hadn't got a road license then.

So it's kind of amazing to me that you didn't have a karting background. You were, by your own admission, very late to auto racing, that you could be as successful as you've gone on to be. I think just to sort of move the story along a little bit, let's go to when you decide you want to be an auto racer.

Well, I wanted to race bikes from quite a young age. I was impressed by a friend of mine when my dad died, a friend of my dad's who was Peter Gethin, actually, he actually raced for my dad, but he was a Formula one driver, and he took me and a friend of mine down to Brands Hatch not long after my dad had died, just because he knew I like motorcycle races. Why don't you come and have a look at these bikes going around Brans Hatch? And I'd never seen anything like it in my life. And I'd been to so many Formula one races, literally sitting there yawning. As you know, Jim Jack is Jackie Stewart goes and wins another race. You know, it was like he used to go past. He used to go and spend any of our summer holidays. We'd go to Monza and we'd Be parked up in some grandstand somewhere. My dad went and raced, and we'd literally sit there, and Jackie Stewart would go past, and then about half a minute later, everyone else would go past, and he would go on for two hours. And you were going, you know, it wasn't. Didn't do it for me, A car.

Is that because the driver isn't using his body in a car the way he's using his body on a motorcycle?

I really. I think that's a big part of it. I think I. As I mentioned before, I kind of like sports where I.

You're the projectile.

I'm the projectile, but I'm also the. The acrobat, you know, And I think that it's very difficult to see that in car racing. And I think that's one of our big problems with. Why, you know, with people appreciating the current crop of Formula One drivers, they might appreciate it when they're watching the race in the wet and, you know, sometimes you can see the speed and sometimes you can see their reactions, but not nearly as clearly as you can when you watch a skier or you watch a surfer or you watch a guy on a MotoGP bike, it's abundantly clear that they are controlling the vehicle. And I think that happened to me. So I went to a bike race and I saw these bikes go past, and I just couldn't believe there was a guy sitting on the bike, doing that sort of speed into. And having ridden a bike myself, I just thought, oh, me do that? You know, it was one of those dumb moments. You just. You can't think straight, being just. You just like the smell of the bikes, you like the noise of the engines, you like the whole thing. So that was my ambition, to go bike racing. And my mum, I was just about.

To say, what was your mom's reaction?

Well, can you imagine? I mean, to me, it seemed like a long time ago, but actually it was only three years or four years ago since my dad died, which is nothing in terms of those things. So I go, mum, do you mind if I, you know, race bikes? And to her eternal credit, and bless her, you know, she recognized the situation, which was that my dad had raced. How could she deny me, her own son, the opportunity of doing something that. And she had admired my dad for his bravery and skill as a racing driver as well. So here was her son, only a few years after the tragedy, coming and saying, do you mind if I have a go at racing bikes? And she said, I don't mind. I think she took a deep breath, but she said, I don't mind you doing it, but as long as you do it properly. I don't know what that means. What does it mean? Go as fast as you can?

I would just interpret it as don't.

Get hurt, but, yeah, I think that's. But she knew there was no way you can stop guys and girls from doing these things, so she let me do it. And, I mean, she never said, no, you're not doing it. Which is not the case with some drivers and Jackie Stewart being one. His mother never spoke to him because he raced behind her back. She told him you not to go racing. And he did. And then when he retired, he phoned her and said, I've retired. And she said, you're best off out of it. That was the end of that. She didn't actually ever say, well done on winning three worlds championships, as far as I know. She just was a bit. Still cross with him for.

Wow. So how did you make the transition from racing motorcycles to racing cars? And given the fact that you didn't have this long lineage of karting that most of your peers had, do you still think there's something about the motorcycle that gave you an advantage that they were missing?

No, I would have been much better off. I've done karting. I mean, that would be the right route to take. I had to unlearn stuff and then had to. I think particularly you learn stuff in karting about racing which I had not learned before, wheel racing and the tactics they employ. And I'm thinking clearly that someone like Michael Schumacher and people like Johnny Herbert, they were used to these guys putting their cart inside the inside and, you know, chopping you up and all that stuff. In bike racing, you don't. They don't do that. They do it a bit more now, but in my day, they didn't do that sort of thing because you'd go down. Both go down, you know, so it wasn't quite the same argy bargy in bike racing. It was more of a clean pass each time. But.

So why did you decide to make that transition?

Well, I enjoyed bike racing. I'd done okay, but I'd had a bit of a. Didn't really pick it up properly. And then I. Then I had to go back to the beginning and start racing club racing. And I thought, well, I still love doing it. So I was basically failing. I'd bitten off more than I could chew and I wasn't making any progress. So I had to decide whether I stopped or Whether I carried on, I thought, well, I'm going to do it because I enjoy it. So I literally bought a bike, ran it myself on my own budget and went to Brands Hatch and I started winning things. And about the same time that this.

Is happening, so this is about 1984.

I started winning these bike races. And then somebody about the same time had said, because they knew I'd race bikes, and I don't think my mum must have said, well, he's not doing very well and it's not really happening. And he said, well, you should get him to have a go in a car. So she says to me one day, a friend of mine said, you can have a go at his car. He runs a race school in France, it's called the Winfield School, and his name was Mike Knight and he'd offered you a go. And I said, well, I haven't got the money to do it and I'm not spending any of the money I spend on my bikes to do it. She said, don't worry, they'll. They'll, you know, let you have a go for nothing. So I thought, well, if someone's going to let me drive their car for nothing and I'm gonna go for a weekend in France for, just for a bit of laugh, then I'll do it. So I turned up absolutely no idea, no real interest or plan to do it. I just did it for the. For the crack, as the Irish say, and I did quite well.

What kind of car?

It was A Formula Renault 2000. Yeah, I think so, yeah. Yeah. And a school car. It's the same school that Praston Tambay and all the French driver Lafitte had been to. And one of the things they had, which was all sort of attractive to me, was fully paid. If you did well, if you won the school scholarship, you get sponsored to compete in France in a championship. And they'd pay for it. Renault Elf would pay for it. And I was absolutely rubbish. I'm not a commercial person. I was absolutely hopeless of getting sponsorships, so I was always short of cash. And so, although I want to talk.

About Sega later on, 10 years later.

Come back, we'll get there. So I literally. It was a pragmatic decision. I just thought, well, this is. It doesn't seem to be going anywhere. The car racing, the bike racing thing is struggling. But just at that time, I started winning everything on bikes. I started to. I found the knack. And just recently, a friend of mine gave me some DVD that someone had put together of some Sad person that stood by the side of the track at Brands Hatch and videotaped everything. In those days, it was a video camera and they put together a dvd and I was watching myself before I came out here, actually, of my bike racing. I'd never even seen it before. And I look quite good on a bike. And I was. And I won everything. I literally won everything I did that season. But it happened just at the time that the car racing thing was starting to take off. So I had to make a decision at the end. Okay, am I going to really, seriously be able to do this as a career bike racing or what am I going to.

What were the economics of motorcycle racing at that time?

I could do a season, you know, for a couple of grand on my bike.

What could you make? Could you support yourself?

No. Wouldn't win anything. No. I mean, if I went to national level, you could, you know, I think some of the races had £10,000 prize money or something, but it was that or Grand Prix racing. And the only real guy who made me money was Barry Sheen. You know, there was just very few people really earning a living. If you wanted to go and do the Isle of Man and risk your life and you could earn a bit more money, but. But it seemed to be a poor equation.

I'm just going to pause for a moment. For the listener in the show notes, we are absolutely at this moment going to link to the Isle of Man tt. If you have any interest in understanding what we're talking about, you must watch this. Or you can just go to YouTube and search Isle of Man TT as in time trial, and you're going to watch something that you will think is being played in fast forward. It is not. And Damon, I still don't know who has it more dangerous there, the spectator or the guy on the motorcycle. It is the craziest thing I've ever seen, yet I can't stop watching it.

Yeah, I think a lot of people feel that about it. I think they feel they have mixed emotions. I've been there to watch. I haven't been to the main event, but I've been to the classic TT and they have guys going just as fast and you have mixed emotions about it. You're watching these people, oh, no, please don't do that. You know, because it looks so dangerous. But it also is awesomely impressive. And I've been around the Isle of Man on a bike myself and I've gone, ooh, this is. This is kind of. There's a kind of spooky Thing drawing you on to go faster. It's very seductive.

Racetrack, was there any point in here, Damon, as you're wrestling with this, to be the motorcycle guy, to be the car guy? Was anything in the back of your mind coming through the lens of your father and wanting to either emulate him or go in an orthogonal direction to him? Was that at all part of your conscious mind, at least?

I think there's something fundamentally, genetically, there must be something in the genes to make you want to do this thing, which he must have had, because he talks about the first time he ever drove a racing car, and he knew immediately. He calls it a light bulb moment. You know, it was just. He knew immediately he wanted to do that. And that was the first time I got on a motorbike. I turned the twist grip, and it was like part of my brain just lit up. And my grandma rode a motorbike. My granddad never even drove a car. So my dad's dad never even drove a car. So where did he get it from? Well, he must have got it from his.

From his mom.

From his mom. And they now, with epigenetics and so forth, they can kind of show that patterns of experiences seem to be passed through the genes. So it's quite possible that something came through that side. But for whatever reason, I had instinctively got what it took, clearly, to drive a car or race a bike. But the motivation to do it, I think, was also to get to know my dad in the way. In the sense I was doing something he did. And then you have some way of relating to him, even though he wasn't there. But was he ever not there? Is he still here now? I mean, we started off talking about my dad. You know, you were evoking his image. You're evoking his character. He's not even. When I just went like that, just then, that sounded like my dad, that was really. You know, it's a. It's a very hard thing to differentiate yourself from your parents. And I don't necessarily believe that it's possible to be a completely an individual. I think consciously you can say, okay, this is what I want to do. I'm doing something different to the way my parents. I know they would disapprove of that, or that's not their thing, but I like it. So that's a differentiation. That's a genuine thing. But they're still there, aren't they? Influencing somehow, somewhere?

It's interesting that you say that. I still think this idea that driving to get to know him is kind of a. It's one thing to reflect on that. I just wonder if at the time you could have even consciously articulated that or if that's just part of this incredible journey of introspection that you've been on through your career, but especially afterwards.

Yeah, there were some parallels that have been drawn. I think I might have drawn them in the book, which is that when my dad was racing, he lost his teammate, Jim Clark, and then he went on to become world champion in 68. And so in some senses, you know, my experience with being teammates to it, and. And then you lose your teammate, and then the team is kind of looking for a new direction, and you kind of carry the banner. You pick up the banner and trying to get back to what we were there to do in the first place, which was win. I feel like I've been through similar experiences, but my dad was. You know, he had the extraordinary ability to cope with tragedy. He actually organized the race team when they were at Hockenheim with Jim Clark when he died. And the. The guys didn't really know what to do, and he got it all together and helped them. And I heard recently Emerson Fittipaldi talking about how he had an accident once, and my dad was there with Joe Ramirez organizing his extraction from the car. And my dad was a very practical and in that way, courageous person. I suppose in some ways I'm glad I didn't have to go through some of the things he went through. But to be an adult, you ultimately have to be able to cope with the experiences that adults deal with. You know, that's not always the nice stuff.

So how do you manage to get into the Williams car? I know I've heard the story before. It's pretty funny how I think Martin Brundle was probably ahead of you in line to at least get the test spot, right.

Yeah.

And then did he go and take the spot at McLaren or what?

There's two drivers, very similar names. Mark Blundell, who was the test driver.

Oh, Blundell. That's right.

That's right. And there's Martin Brundle, who was current, who was actually actively racing. But Mark was the test driver at Williams. Then he went to McLaren, so there was a slot available at Williams. And so I went to Williams.

And this is 92.

91, actually. So end of 90, I went, became the Williams test driver in 91. 92, I was still a test driver. Mark had moved on to McLaren and eventually became a McLaren driver. But when the end of 92 arrived and Nigel had left.

That's right. So Nigel won in 92 and then promptly retired to go to IndyCar.

But yeah, but not until very late in the day. So Frank had let Ricardo Patrese go because he thought that he'd keep Nigel and he'd already signed Adam Prost. And when Nigel found out that he'd signed Adam Prost, he said, I think he decided he was going to do IndyCar.

Was the implication that Nigel would be number two to Prost being one?

I don't think 93. I think he'd already been with Alain in Ferrari and I think he didn't want to be sharing a team with Alain. So it may have been that he'd got an attractive deal from India, I don't know. But then whichever way it happened, there was a space left at Williams that Frank had really kind of not managed to fill because everyone else had been signed up. So Ricardo wanted to come back from Benetton, but they wouldn't let him go. And so I was the guy there who knew how to drive.

So this is for the 93 season?

For the 93 season.

And you had spent much of the 92 season basically learning the ropes on this active suspension car. Let's pause for a moment for people who aren't steeped in Formula one to explain what a technical step forward the active suspension car of 93 was. Some people describe that car, the FW15, as the most advanced car in the history of Formula one for its time. Being the Senna fan that I am, I still favor the MP4.4 as the greatest car of all Formula 1. But the case could be made for the FW15. What does active suspension mean? How would you explain that to somebody?

Okay, so it's a ride height control. So why is ride height important? So it's the distance the car is held off the ground. Lower center gravity is a good thing. If you're very high off the ground, then you get a lot of roll moment on the suspension, which the drivers don't like. You can't change direction that quickly. But the main reason is aerodynamic. So they found just after they banned tunnels and ground effect cars, they went to flat bottom cars, which they thought would eradicate the dangers of having too much downforce on the car. But what the engineers did eventually was sure enough, they found a way of making the flat bottom of the car work to create more venturi effect suck onto the ground. And the closer you can get it and the more you can control the gap, the more effective it is. So active Suspension is a clear advantage over passive suspension for the very simple reason that when a car is loaded, it squashes the springs and it gets closer to the ground. So it means a lot of the time the car is not at the optimum ride height. It rides back up again on the springs when the car slows down. So you get this variance in ride height. If you can keep the car at the optimum fast or slow, then you've got a huge advantage. That's what active suspension was there to do. But it had a lot of other interesting side effects in that you can, then you can change the attitude of the car all the time. So you could even stall the diffuser on the straight so you could lower the back above a certain speed.

I just love it. I love hearing you talk about this.

So you could play with it a lot. We tried all sorts of things like making it roll into a corner so it would have stagger on it in which they use in Indy cars. So if the corner goes right, you'd make the left side of the car pop up a bit and the car would lean into the corner like a motorbike.

Yeah. It's just unbelievable. So do you remember in 92 when you were testing these features out in anticipation of the 93 season, not actually knowing that you would be the driver?

Yeah, I didn't know I'd be the driver. I knew that Nigel was making a good job of making it work and I knew that if I was in that car I would also be up the sharp end of grand prix racing. But it was never more than the, a pipe dream. You know, I honestly thought I was 32 by then, you know.

Yeah, let's, let's reflect on that for a moment today. A 32 year old rookie, that's an impossible concept.

They wouldn't get you and you wouldn't get in the car. I just don't think any team would put someone that age in this. I think a lot of people look at it from the point of view that what's his, what's his long term future like? You know, they're even looking at drivers now who are. I think it's the youngest average age of a grid in any year of Formula one at the moment. But they're looking at drivers who are 28 and thinking they're old now.

I mean, Sebastian is 32. It's hard to imagine Sebastian as a rookie now. I mean, he is 12 years into his Formula One career at the age and four times a world champion at the time. That you were entering your rookie season, and to your point earlier, not coming from a karting background, so you could.

Say I shouldn't have been there, Pete. You know, honestly, it was just pure. I was down and out in. When I was 29, we'd had Ollie, we were talking about my first child, and he got down syndrome. And I'd lost my drive in Formula 3, and I had to. Literally, I just bought a house. We had a mortgage. Interest rates had gone up to 17%. Can you imagine that?

I mean, it feels hard to believe.

Imagine Wall street now, 17% interest on a mortgage. And I just had my first child, and it turns out it's got down syndrome. So we're. Georgie and I are just working out. Well, what's that mean for the rest of our life? What are we? What's the response? And I still wanted to race cars. I mean, I was mad. You know, what. Why. What madness was this that made me press on because it turned out okay in the end.

There's a line here which it's a quote I'm sure I'm bastardizing. And it's basically like chance favors the prepared mind, the context of the quote. And I can't even remember if it was Einstein or Louis Pasteur, but there was a scientist who made this point. And the idea was, you look at scientific breakthroughs and you think it's an inspiration or a flash of genius. And the point is, no, it's not. It's a lot of hard work. It's toiling, it's failing. It's doing the experiment over and over again. It's failing, it's failing, it's failing. And if you pay enough attention, you're gonna see the right thing. Great scientists always talk about this idea that what separates the good ones from the great ones is the great ones are able to see the right thing at the right time. They're able to extract from the data that which others don't see. But that requires being there. That requires being in the trenches. And in many ways, I think that that's what that 92 year was. You put your head down, you were in the trenches, you showed up every day, you test drove that car. You basically helped Patrick and Adrian make what would like, I said, probably be the greatest, technologically most advanced F1 car ever. And you sort of did it without an agenda of, well, I'm doing this because it's going to get me here. I mean, that. That's sort of my reading of it as a distance, which was. It was just being in the moment and putting your head down and doing this amazing job. And so when the situation arose with NIGEL Going to IndyCar, I mean, I think Williams was incredibly lucky that you were there.

Well, I'd like to think they felt that. You know, I think that I did do a lot of hard work, but I didn't design the car. I worked with the engineers. I worked with Paddy Lowe, who was the computer guy who worked on. On the suspension. And we did play with lots of stuff that we eventually used and. And I helped kind of shape it a little bit, traction control and stuff like that. And, you know.

But they have to get feedback from a driver that'.

Yeah, but that's the point. Actually, it was starting to get to the point where they don't need as much feedback as they used to because they can see it on the computer. So they actually were going, okay, we know what the gear change is doing. We're in control of that. We know we can give you a throttle that can do this. And if you've got electric potentiometer on the throttle instead of a cable, we can make it do this. And they can see all things. What they can't do is put their bum in the seat and go, that's a scary feeling. Or it's not scary in the car, the driver can't override the negative things that we're giving to him. You know, the driver still played a part in that, in that sense. But what I did do was I think I was a known quantity, and I think I worked well with the guys, with the engineers, and they had Alan Prost, so it's not like they didn't have anyone. They had someone in the bank, but they took a huge risk putting a guy. And he's never done a couple of races with Brabham, but they had never run at the front in Formula one. And they clearly thought, well, he doesn't have to run at the front. We got Alan Prosthill just needs to back him up.

Were you intimidated by Prost? He strikes me as sort of a pleasant guy.

I mean, no, he would never, not to any of my knowledge that I've ever been, felt like Alan would do anything underhand. You know, I think he was a very decent chap, and I think he was clearly very fast, and I could learn a lot from him, so. And I thought if I could beat him, then it's very much to my credit. And sometimes I did.

What did you learn from him technically, in terms of, like, technical driving ability? And what did you learn from him at the meta level in terms of.

Philosophy, he is a very quiet guy and it was quite interesting. The things that I remember were him speaking to his wife on the phone before a race and he'd make a little phone call and he's clearly a very affectionate person and he was quite happy for me to see that he didn't do that in private. And when I spoke to him about the car or something like that, he, I mean I never, I would never have gone up to him and gone, alan, how do you do this or how do you do that? You learn by watching the results of what he's been doing. I speak to the engineers that are running his car and they, they say the amazing thing about Alan Prost is, you know, he doesn't use any brakes. You know, he's very, very light on the brakes, but he's incredibly quick.

Right? Very light on the brakes and very little hand movement. Right?

Yeah.

Was never fighting the car, no minimal movements.

So obviously micro movements. So he's very clearly ahead of the car and able to anticipate it. And what he didn't do was throw loads of things at the car. He just fine tuned it and he fine tuned himself. I think he knew he was quick and I think he, he knew how to make a car go quick and he knew how to race. And when you look at some of those very early races, the Kyle army race with him and Senna, Senna was brutal with him and you know, Alan was equally tough back in that active car. He wasn't intimidated either. He was a hell of a fighter, but he'd never show you that. He wouldn't out of the car. You'd never know that the guy was such a formidable competitor.

What do you remember about Donnington in 93?

Well, what do I remember of that? I remember my brain was fried because I was seeing why every time I put a set of tires on does it do the opposite of what I wanted to do. And at the same time Senna would just stick on his tires for a bit longer and oh God, that was just so embarrassing. I, we, we lost count completely of how many pit stops we'd done. I mean, I, I have no idea what was going on. It was. And half the way through the race you just go, this has gone so horribly wrong. It's a farce. But you suddenly find out you're second, you're running second and you go, how the hell did I get there? I stopped six times, you know, so for a guy in his first full season with the top team, it was a bit of an eye opener. But I look back at that race and I just think, why did I let Ayrton through so easily?

Yeah. Because on the first lap, again, it's of the stuff of legends, right? How he drove in the rain and that he could pass you and Prost on that first lap in an inferior car.

He had a lot more experience than me.

Yeah. Yeah. And truthfully, I just think there was nobody on the grid that was as comfortable in the rain. Although he was clear to say he didn't like the rain. You know, I remember in an interview once where someone made this point, which is, you know, Ayrton, you're so great in the rain. And he's like, I don't like this. I just practiced in it, you know? But there's a funny picture of the three of you on the podium. The two of you guys in your blue fire suits sort of like, couldn't believe, you know?

But it was. It was particularly hard for Alain, I think, because it was a humiliating experience. You know, he. I think, oh, God, it all went horribly wrong for Alan in that race. And I remember the press conference as well. Ayrton kind of.

He sort of made the point.

He was just brutal.

Yeah.

And it was. It was a tough one for Alan because, yeah, Ayrton could be very, very harsh and humiliated. Alain, after that race, it was not one of our finest weekends as a team or for Alain, but it was a great. They talk about it as Ayrton's greatest race.

You were third that season, correct?

I was third that season. I was second to Alain.

I think you were second. Okay.

Yeah.

Which is amazing. Right. You know what?

You better check that, because. I don't know. I honestly don't. I don't know. But where did I finish? No.

Third.

I think maybe I was third. You're right.

Yeah, I think you were third. Yeah. So at the end of the 93 season, was there any doubt that Prost was gonna retire? Was there a chance he was gonna stick around till 94, or was he very clear that it was one and done?

I'm sure it was clear that with Frank, that he knew he was only there for one year to get one more World Championship.

Okay, so he's one and done, and then all of a sudden, Senna gets what he's wanted for several years now, which is he has wanted to come to Williams, certainly in 92 and 93. Of course, people know the backstory. Proust had an anti Santa Clause. You don't get to have us both. But there's interviews where Williams talks about how he wanted Senna in the 80s. He wanted Senna in 84. 85.

Yeah. But Frank, he gave him his first Formula One test. I don't know why he didn't sign him then.

Yeah, I feel like I need to go back and sort of watch some of those old interviews because he sent his first team was horrible. And then he spent three years with Lotus before he went to McLaren. So you must have been pretty excited, right? I mean you're thinking to yourself, my first season in Formula one, I'm third overall. I've just been partnered with one world champion and I now I get another. Yeah.

And before that was Nigel as well. That's right, yeah, completely. I was completely spoiled from that point of view. I mean, I had a chance to see close up how these guys worked, which is something money can't buy. I mean it was, it was just great for me and I, you know, I really like the idea of having.

So where were you in. So going into the 94 season, is Josh your second or third?

Second child.

Second child. Was Josh born yet?

Josh was born in 92. Yeah, 91.

Okay, so Oliver, Josh.

Yeah.

But Tabitha. Not yet.

Not yet.

Okay, so you have two little boys. The interest rate hopefully has been refinanced at this point. The 17%.

I think when I got the test drive I was able to cope with the interest a little bit. And then I got signed up and I was actually a full time driver in 93. I think I didn't have to sweat quite so much, but it wasn't.

So when the Active gets undone for 94, when you're in preseason testing for 94, you are probably the only person in the world that can appreciate the difference between the FW15 and the 16. What are your first thoughts on that transition?

I thought it was going to be different, but it was very. I found the car quite hard to drive, get a time out of and be consistent.

What was the clearance on that car? The ground clearance?

Oh, wait.

I mean, incredibly low.

On the active car it was not as low as the. Sorry. On the passive car it wasn't as low as the active car. It's much higher. They had to make it quite high up. So, so. But they were generating a lot of downforce and I think they, they had, I think it could have been more difficult for them to get used again to controlling the, the downforce without the Active. So it's a little bit of relearning. Stuff they'd forgotten, I think.

Now, were you at all worried? Did you feel that the car in any way was unsafe as you embarked on the first race that year?

No, I didn't never felt it was unsafe. I thought it was hard to drive and, you know, but I thought that's just because I'm Damon Hill and that's it. And Senna. So I couldn't quite match his lap times. You know, I just thought, this is a. For me, it was new, a new comparison, a new benchmark. So I drove that car knowing that there was, you know, we had work to do on setup because it wasn't quite as good as it wasn't in the optimal range that you wanted it to be in. And so I think everyone at Williams and Ayrton was. Were trying to work out how he got there. But then we were also distracted by, I think a little bit by the performance of the Benetton, which had suddenly come up on the. On the rails and was winning races and being.

So it was the first race that year, was it Australia?

Brazil.

Brazil was second, I thought.

Second. We had this race in Aida, didn't we, which was in Japan as well.

You're right, it was Brazil. Asia was second.

Yeah. Okay.

So Senna's on pole, loses control of the car, doesn't finish.

Yeah.

Second race, Senna's on pole, loses control of the car, doesn't finish well.

He got knocked off, didn't he?

Oh, that's right.

Yeah. And. And then. So he's had non finishes.

He's had two non finishes. You're second.

I'm second, but a long way behind Michael.

And Michael's won both. Yeah.

Yep.

So you're heading into Imola and you're on your heels. The team is on its heels.

Yeah. A lot of disquiet, I think. I mean, I think Ayrton was having doubts about, you know, he was quite surprised at the way the team worked and the performance of the car. He was a bit baffled by that. And then there was. He was worried that maybe Benetton were doing something with their traction control they shouldn't have been doing and stuff. So there was. It was definitely off balance situation, but I was not the lead man in that situation.

Did you, did you share Senna's belief? Because he had talked about how after he got knocked out of the Pacific Grand Prix, he was listening to. He could hear Schumacher going by and he could. He claimed he could hear the traction control.

Yeah.

Did you share that view that there was something in that car, either software or hardware wise, I never heard that.

That myself and I. All I had to go on was that Ayrton believed that there was something fishy going on, but it was not something that I could control and not something I had any influence over. So I, you know, pretty much stuck to back, got back to work and on the car we had, which was in testing, you, you do what you could to try and get a balance on it and feel comfortable with it.

Confident in the same way that you probably remember exquisite detail about the circumstances in the days around your father's tragedy. Do you have that same sort of recollection of Imola aspects of it?

Yeah, but I think it was different because I was also racing myself and I was.

You had to focus on what you had to do.

Yeah. I think you don't feel shocked when you're racing. I think you have the protective wall around you a little bit. I think you managed to remove yourself from over feeling things. Obviously, when you're sitting at home watching tv, you're pretty. You're unprepared for something, so. But when you go to racetrack, you're kind of more prepared.

You're heightened.

Yeah. And also you'll, you know, something happens. You kind of know how to just pour cold water on it and, and not let it affect you too much.

So. Were you shaken at all by the crash on the Friday?

Yeah, I was surprised at that. But you just thought it looked horrific. But he got out okay. It was concussed. And you just thought, well, that hurt, you know, that was.

Were you of the view that the car is still safe enough that, you know, the crash is the crash, but you're protected in the car? Was that kind of your view?

Yeah, I think so. I thought. I think I believed in carbon fiber and you know that it was incredibly strong. It's gonna hurt you like hell if you have a big shunt, but you should be okay. Yeah, I think we. We did think that the worst was over a little bit. You know what? Certainly wasn't anything like it was with aluminum cars that rupture the fuel tank or something like that. So you.

So what did you think on Saturday when Roland died?

It was horrible. You know, it was. It's a horrible thing. I drove because they stopped the session, but I still was on the circuit. So I drove past and saw them attending to him.

And was your first assumption another horrible shunt. But he's probably okay or. Did you know this?

No, I didn't. I knew that that was not a Good one. There was something about it. I don't know what. It just. I just looked like there was a much more sick. You knew, you know, also the. The location. It's not going to be a small impact, a place like that. It's going to be pretty high speed and. I don't know, it's just something about it. And then the fact they stop the session and more time goes by, then eventually you start to fear the worst.

And it's so eerie to see. I think I was telling you I was in Imola this year and spent the entire day there and went to obviously where Senna crashed and went to where Ratzenberger crashed. I mean, we saw all the crash sites and it looks like the margin for error is so much smaller than it appears on television. And Roland's crash, you don't really see well on television. When you got back to the pit, did you go back out to qualify again or was the session completely ended?

Do you know? I don't know. Don't think we didn't run the car after that. No. On the Friday we pulled.

On Saturday.

On Saturday, no, we didn't. I don't think we.

Because Ayrton was. He was really shaken by this. I mean, he seemed to be.

He was. He seemed almost angry, actually. Yeah, I think he was derailed a little bit by or upset by Rubens accident. I think he was in a very high emotional state. I think he'd had a lot on his plate and I think I talk about that in the book. I think people have wondered about his condition. And I know that he'd spoken to my wife because she was in the motorhome and he was speaking to her about having a family. And he said, what's it like having a family, you know, and. And because she said, you want me to. To leave while you get changed? And he said, no, you. I just want to, you know, talk. And that was on race day. So I think he internalized a lot. I think he took a lot upon himself. I think he felt enormous responsibility for people in Brazil and the projects he had to do with helping young people. And I think he really felt that he had a job to do, which he couldn't. Somehow racing enabled him to do. Through his racing, he was able to be at and Senna then he could do these great works that he had.

Did you know he took an Austrian flag in the car that day?

No, I didn't know that on the day. No, I only read about that later. Yeah.

I have always believed that Senna's crash occurred because of a technical problem in the car. I always thought the steering column broke. It's really your book that has probably changed my view on that. I think the way you describe the accident, coupled with your experience in that car, that has probably not. Probably it has, it has changed my mind. And it, and it's also made me come to accept something that I think had always been a blind spot to me. You see, when you idolize somebody, it's very hard to believe that they can make a technical error. You just can't believe it. Right. So I think if you idolize Senna, you can't really believe that he lost control of the car. It's easier to believe that the steering column broke. And there are lots of good, you know, I mean, we, we create narratives. That's sort of what we do. And you could go through all of the stories about how that cockpit was built and how the steering wheel was in the wrong position, but they had to add an extra couple of inches to send a steering wheel. And of course, that if you look at the shear forces on that, that's going to be the thing. And you can watch the onboard camera. And yet in a very unemotional way, you sort of dismantle a lot of that logic.

You're right. I mean, I went through it in quite a lot of detail. Well, that's because I had to after the event to go back through stuff with the engineers to see if I could shed any light on what had happened. The data I was able to see showed me what concurred with the onboard footage was that he was putting opposite lock on the car and controlling the car. And my argument has always been that if the steering wheel column broke, you'd put more lock on to make it work. And I mean, if you imagine you're.

So let's explain this to people because I think for people who don't drive a race car, they won't know the difference between lock, opposite, lock, understeer, oversteer, et cetera. I mean, again, I think you do a masterful job explaining this. But let's go back to set the stage a little bit. Tamarello is a sweeping left hand. It's a very fast left hand corner that is taken basically flat out, assuming your tires are up to snuff. Now, you also mentioned something really interesting, which was the line that he took. You were surprised at the line he took on the first flying lap after the safety car left.

There was about a couple of bumps and a couple of Indents like it subsided. The road had slightly subsided close to the curb on the inside line, which is the racing line. But I didn't like going in that line because I, it upset the car for me. It upset the car. So I stayed wide a bit and it was, it seemed to miss the bumps. But yeah, the reason I did that because I didn't want to go where he went, you know, not, not because of what he, you know, what happened to him, but because for me it was in a harder ride. But I'm not Ayton Senna. And he was at and center and he drove the car. He wrung everything out of every car he raced, you know, and I think.

That you mentioned that the only real flying lap he had, which would have been what lap six. He had the third fastest time of the day and that's with 65 kilos of fuel and cold tires.

Yeah, they were cold, not as pumped up as they should have been because they had to go around the safety car. Was it called the safety car then? I can't remember. Anyway, so it wasn't a quick super slow safety car. The super slow safety car are. So there are. I, my argument is that there are really what I say and what I believe is that I don't believe the steering column broke for two reasons. One is if the steering column broke then your instinct is to keep steering and that means your hands would have.

He would have just right. So that's so for the listener, what that means is you're describing that as lock. So if your steering column breaks and you're doing a left handed turn, you're going to be turning left as far as is humanly possible.

Yeah, because you, your brain will not not it's disconnected. So you're, you know, you're a passenger so you just instinctively put more on. And even if it's, even if you don't put it on you, if the steering column broke, that broke, then there'd be suddenly less resistance to the lock that he's putting on and his hands would put more lock on because it's suddenly released.

But instead you saw the opposite. So explain what opposite lock is and how it's used to correct for a rear, rear loss of traction.

So it's the attitude of the car changes in relation direction of travel. So the nose of the car, when it's oversteering the nose of the car is pointing more to the inside of the corner than, or let's say the, the back of the car or the middle of the car is is actually at an angle to the line of travel.

So what happens is it's safe. If I describe that to people as when you're oversteering, the rear of the car is turning faster than the front of the car into the direction you want to go.

It's more like a compass. Imagine a compass. Right. Compass spins from the middle. So. So if you want it to point dead north, that's good. If it starts to point slightly west of where you want it to go, which is north, then in order to get the whole thing to keep going north, you have to turn the wheel to the right. So the direction of the point of the car is to the left. You put the steering lock on slightly to the right, and that means the back of the car would act more like a dart. You know, it'll actually start to straighten up, up. And as the car straightens up, you put lock back on, so you point north. Understeer is where we're going. Well, we won't go into understeer, but anyway.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I think initially he was under steering because he reduced throttle.

Yeah, I. I don't think it was ever under steering. I think it was. He only ever got oversteered because he. He was turning into the corner. So he's putting lock on to make the car go around.

Oh, so you don't think he ever understeered. You think this was immediate loss of rear traction?

I think it was a change in attitude because you can see from Schumacher's onboard camera that the car bottoms, and when the car hit the bumps, the car lost downforce and starts to slew slightly to the back of the car, comes out to the right. So he puts a little bit of right lock on to compensate, and then he puts more back lock. When that settled down, he put lock back on to go left again.

So the first one, he recovered.

Yeah, well, recovered. He just did what, you know, he expected it to do. The next one, it was even greater, and you get more of an opposite lock on, and it suddenly snaps to the. To the right. And I just think at the speed he was going, the loads he was going through, I think it's entirely plausible that tank slapper. Don't. You know, we call it tank slapper in bike racing. It was just a massive sideways, and with low tire pressures, you would have got a lot of lateral movement, movement on the tire, and then it springs back. And at that speed, it can throw you off the track. I mean, I don't see that, you know, not detracting anything. I think he was so motivated to win this race that I think he was putting himself right out there at the, you know, the end of the branch. And maybe even a guy like Ayrton couldn't drive that car beyond a certain point without something giving somewhere.

And I think the way you describe it and you go into more detail in the book, we won't have to. We don't have to go through it here now, because I want people to read this book. It's so great. But the way you talk about even being able to see, like, one of the radio lights or something on the wheel, the yellow light, and it. So you actually have this frame of reference to actually see when he goes from Locke to opposite Locke. And I think there was just something about reading your account that. That, along with. With reading Adrian Newey's account several years ago, that really sort of changed my view a bit and made me realize, like, even your heroes can make mistakes and can lose control of the car.

I mean, Ayrton lost control of the car in Brazil, and we push the cars to their limits and ourselves to our limits. And I. My argument really, in the book is that if you put someone under, even someone as brilliant as Ayrton, under a lot of stress, with lots of different doubts, lots of different questions, lots of different problems, and then you put them in a very competitive situation and you expect them to perform with a clear head in the same way that they have done in the past. I think something's got to give somewhere. You know, you add in the fatality the previous day, the emotional state, the guy, the determination to win, the fact that he's in a different team, it's not going the way he wanted it to in the championship. If you say, if you put someone like Ayrton in that situation, is he going to back down? No, he's not going to back down. He's going to be Ayrton Senna. He's going to go and go further beyond where he's ever been before, because that's what Ayrton Senna was. He's not going to go, okay, I'll. I'll feather the throttle through Tamborello. He wouldn't be at center.

So you write about something which is that in the days that followed, the last thing that was on your mind was to go to go to Brazil for this funeral. Not out of any lack of respect for Senna, but probably out of the need to be with your family, frankly.

And also, I didn't want to go to. I know. I'm like, it's not, it's also.

Yeah, it's, it's re. It's bringing back memories that the last time you were at a funeral was, you know, obviously a very traumatic experience for you. But Jackie Stewart nudged you to go.

Yep. Jackie rang me and said, are you going to Etten's funeral? I said, oh, I don't know, Jackie, I can't, you know. And he said, you will regret it for your, you know, to your dying day if you don't go. He basically didn't set me straight, but he made a very important point to me, which is that you, you have to do this in a way you want to be a racing driver. You can't, you can't just sidestep the nasty bits.

He's about the most capable person to say that. There's no one that could say that to you with more credibility. That was still alive at that point.

And you know, in the absence of my, my dad being around, he was a kind of surrogate father figure to me, giving me the right advice and impressing on me the importance of being there. And he was absolutely right. So eternal gratitude to Jackie for that. Not something you want to do, you know, you don't want to get on an airplane and go to Brazil and go to some to be confronted with the box they put someone in when they're alive anymore, you know, it's, it's horrible. But when, you know, Ayton's funeral was the most extraordinary event. You saw how he affected people and that's what he'd lived with, that's what he'd been carrying that nobody in F1 really saw. They didn't really see him in that. They thought he was a racing driver. He's a bit, bit nuts at times, you know, and a bit over emotional or maybe that's what they saw, but they didn't see.

They didn't see the weight of a.

Nation, they didn't see the weight of the nation. They didn't see what he represented and he, and the hope he had given.

People in Brazil, it's really amazing to this day, I mean, I talk about this elsewhere. I can't meet someone from Brazil who, if, when I start talking to them about Senna, even if they weren't alive, right. Like, or even if they were five years old. Our nanny for example, is Brazilian and she was 4, maybe 5 the day he died. It's her earliest memory of life because that's every Sunday. That's all you did was you watched Senna Race, and the country stopped for three days, and more than a million people lined the streets for this funeral. And to this day, I mean, it's like if I'm in an Uber and the driver happens to be from Brazil and we get talking about Senna, it doesn't matter if they're 20 or if they're 60. This is the single most important person they'll talk about.

Yeah, they're emotionally, you know, very strong nation. They. They're so passionate about everything. And they loved what Ayrton had done and given them. They'd been through some tough times, and football is also one of the things that lifts the nation. But Ayrton had taken them to another place as well and was proud to be Brazilian. And it was a very, very cruel blow to all those people in Brazil. You know, they couldn't really understand what had happened. I don't think for a long time. It was too shocking.

My daughter wanted me to ask you this question when she knew I would be speaking with you, which was. First of all, she was like, oh, my God, he's on tv. When I told her I was even talking to you, because, of course, every Sunday we get up to watch Formula One. So she gets. She. She knows you as the guy on tv. She's less. I had to remind her of, like, all you'd done. But her question is, were you afraid to get back in the car for the next race? Well, because now you've got two weeks for the dust to settle.

Yeah.

You fully processed that two drivers have now been killed in the span of two days. Another one lucky to be alive. So you could have easily lost three drivers in three days.

Well, I'll put it like this. The enjoyment of driving had evaporated from that point on. It was a task I had to do.

For how long did that feeling persist?

I think for a good. Maybe a couple more races or something. Certainly, Monaco was a tough one. I wasn't sure whether I could cope with carrying all the hopes of the entire team. You know, I was not Ayton Zenna. It was abundantly clear. You know, I was okay, but I wasn't gonna be able to do the things that they wanted from Senna. So that was a wobbly one.

How much fear did you have of physical harm versus the pressure you're describing of. Wait a minute. Like, two years ago, I was a test driver, and now I'm the potentially the guy who's carrying the hopes of one of the most storied teams in Formula One, because those are Two sort of different things. I mean, they can overlap a little bit, but one of them comes back to this real visceral concern of, I can't let happen to my family what happened to me.

Yeah, I think I did have the brakes on being pushed into taking unnecessary risks. So you might say, okay, well, you're not a proper racing driver. Of you. That's what Aidan would say, you know, if you. If you stop taking risks and you're not a proper racing driver.

Well, listen, did Georgie talk with you about this at all?

Well, I mean, when you say talk.

I mean, was your wife in this moment of. At this point, it's back to being gladiators, right?

I don't think so, because, I mean, if you Gladiator, I don't know what it's like being gladiator. I think basically you're trying to hurt someone else, and I'm not that sort of person.

But in terms of the risk, I.

Guess, yeah, you're showing your skills and you're also competing. I think that's the key thing, is to actually, you want to be the first guy, you don't want to be the second guy. So getting out there and. And racing is partly what you love doing. But then when you've just had an experience like that, it. It sort of sours it a bit. And I think there was just too much pressure on everyone.

Did you talk with Jackie about this more? Because, again, in the absence of your father, who would have been the perfect person to have talk this through with you, did you feel like, I want to understand from someone who's lived through this, losing teammates, for example, this was all tight upper lip.

I have to say I was affected with the thought that because Etten's accident was incredibly public, you know, and shocking and so forth. So definitely my wife did not want her children to see anything like that happen to me. So protecting the kids from any potential shocking incident was also part of our lives then, I think after that, and was, I think, increasingly part of my modus of going racing. My dad raced with three children. A lot of racing drivers in those days had kids, including Jackie. Enzo Ferrari used to say that a driver with children was a second lap slower. Well, there was a lot of world champions with children. And I think that some, in some senses, the goal is to survive. So if the goal is to survive, then you're doing the responsible thing by performing to the very highest level you possibly can without going over that, that, that threshold. And, you know, Ayrton didn't have children. You know, I think it's very easy to. To think of as racing drivers could get to the position where they think, well, if I get hurt, then that's my own stupid form, you know. But when you've got a family, you think, well, if I get hurt, someone else is going to get hurt as well. That's a slightly different thought.

And the last point I want to say about the. That weekend is something else you wrote about in the book, which again, I think just speaks to the. The beautiful level of detail you bring to these. All of these little stories that just don't get told was when you show up for Monaco in the Williams truck and sure enough, there's Senna's clothing.

Well, it wasn't. I mean, it wasn't expected.

Yeah, it's one of those things where you talk about it, like. And it's so obvious when you talk about it, which is every day a driver goes, takes off his street clothes, puts on his racing kit, gets in a car, but invariably, sometimes that driver doesn't come back.

Yeah, that was something that. A detail, which is a really hard thing to consider, but of course gets lost in the sensational stories is that, you know, that happened a lot with people in my dad's era and they. Someone would have to go and clear out their room. They'd have to go back to their room, get all their stuff, pack it up and take it and make sure it got back to their family or their loved ones. Imagine that.

Yeah. Imagine how many times that took place.

They're very poignant experiences. And also, even just to think about that, you know, we. We have all this stuff around us, you know, and we're suddenly not there. The stuff, somehow we linger in, the stuff we have and we leave other people with that responsibility to deal with it.

Do you remember any of that from your father?

Well, yeah, absolutely.

I mean, like, do you remember actively helping your mom with. I've never actually thought of it until I read you writing about it. Right. Which is this idea of like, well, there's still a drawer full of socks and shirts and pants.

Yeah.

You know, so what does one do with these?

Well, you know, and of course then you have to decide whether you're gonna throw it away. So for a long time, I think my mum. My mum kept a lot of my dad's ties for me. These were ties that were about 10 centimeters across. They were 1970s ties, like bright colors. But they were my dad's toys. So, you know, he kept them quite sweetly. She kept them because she Thought maybe I'd like them not as. Not to wear myself, perhaps, but, you know, as mementos and things. But what, what, what do you do with. Sooner later, you have to let go of this stuff. I mean, so you look at, you just think, well, I could wear it, but it's a bit odd wearing your dad's clothes. You're still attached to it because of. It brings you close. It's a relic. But can you let go of it? Can you kind of go, okay, we're gonna throw this stuff away, put it on ebay. I mean, there are all sorts of fans out there. They love all that stuff, wouldn't they? But is it disrespectful? You go through all those thoughts, you go through that. You just go through all these little questions and you can't find the answers to them. You know, what is the right way forward?

The other thing that's sort of interesting about this story, at least to me thinking about it through these lenses, is I don't get the sense from the book, and you're never explicit about this, but I don't get the sense that Frank or Patrick sat down to have long discussions about this either. Am I correct in assuming that, or were there times when they wanted to know how you were doing and they wanted to talk about your head outside of the car?

No, but then they had their own stuff to deal with as well. So it's not all about me. They also are going through. Imagine what it's like for Frank. He signed Ayrton to go to race 15. Imagine what it's like for Patrick. Patrick is his car, and people are saying it's failed. He's having to go to.

Yeah, what does Adrian. I mean, how do these guys all feel?

You know, it's the. Everyone had a lot of stress to deal with. The engineers, the guy works in the car. Not an easy time for. For any of them, you know, so that's one of the contradictions with us Bought is, you know, we focus a lot on the driver. In some ways, the public see the driver as the. The public facing person, the person of most interest, you know, but it's not all about the driver as well. You work with these. Rely on the team. You work with the team. They went through a lot. They were really battered after that experience. And some of them still today don't want to talk about it.

As you head into the second half of the 94 season, all of a sudden the gap between you and Schumacher is narrowing. And as you head into Suzuka I think you're separated by a point.

Right. What was the situation? I had to. He.

Yeah, well, if he finished ahead of you, he would win.

Yes, exactly. Yeah.

But then he crashed trying to cut you off.

That was in Adelaide.

That was in Adelaide.

So in Suzuka.

Oh, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Sorry I missed. Suzuka was the second to last race.

Yes, it was.

Which you won.

I had to beat him to keep the championship open.

And you did. Yes. Okay, so Suzuka is the race that you.

It came down to match play, basically.

Yes.

It was hole by hole.

And that you, you wrote something very interesting about this, which was you have this moment where you feel like you can't do anymore. And you. In the book you actually describe this as you call out to, to Ayrton and you say, like, if you're up there watching me, like, I need your help right now. And then you describe the next lap as an out of body experience. And I'm reading that and what you're describing sounds exactly like the way Senna described his 88 qualifying session in Monaco, which was he wasn't driving the car like he was part of the car. The car was being driven. And I don't know if that was just a coincidence that. Because you didn't reference anything about Monaco, but it was just interesting that you talked about having this thought of calling out to him for help as your former teammate and then driving. I think the word you used is you were possessed.

Yeah, that's the only way I can describe it. I mean, it was. I'm sure that there's a perfectly logical explanation or one that can be described.

Or explained scientific terms.

Yeah, biologically. You know, I think that we, we all know that every now and then we do something. We hear people say things like, I don't know how I managed to lift the car up or something like that to get off some kid or something. You know, we. We have more potential than we are aware of. And sometimes it. To release that potential we have to play tricks with our mind and we have to say, imagine that pain isn't there. And you know, I've had stories of people who've, you know, got. Got dreadful pain, but they can manage to cope with it by so meditating. Meditating and, and all these things to do with fully exploring what the mind is capable of doing have got lots of very strange stories attached to it. And I think people are right to be skeptical of them and question them. But if I had tricked myself into. Not deliberately, but just simply. I wanted to win that race. I knew I had to win that race. And I also wanted us to win for Ayrton as well. There was an element of wanting to beat the Benetton team because of this story, this. Not story, but it's this experience we'd had in 94. So I was massively motivated to win that race. And I'd run out of steam. I couldn't go any faster. And he's catching me. And I knew he was going to get me on the line. And I just. I just thought, okay, I need some help from somewhere. And so I just said in my mind, it was a kind of like, nivia there. I need. I can need a bit of a hand. And I swear to God, it was like someone had got my foot and planted it flat on the floor.

And I found an exercise, and I.

Couldn'T lift it off. I couldn't lift off. I'm going through the essays. I'm going, oh, my God, my hands are like, my hands just correcting the car. And I literally was disconnected from what my body was doing. And it was just like I was willing it to win, you know, willing it just purely through thought, through some sort of telepathic kind of way. I was controlling things. And eventually I got halfway around, I just said, oh, no, I gotta. I'm sorry, I'm gonna have to come back here. This is all gonna go horribly wrong. And I sort of. I can remember literally feeling like I was coming back into the car and in at the hairpin and going, right, I'll take it from here. You know, I'm sure you can finish this off. And now people listening to this will go, you're nuts. You're making this up. You know, but that's what happened. And I can't explain it in any other way than I just did. It's. It was. You know, and I beat Michael in the wet. So let's be honest, little old me beating Michael Schumacher. Someone must have helped me.

Well, it's funny, I'll pause for a moment only to say something for the person who's listening to this, who isn't a die hard F1 fan. Many a pundit has actually, with the benefit of the retrospectoscope, said you're arguably one of the most underrated world champs ever. I mean, you're incredibly modest. You're so uncomfortable sometimes. Do you remember when they did the this is your Life special? About 20 years ago? I found a clip of this on YouTube. Have you ever watched it?

No, I don't even know what you're talking about.

You know that TV show this Is Life? Yeah, I remember.

This is Life. Yeah, they got me on that one. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

You have to go back and watch this because I'll tell you what I can't get over on that show is how uncomfortable you are being commended. Think about it. The whole show is singing the praise of the person who's, this is your life. They're bringing all these people out, everybody's talking about you, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

You're making me feel uncomfortable even now just talking about it.

But the level of discomfort in watching you be praised by people is. It's palpable to watch. Now, maybe I'm just a bit more tuned into that now because I read everything you've written, but that was my reading of that. Now, I could be wrong. I'd be curious to know what your wife or someone who knows you well would think or what your children would think if they saw that. Is that just Dad's countenance or is that actually dad being uncomfortable being praised in this way?

I am uncomfortable being praised. I mean, there were times when I was in therapy, which I talk about in the book, where my therapist is going, well, I think you did really well. And I be going, oh, no, don't say that. I want. I want you to criticize me. I want to know, you know, how I can be better and what I've done wrong. Now I'm much better with that. I mean, I honestly, if someone says that was a great shot, even if it's rubbish, I go, okay, well, that was. That's very nice of you to say. So. I really appreciate it and. But I don't know. Yeah, it was. It does make me feel really queasy about. Yeah. Getting compliments. I don't know why. I'm sure that's an awful failing in a human being.

I don't know. I don't know if that's true, actually.

What I do think is, I think we celebrate far too much people's achievements, that perhaps they don't warrant so much celebration as we give them. I mean, what does it mean? You know, racing driver, they want to. You know, everyone wants to race and they want to win. They don't want to win for everyone else. They want to win for themselves. So it's a kind of selfish activity. Yeah. Every now and then you want to win for someone else and you. Yeah, it's nice to do that. But is it so praiseworthy?

I don't know, I mean, I think it depends, right? I think it depends on. I mean, I understand your point, of course. Right. You know, compared to a missionary doctor or someone who's, you know, out there saving a life or something like that, maybe not. But it's still a metaphor for life, right? It's still the substrate by which we can take lessons and expand, and it still pushes the boundaries of what it is that we're capable of. And I think there's something about that, that Senna is the most extreme example of that that we've probably ever seen in all of sport, where one individual's passion and pursuit is. First of all, it's a tool by which he was able to help millions of people in his own country directly and financially. But I think more importantly, it's sort of a hope that people cling to. And in the words of David Foster Wallace, we all worship something. There's no such thing as atheism. So we're all in the pursuit and worship of something.

I think also there's something, maybe it just occurred to me, but I think also that I've learned to appreciate that opportunity doesn't come to everyone on. And some people look at somebody who's got. Had an opportunity and they've done something with it and they've done the right thing with it and they've gone, oh, thank God you did that. I didn't get the opportunity to do that, but I'm glad you did, because that's what I would like to done. And so when you get praised, if you get praised for something, it's not you they're praising. It's celebrating the fact that somebody has had an opportunity and they've triumphed over something. And you're right, that's what gives us all hope that, you know, maybe if we got the opportunity, we do the same or it's a generosity. When you're celebrated celebrity, I think you people say congratulations because it's that we're. We're celebrating something for all of us. I think that's something which I perhaps never really properly understood. I felt, you know, a bit like a kid getting too many Christmas presents or something. I don't know.

Well, you almost got the Christmas present in 94, because as we head into Adelaide, of course now you're down by a point. If Schumacher finishes ahead of you, he wins the championship. If you finish ahead of him, you win the championship and he crashes. And all you'd have to do at this point is finish the race and you win. And then Something is wrong with your car. If I recall, it was suspension.

Yeah. So what happened is we were racing hammer and tongs and a long way ahead of everyone else.

Yeah. Because Nigel was on pole. Nigel's on pole, but had a horrible start. It was basically a two man race.

Two man race. And it was sort of Suzuka Part two. We went straight back into the battle we'd had at the previous race. I did put him under a lot of pressure, but then he started to creep away from me and he got so far away I couldn't see round. It was like a street track that went around blocks. There was 90 degree corners and he'd just gone around the of the 90 degree corner. I couldn't see that he'd gone off and hit the wall and come back on. So when I come around the corner, I'm right on his tail and he's coming back on the track and obviously not up to speed. And I thought, this is my chance, I'm never going to get this again. Because he always, he already managed to pull away from me. So I thought he slipped up. He's got managed to get back on the track and I'll have a go at passing him on this corner here. So I went down the inside but he closed the door on me and touched my car and damaged the suspension. He crashed out. So his race was run. But unfortunately my car was also damaged and I couldn't carry on either. So he'd won the championship and a lot of people were very cross about that. I'm gonna have to say I, I look back, I. At the time I thought, oh, what have I done? That was a stupid, clumsy move I just did.

But actually very British of you.

Yeah.

Jeez.

Well, when I look at it again, it still looks like that to me. But anyway, that what I did was his car was probably terminally damaged anyway. So if he knew that his car was damaged, then he knew he had to do what he did. And if he didn't know, then it was just a defensive move that worked for him. Luckily, I suppose, because my car got broken.

I think the hardest part of that story for me, sort of cheering you on is like you're just thinking, come on guys, you don't need the suspension to be perfect. It just needs to be good enough for you to limp to the finish line.

There ain't no limp. You don't limp in a Formula one car. They pare things down to the bare minimum. If one part of the suspension is buckled, it's going to just Snap the moment you hit the brakes or put any load on it, it's going to collapse.

So how does that race put the exclamation mark at the end of the most emotionally draining season of your life, which is the lowest low. And it almost. You come within literally one foot. You're 30 centimeters of width. And you could have had the highest high in that season.

You know, I could also been. Had the same fate as Ayrton.

I mean, is that basically why? Because I've heard you in interviews in the last 20 years. You've never sort of complained about that race. You've always had a very. And maybe this is. I don't know how much of this is. Is just, you know, you're being polite and it's not your nature to versus like you really had a sanguine view of, you know what? Look it. I gave it the best I could. It's amazing that I was the second. You know, I had the second most points that season. But I don't have hard feelings about it. It's sort of the way I feel. You. You describe it.

I. I think in 94 I was. I gave it everything I had and wanted so badly to. To win. I. I am. I want to ask you a question. Do you. Did you see. Did Michael set himself up as somehow the villain was in some way. What happened to Ayrton was not his fault. But I mean, I think a lot of people kind of.

It's complicated. Here's the thing. I mean, I'm gonna just put my bias on the. On the table, right. You can see my laptop over there. It's got a MP4.4. I mean, you've got. I'm a Senna fan like no other. I've never liked Schumacher. I have to be honest with you. I never. I always felt he played in a gray area of the sport. Let's look at 94.

Well, I'm the same. Peter. I asked you that question because I sort of knew that that was the situation. Not with you personally, but there was definitely some animosity towards the way Michael went about racing.

Yeah. And part of that's not fair to Michael. Right. So part of it is, I think if Michael had not raced at Imola, I don't think Senna would have died.

Right.

That's not Michael's fault, by the way.

It's not. It's not his fault.

But that's sort of the view that I carry. Right. Was Senna was convinced that Schumacher was riding traction control. I probably think that's True. Remember, Benetton refused to submit their data to F1 after that race, incurred a huge fine. Several races later, they get busted for using an illegal fueling filter. I mean, they were always sort of doing something a little bit gray. So I think there are some fans that just immediately fell into, Schumacher is not the good guy.

But you can also look at Ayrton and say Ayrton was someone who's very volatile, and if he felt that someone had treated him badly, he would almost never forgive them.

I don't think he ever forgave Prost for. For Monaco of 80 A4. I think that was the beginning of the end of that animosity, and I.

Think maybe that was a weakness. It is.

And, you know, my wife asked me about this. She goes, you sort of have a double standard with Senna. Like, you know, you're very quick to overlook his flaws. I don't know that that's true. I think what it is. I think it's how open a book he was and how volatile he was that I actually see as appealing. It's the. There's no ambiguity of where you stood with him.

It's kind of Greek theater, isn't it? With Ayrton. Yes, he's kind of destined. He hadn't got any choice in the matter. His life, his personality, the things that. That made him who he was. These forces were driving him.

And you look back at some of the earlier interviews. I mean, there was an amazing interview with Prost in 990 maybe, when he was so upset at Senna. But he made this point which was like, God, Senna acts like he can't die in a car. You know, he drives like someone who's immune from death. But he said, but he's not. You know, of course, never would anybody imagine what that would foreshadow four years later. So, yes, going back to your final race in 94, I thought Schumacher was out to lunch. I mean, I thought that was completely unfair.

But what should have happened was that the people who run the sport should have said, you can't do that. And they didn't. They didn't do that with Ayrton when he crashed into Prost in Suzuka.

Although I always thought that was sort of payback for.

It's not. It's not.

I know, I know, I know.

You can't run. You can't let drivers have. Yeah.

You can't be mercenaries.

No, it's not. It's not Death Wish or whatever that film was with Charles, but you're too young to remember.

No, no, I totally remember.

But you know, so you can't take the law into your own hands. That's what they're there for. They're there to stop things getting out of hand and they just abdicated their responsibility to, to running things properly. And you know, that meant that opened the door for everyone in all branches of sport to go about the sport in the way they saw it being executed in Formula One. Because everyone looks down, sees Formula One as the pinnacle of everything. That's the way they work it. So in American racing they're a lot tougher. It's incredible. You know, they can be quite tough on drivers who are bad driving and stuff like that. And in the States, particularly on ovals as well because it is, is very dangerous.

So we're going to skip the 95 season just for the sake of time because there's still so much I want to talk about post retirement. But into the 96 season you're racing very well. You've now got this new upstart, the. Another son of as you describe him, right from my home country. At what point even though it came down to the last race. So it's sort of a nail biting season all over again. Your form looked incredible that season. Right. I mean was there a part of you that was starting to accept halfway through that season that this is your season?

Yeah, I think before the season started it was always a one year contract. I didn't know it was going to be my last season with, with Williams but you know, I knew when, when we got to Monza by Monza, which was a bit later in the day. But I mean at the start of season I thought this has got to be perfect this season. I've got to, you know, not be distracted and I've got to polish the job. I knew I had a chance. The car was brilliant and I knew I had a guy who'd never done a lot of the tracks he was going to go to. So no matter how fast he was or motivated, you know, he, he was at a disadvantage to me. You know, I had no excuse not to beat him really. And he was a good teammate. You know, he was cocky and a bit irritating at times but, but charming with it as well.

What track was it? Estral. When he claimed he could take the non racing one.

He did that at the start of.

The season, like in pre season testing, right.

Preseason testing. He sort of sat down and was. I think he did it as a way of getting noticed by the team and the engineers by saying you know, do you think anyone could overtake round the last corner and boasting really and catching everyone's attention in the process and, and we'd sit there and go, guy's completely mad. What does he think? What's he talking about? Anyway, he did it.

That's the amazing thing. And he couldn't have passed a better person.

No. And he did it. And also I was in the post race cooldown room with him as well and Mike was very cross with him because he claimed it was dangerous.

Yeah, the irony of that.

The irony of.

Unbelievable.

But that's the extraordinary thing about these guys is they'll never really wrong in any situation. Their mind, they've tricked their mind to believe they have to be right in every situation. And there's only one rule and it's their rule, that's their way they approach. And someone told me the story about Jack Nicholas being asked in an interview once by someone, some get together with the public and meet the fan type thing. And the guy asked him, jack, when you three putted in the masters in whatever, he said, I never three putted in the master. He said, you know you did, I saw you, I was there. I never three putted, I never three putted my whole career. He just basically explained that people who are that competitive and train their mind, they don't see themselves as making mistakes.

Well and you could almost argue that's a trait like that's a feature of their greatness is the ability to completely suppress anything that could be negative or that could reflect on them having made an error. Now I've always found that interesting because you take the opposite like you're someone that comes in with a totally different personality which is highly willing to accept. Oh my God, what did I, did I make a mistake here?

How can I learn from this tactically maybe a mistake.

Well, that's the point I'm going to make is the evidence would suggest both phenotypes can produce success. So I don't know that it's necessary that one has to be blind to their mistakes to be successful. In fact, I would argue that that's a harder way to live your life, isn't it?

I would say that Alain Prost was self critical, openly self critical and willing to accept a little bit of his fallibilities maybe. And I think that in studies with sports psychologists they have identified the people who are the best people are more self critical of themselves. So they're actually, they see themselves as a work in progress and they're always trying to improve. Whereas the ones that have a problem are the ones that feel they've got it all and they don't need it. They've got nothing else to learn. And it's a kind of harder position and it's easier to fracture. And you have to say, in some cases, when Michael was racing and things weren't going well, he fell apart. It didn't compute. I think in some cases, and I think he showed a certain fragility, but most of the time he was so strong as a competitor that, you know, his confidence with what gave him also some power over when everyone else, when.

That season ends, you take a Concord over to New York, you end up on Letterman.

Well, they put a car. Yeah, they said, we want you on the show. And they put off.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I didn't choose to go Concord, but no, no, he was there. Yeah.

Well, it's kind of amazing. It would be only a few years, three years later, four years later, that plane would be grounded, never fly again. So. So you kind of got this surprise from Letterman when you were on your sort of victory lap, so to speak. Right. Because he pulled out a picture of your dad, which again was done in good spirits. It was done as a way to basically make a point, which was you were the first person to ever win a Formula one championship as the son of another Formula one champion. And I don't think at that point in your career, by the way, anybody would say, well, of course, once you're the son of a champion, it's easier for you. I mean, if anything, by that point you had established you didn't have a single break your way in terms of being the son of Graham Hill. In fact, I think even Letterman riffed you about it a little bit that you, you still got. You lost your seat.

It didn't help me keep my Williams drive. No.

Yeah.

I don't think Frank saw any benefit in that, just having a son of around the place. So. No, I don't know. I don't know whether I, I, nobody can answer that one. I mean, is it easier? Is it less easy? I don't know. A lot of the guys whose dad didn't have successful careers, they went on to be successful racing drivers. There's lots of sons of out there.

Did you think about it when Josh was racing?

Yeah, I did. I thought it must be difficult for him, you know, it must be difficult because he can't just go racing and be treated like everyone knew that this was someone who could potentially be a third time, third generation World champion. No pressure, son. I think that Josh was very mature and could cope with that. But nevertheless it's a factor and you kind of don't know how to deal. I don't know how you, you can't ignore it. You can't, you don't want to keep banging on about it, but it's there all the time. It's just a fact of life and you're going to go, well, that's it, you know, that's. Now we've got to get back to the racing and actually the only thing that really makes any difference and only things that thing that people really care about is where do you finish?

So the next year 97, you're in the Arrows car and then you spend the last two years in with Eddie Jordan, right?

Yeah, yeah.

You managed to win a race in the Jordan car, right?

Yeah.

Was it Hungary?

No, it was Spa.

Spa. So your last win was at Spa?

Yeah.

Epic circuit.

Yeah. But I knew when I won that I couldn't do that again. That was a two race in the wet. I'm 38 years old and it was exhausting mentally, physically, you know, it was really tough and I think if I, if I'm finding this difficult now, I.

Just, you know, what did you decide at the end of 98 to come back for another year? What, what did you have left to prove at that point?

Well, I had a two year contract so I thought the car was getting better and I, I just. At the end of 89, why would I come back?

Yeah, yeah, I know you had a two year contract but, but I mean contracts aside, did you still have.

I want, I want. You can't. It's very difficult to just give up. It's very difficult to go. Okay, well I'm, you know, I've not had a good weekend but. Or a good season. I found it quite hard. But I'm still fetish youngish, you know and I still think there's a chance. And so that part of you overrides the, the one that can be utterly, brutally objective and say, you know, you should stop that. And so I got halfway through 99 and thought I can't, I can't carry on with this. I gotta, I've got to stop, gotta get out. And I wanted to stop at the British Grand Prix but Eddie Jordan had got someone else signed up and made a commitment to someone to get me out of the car. And I just thought, well, I don't want to leave on a, you know, I like at least to go out you know, saying thank you to everyone and finish my career where I started at Silverstone and British Grand Prix and everything. Can you. Can you see your way to just letting me do that? And that was then. Suddenly, it got all complicated, and suddenly I got locked into doing the whole rest of the season.

So let's go to the very last race, your last race as an F1 driver. 1999, Suzuka, right?

Yeah. So by that point, I'd just gone. It had gone wrong in the race somewhere. And I just thought, I'm a lap down. I had to come in for a front wing. We got no ch. We're in a way out. The points. It's. It's. It's just. And I just thought right now, in. A wheel could fall off. I could hit a barrier and kill myself, and then it would all been stupid, wouldn't it? Why risk it? So I came in and.

What did you say?

That's it. I'm finished.

What did they say?

They were. What's wrong with the car? Nothing.

I mean, it's a lot like Niki Lauda in. Yeah. In 75, 76. Right.

Yeah. They're not happy with you if you retire a car, but screw then. Sorry. They don't understand you are putting your life at risk and affecting potentially, you know, your family and all that stuff. And there are times when it doesn't matter.

This was really a crescendo for you, right? This was. It's your last race, but it was the moment when you finally sort of said, wait a minute, Like, I am now secure enough in my skin. I'm a Formula one World Champion, and on my terms today, this is enough.

No, exactly. I'd done it their way my whole career. I had always given everything I had for the team, and I gave everything I had for Williams, and I got the sack. And after a bit, you just go, hey, listen, there is a deal. They're doing a deal. You've done a deal with them. Okay. It says in the contract, you will always give the best your performance. I gave the best. I had nothing left, you know?

Do you remember that evening? Or the next night? You were. I guess it would have been probably a. Were you. Was your family at that race?

No.

So how long before you got home, do you remember? Say, two days, maybe.

Yeah. Yeah.

What was it like that first time you came home knowing you were retired? Was it the greatest feeling? Was it a sad feeling?

It's a very good. I don't. I don't actually remember. I think I was very Relieved and happy. I thought I was home and dry. I thought I'd escaped. That's what I thought. I actually all of those things came home to roost. You know, the things you put back behind you, those fears and wherever worries that you. Imaginings that you have, you kind of go, well, you know, you can, you can stay there for a bit. And then when you step out the car, you just think, I made it, I made it. I made it through in one piece. It's like getting to the top of the mountain. El Capitan. And actually the worrying thing is whether you come back and do something dangerous again. You know, you have to kind of. So I did, I didn't. I stopped racing. I thought, right, that's it. I'm not going anywhere near anything dangerous for as long as I can. You know, I'm still relatively sane about things like that. I did do karting when, when Josh was karting. I got back in a, got pumped up again and started racing a few guys, but took a few risks there. But generally I've been to quite good.

But this is kind of interesting, right? I mean, there are a lot of people, when they leave the peak of their profession, their identity is so wrapped up in that thing. And again, this could be being the F1 driver, this could be being the big shot lawyer, the big shot doctor. But I see this pattern all the time, which is people that have this inability to go from being at the apex to living the normal life. You never really seemed to. I mean, you went through something different, which we're going to talk about, which was now that you had more stillness around you. I think you were able to appreciate the depression. You were able to go back and confront some of the tragedy of your life that I don't think had been fully processed. But you also didn't have as much of this struggle, it seems, with your identity being first and foremost a driver.

I think I felt like I denied my, my identity by being shoehorned into being a racing driver. I mean, I think I, I did the racing. I don't think I ever thought that that's who I was. You know, I knew I could do it and I liked doing it and I felt strongly that I was a very good driver and I could beat people and I gave it 100%. But I just thought that's, that's only a small. Your Formula one wants people to be a certain way. You know, they want particular types of heroes and, and I just thought, well, maybe I'm not that person and I don't want to be what you want me to be, so I've got to be me. And I want to go racing the way I go racing. And I gave a little bit, but I also perhaps was not cut out for that role. I don't know. I don't. I have.

Any of the younger drivers ever come to you as they're ending the. Or entering the twilight of their career and asked for advice or just wanted to talk about that transition?

Not one. Not one driver has come to me and gone, I want to be a Formula one driver. What do we do? It's amazing. I mean, it's almost not a conversation. That never happens with racing drivers. They hardly ever speak to anyone else, any other racing driver, about getting advice. It's not like tennis or golf or something like that where they have coaches. It's really peculiar. I was lucky. I had my dad. You know, I had my dad when I was younger, so I kind of gleaned quite a lot of knowledge from him. But maybe it wasn't. Wasn't clarified because I was only very young. But I did ask drivers occasionally for a bit of advice. Got some help from James Hunt once. He just said, I think you're doing a good job. And that was really helpful. That made me feel great because I thought, here's a guy who's, you know, respected actually giving me some thoughts on what I. What he thought I was doing. I'm trying to rack my brains to see if I've got. I also. So didn't get advice as such, but I'd used to speak a little bit to Niki Lauda.

And were you close to Nikki at all?

Only a little tiny bit, but not that close. But because he raced against my dad, I kind of felt like he was cognizant of that side of my life, if you like. So a bit of a connection there. Jackie. Of course, Jackie would give advice, but as far as other people coming to me and going, how do you do? I think. I think probably people look to my career and thought they don't want to do it, like, the way I did it, so they don't ask for my advice.

You wrote about how you weren't specific as to when this occurred after retirement. So I can't tell if it was two years after or 10 years after. But you wrote about how you were on a family vacation somewhere and you were sort of sitting there, I think, just with Oliver. And you wrote that you were frustrated, confused and angry. And then you had this moment of sort of clarity. And I Don't know if you intended it to sound like a turning point, but it sounds like it was. I believe you were already in therapy at this point. You were already speaking with a therapist and you were already confronting your own depression. But what is it about that moment?

I mean, depression is such a depressing word.

People.

You talk about depression, you can sense people going, oh, please, please don't talk about depression. And my comment on depression is that depression is a way of telling us we're going the wrong direction. So it's a profound signaling, a running out of energy, an energy that is depleting and it's actually starting to go the other way. It's actually starting to drag you down and it's because it's trying to tell you something. You are sort of doing this to yourself. You actually need to reorientate your perspective on things. How do you do that? That's easy to say. And as everyone, anyone who's had depression knows, someone can't say to you, just cheer up.

It's the most useless advice one could give.

Do not understand the meaning of depression. If anybody thinks that that's what it's about. It's almost like you've run out of ideas completely. And it's not even the buffers, it's. It's the black hole, isn't it? So the abyss. I remember I did actually go and see Rothko exhibition, Tate Modern, I think it was, and I was looking at one of his paintings and there's usual thing, there's. There's horizons. So they are literally horizons, aren't they? There's. And one of them was a very sunny looking painting. So it had sort of like the sun above. And then as you went down, it went darker and darker until it went down. And I remember looking at this painting and just going, I don't want to go down there.

And you felt like you were on a path to there or that there was some sort of pull, like if you didn't make a change, that's where you go.

I think you mentioned identity and I think that is fundamentally important. And I think that people who have had an overwhelmingly powerful parent, let's say they haven't fully evolved their own identity. They haven't had the chance. Something, you know, your dad's famous and then he dies. Who are you? Are you your dad's son? Are you? Who are you? He wasn't around long enough to kind of. It didn't manage to get to that point where I was confirmed as me, my mom and my dad were distracted. They had this career going, going on. His, his career going on. I think I didn't fully develop an identity. I knew I had somebody that people responded to and my friends when I went to school. But it wasn't a fully developed personality. It wasn't a real rounded thing. It was, it was sort of half cooked. And when I stopped racing, I don't, I just expressed something that I had. Maybe I was just, you know, play acting. My dad. Those are the sort of questions you, you. I didn't really achieve.

So to be 40 years old and to be thinking those things has got to be somewhat jarring. Right. Because you're sort of saying, wait a minute, who am I? Like I haven't figured this out right now. Yeah. And what if I've spent the last 20 years.

Yeah.

Pursuing something that wasn't really about me.

No, exactly. And there was, there was I definitely an agenda. Part of it was to re constitute the life that we had before he got killed. So I managed to get us back. I used the word us, but of course my mum had lost her husband and my sisters lost their dad. But I had a family. But in a way, in partly my mind it was if I restructured my family, then we'd restructured the family that was shattered, that was destroyed. So I'd rebuilt this thing. So there was this. It's a misplaced concept. It doesn't apply because it's not. You can't put back together the family that died. My dad not going to come back. And so my kids were growing up. I was thinking all the time, well, I would have done anything to have had my dad back. But they had their dad, they didn't know what that was all about.

Did you ever feel at some point that you had an obligation to them to figure this out? Because the irony of it was you lost your dad because he actually died. But if you didn't figure this out, your kids were gonna lose their dad not because he's physically dead, but because he's emotionally absent or emotionally dead. And for lack, you know, at the risk of sounding too dramatic.

Well, and I think the more, the more you dig in there, the more you realize that your parents relationship was, was not as ideal as it should have been. And when you're younger you idealize them and everything's wonderful when clearly it wasn't and what you don't want to do.

Did you ever talk to your mom about this?

Yeah, I had, I did actually go and start to talk to my mum about her relationship with her husband. But she was quite defensive. Not defensive, but she was, she had created explanations for her relationship with her husband and he clearly had, they'd had difficulties. But then if I started to criticize him, then she would suddenly come to his defense.

And do you think part of that is just her stoic nature? You know, you write stories about her upbringing. I mean, I mean she almost died during the war. And then on top of that, she's standing there as one of the wives during the most dangerous era in the history of this sport where about a 1 in 3 chance your spouse is gonna die over the course of their career.

And they're saying all the time this is a noble thing to be doing. Well, was it really, you know, was it that noble when you've got family and stuff to. Is it really that admirable that you're putting all that at risk? And of course the irony is because he retired, he was home and dry.

Yeah, he retired about six months before this crash.

Yeah, he was 46. He stopped. He had this team that he was developing. So everybody thought, everyone breathed a sigh of relief. Oh, he's in the car.

He dodged the bullet.

He dodged the bullet. And bang, six months later, it got even worse than anyone could have imagined. It wasn't just him, it was his young protege, driver, team designer, team principal, the chief mechanic, engineer, all gone in one big catastrophic bomb. And makes you go through life slightly, you know, you're never quite sure what's around the corner. That's a horrible thing.

If you knew in call it 1985, right. So you're 25 years old. If you knew then what you know today or if, if you could go back and talk to that guy then, but as yourself now, what would you tell the 25 year old version of yourself now?

I would try and dispel from him a lot of erroneous notions about how the world works and who really cares about what you think and what you do. And I would say just don't waste a lot of energy thinking about those things or trying to make an impression on people because you think that would help you. It doesn't work like that. Just don't worry about that. If you've got a job to do, do the job. If you do it well and you do it better than other people then, and that will work. That will help you focus on what things you can do, not on the things you can't do anything about. And don't waste a lot of energy worrying about them. I probably would say that And I'd also say, enjoy it. Just don't put yourself through torture because you think this is something that means a lot. It does. You know, we're going around in circles, chasing each other and trying to come first. That's all it is.

Yeah. It's interesting, right? You talked earlier about the nobility of the Sport in the 60s and 70s, when it was basically the most, you know, dangerous thing you could have done.

It was almost pornographic. Some people actually, I think, looked at Formula One and were put off. They. They thought it's a disgusting thing. And now I can see that, that I can understand why they felt that way. I think that anybody in the sport at the time, or even today, we like to embellish it and. And make it seem like it's such a wonderful thing. And it is. It's impressive. It's incredibly impressive. But let's not get it too far out of. Out of context. You know, it's just like a lifestyle choice for a lot of people, and it's a show of brilliance in certain fields, but it's not going to really change the world for the better. A few people's weekends get a lot better or a lot worse.

But do you think that there are benefits from Formula one, for example, in terms of advancing safety, technical achievements of vehicles?

I think what Formula One does brilliantly is that it shows people if there's an issue or there's a problem, they can solve it. They're absolutely brilliant at not stopping when there is a challenge. They go, where's the challenge? We can't. Well, we'll do it. We'll find a way around it. We'll do it. That's the impressive thing about Formula One.

I mean, Max Mosley, do you remember, a couple of days after the Senate crash, he was very recently had become the president. But I remember this press conference, and he said, you know, I think very aptly, the question isn't why did Sena crash? Although that's all anybody wanted to talk about. The question is, why did he die? Because the reality of it is, if you took 100 drivers in the exact same crash, 99 of them probably would have lived. It was a very fluky death.

Fluky. And also the thing to consider is that, just to explain, people didn't understand there was a part of the suspension that penetrated his crash helmet, and the force needed to do that wasn't that great. If he'd crashed at a very slow speed and the suspension had happened to come back, that. And we've all been in crashes like that. You know, guys, we've all crashed. You know, even in Formula Ford, you've got suspension arms and wheels flying all over the place. You don't have to be going that fast. Can you imagine just throwing a wheel at you at 20 miles an hour? It's going to go through your head.

Yeah. You know, so that, to me, was the big step forward in. In Formula one safety, which is. Yeah, they're probably just as many crashes today as there were in the previous generation, but people aren't supposed to die. There's an amazing place where Formula one really did step up and. And I think made that difference. So, I don't know, I think you're.

Then we're back into that loop of when you take away the risk. Do we appreciate the. The skill and the. And the.

Yeah. So do you think the pendulum has swung too far today?

Well, you know, I don't know how you answer. I just, I.

Because you don't want to say there should be more risk.

No, you don't. Well, there's a guy who constantly reminds me, he's an engineer, that there's a difference between hazard and risk. So the hazard is what can happen and the risk is the potential of that happening. So the chance of that happening. So, you know, the chances of being hit on the head by a flying wheel are slim because not that many people have been killed, despite all the flying wheels in motorsport yet. Well, we can name two, three people who've been killed by that just thing, and now they're brought in the halo. So we believe we have eliminated the hazard. The chance is reduced, I suppose, because it's got to somehow get through the halo. So we've taken away one of the hazards to someone being hurt. That's got to be a good thing. So we have to then replace the chalice challenge, or if we've taken away some of the challenge of the sport, then we need to find a way to introduce other challenges that will be appreciated. Whether that's, I don't know, giving the cars more power or, you know, more difficult to drive, or if it looks easy and it's too easy, then nobody cares. You know, they're not gonna. They're not gonna be watching.

You mentioned how after you retired, you didn't even watch the next decade of racing. I mean, when. When Schumacher was. Yeah, you knew what was happening.

I knew what the result was going to be. So he just cleaned up, didn't he? For about five years. And I actually, I was at a low point with regard to the way the sport was run at that point, too. Nothing personal against Michael, but I just thought this is. This is putting on a show for the benefit of just one person and a team. And I just didn't see that's what people wanted. I mean, unless you're a German, you know, or Italian, I suppose.

Yeah. You also said something that really got my attention. I'm writing a book right now, and in this book I talk about this practice of going to funerals. And, you know, it's funny because you had talked about how much you did not want to go to Senna's funeral, which makes all the sense in the world. But in the last couple of years, I've come to find funerals to be an amazing grounding experience and a reminder of, for any individual, how insignificant we are. You know, like, I've never been to a funeral yet where the Earth stopped turning on its axis. So that gives me pretty good confidence that there is no one of us who's so special or so relevant that somehow our departure from this planet will change the rotational force of the Earth.

It'll change it for us.

Exactly. Only for us. And more importantly, to be a little less glib about it, it focuses you on sort of what matters. Because it's what people are talking about at the funeral that probably matters more. They tend to talk more about the type of person you were than what your achievements were. It's much more about maybe what kind of a mother you were than what kind of a lawyer you were. And I couldn't help but notice this line in your book that is literally just. It's one sentence and it almost goes unnoticed, which is that you. You found yourself reading obituaries a lot and not of anyone famous, of people you didn't know. Tell me a little bit more about that.

That comes back a little bit to what I was saying about applauding and celebrating people in public eye who've done stuff. And you read other lives of people I'd never heard of, but maybe in their own career, in their own field, they're well known. But, you know, just. It's unbelievable the kind of lives people have and the things they do. Modest people do extraordinary things. I was a guy who was a. It was a kind of diplomat who managed to stop a revolution just by going up and standing in front of the guy who was leading them. You know, just some insignificant, apparently looking guy would do something extraordinary or woman. And it's those stories which I think are profoundly moving because you don't know who These people are. They're out there now, and you might meet them and you don't know what they're capable of doing in an extraordinary situation. They could be the people who suddenly do something really. You might have just passed them by. Every day of their lives, people have dismissed them as being ineffectual, and they'll do something really remarkable.

Now, how has that insight helped you in your journey?

I think. I think it's made me wonder whether I'm one of those people or not. You know, I'd still. I shudder to think that, you know, look, something might happen. I might have to kind of make a decision as to whether I go in a burning building or not, you know, but there are people who do that, but they do that without even batting an eyelid. You know, you just think. Think just being a racing driver, is it that brave? It's like I'm enjoying what I'm doing as well, you know, and people's capacity as well for work. I mean, some people's, they're just unbelievable what they can pull off in one lifetime. So human beings are extraordinary creatures, if that's the right word. And I like learning more and more about them. I like learning more about what we're capable of and what some people are capable of. I like. I'm. I know I have my limitations, but I'm still in awe of. People are skilled or people who are educated in all kinds of ways and are able to make things happen as well. Some people have the amazing ability to get things done. I mean, whether it's Elon Musk or, you know, or that guy who's doing the ocean cleanup thing, you know, it's amazing. Some people just have this ability to. I. I'm absolutely rubbish at making anything happen. I don't know why. I try and come up with an idea and I can't seem to get it to take hold and then may probably because I doubt whether it's any worthwhile.

Do you think your kids would say that you've been rubbish at being a dad, or do you think your kids would say that? I remember one of the things you talk about. I don't think it was in this book. It might have been in. I don't remember. Maybe it was in this book. But you talk about how, upon retiring, the thing you look forward to most was taking them to school. You know, this idea, which again, that struck me as a little odd because I have to. You know, we can't help but read the stories of other people and put ourselves in Them. That's the nature, I think, of what we do is we are so self centered as individuals. We always tend to extrapolate through our own lens. And I just. There's a part of me that feels really sorry for someone to be at the pinnacle of a sport as an example, and then have to retire. And there's a part of me that thinks, God, that must be awful. Like at least I don't know what it's like to be great, you know, so. So there's, there's joy in mediocrity because I can't imagine what it would be like to be the best in the world at something and then to be off that stage. And I guess I was just sort of pleased for you that even though I knew, because I know how the story unfolds, that there is this huge journey you have to go through. I thought, how much better is it that at least you have this, you have these four kids that mean so much to you.

The world can completely change with one generation. And it's all about how we nurture our children, you know, what we advise them in and the opportunities we give to them. You know, it would only take one generation of people who didn't want to kill anything or anyone.

Isn't that kind of amazing when you think about that, that your children and your father are separated by only one generation and yet there's very little in common in their experiences?

Yeah. Well, it's extraordinary the amount of change that's been in the world in those two lifetimes.

I mean, do your kids ask about their grandfather much?

I think a little bit, yeah. I think they know about him, but I don't think they. Maybe in time, but I don't, I don't think they let it rule their lives, which is that Graham Hill was a huge thing in our lives, all of our. Apart from me and my elder sister, but not so much my younger sister. But his absence was a big thing in her life. But for our lives, it was all about this thing called Graham Hill, you know, which was a kind of concept which. Over who touched everything you.

Did you borrow a quote from Lincoln?

Did I?

Yeah. Well, so I believe it was Lincoln who originally said, if you have six hours to chop down a tree, was it him?

Was it him?

You spend four of them sharpening your axe. You basically paraphrase that as if you had 10 years to chop down a tree. You spend nine of them sharpening your axe.

Yeah.

The way I read that is that it took a while for you to put this book together. You had to really. You had to sort a lot of things out before you could write this story.

That's right. I couldn't really put pen to paper before that until I felt like I knew I had a foundation or something I can, you know, write it on. Because, you know, I was all over the place with my ideas, my thoughts about things. You know, I used to think. I used to listen to Programs on Radio 4 about philosophy and mathematics. Stuff that comes into your head, like Godel's theory of incompleteness and Wittgenstein's Whereof we cannot speak there or we must remain silent. I mean, these things are very profound. You can only have it's being or nothingness. It's. Which is Sartre's argument. You know, there either is something or there isn't. How do you get something out of nothing? And those sort of thoughts. And it would be. For me, I had to get some sort of bloody answers from. From somewhere. And, you know, and. And then you realize that they spent an awful lot of time energy trying to work them out. And they were probably a lot smarter than me. And they didn't get an answer, did they? They didn't get an answer. You know, nobody got an answer. Tell me who's got the answer, Peter, Maybe. Maybe you're the man.

Well, I. I definitely don't have the answers, but I. I think I'm just really impressed with the journey. It's this journey you've been on that is.

And I don't really amazing. It's a journey that is well worn. It's a journey that men and women, I keep saying, and women, all of us humans, have been making for thousands of years. We've all asked the. That everybody's gone through or in every epoch. They've been wanting to know these answers. And it's natural to want to know those answers. And I think it's when you hear the writings and the philosophies of ancient civilizations, they're all fascinating and have some kernel of truth in them that somehow got appreciated by another group of people somewhere else. Without the influence of Western civilization or something like that, you know, it's. It's something that is eternal and something which is profoundly compelling about being a human being. I mean, I was going to mention something. So here's something. When I was quite depressed, I had a tree that was given to me.

A tree?

A tree which was given to me for my 40th birthday by a famous rock band person who couldn't make it to my party. And it was a peace tree. It was an olive tree, okay? So I had this olive tree, which I kind of treasured. And I thought, I really must plant this tree and get it watered at some point. And it got attacked by aphids or some sort of bug. So I spent ages picking these bugs off the thing. I didn't want it to kill the tree, but I was killing the bugs. So I'm thinking, hang on, what do I do? Do I let them kill the tree? Do I kill the bugs? Do I leave it be? Do I not have any involvement? What is my purpose here? You know, what. What should I be doing? That's the kind of stuff that stops you in your tracks when you. When you're heavily, you know, in those mindsets, you kind of get caught between those unresolvable questions. Maybe I should just chuck the whole thing in the skit.

But, you know, I think you're special in the sense that I don't think enough people spend time thinking about these things. I mean, I think these. These are the human questions. And it's really easy to just not think about them. It's really easy to live a life that is unexamined. I. I don't think I examine my life as closely as I can because, quite frankly, it's not. It's not comfortable.

I would say, Peter, I think I don't do it as much as I used to. I actually now have got to the point where I go. I think that's an unanswerable one. I think we'll just let that one go. And actually that it's liberating in that sense. You know, I don't have to stop everything until I've got an answer to that.

When you look at that same painting today, the painting that starts with the sun and it gets darker and darker as you go down. The painting that once made you think, I don't want to go any lower. Where do you see yourself on that painting?

I'm in the sunny bit.

Yeah.

I don't feel like I'm gonna slip into that abyss. And I think that it was. The abyss was a complete loss of identity. I think the abyss is no identity. And I think when you have questions about your identity and you have. You don't know who you are. And on that point, I would say. Well, I've also realized is that identity is very much a compound of your relationship to others. And this is where it becomes. I think it becomes a healing thing when you recognize that who you are is what you are to other people as well as who you want to be for yourself.

Yeah, well, that's very well said. I'm not sure I could add anything to that. Damon, I have really enjoyed this discussion. I've wanted to speak with you for such a long time, and I don't remember what the first thing was that made me reach out to Luke, who was obviously who introduced us, and say, hey, if there's any chance you think Damon would be willing to speak, I'd love it if you'd make that introduction. And I wish I could remember what it was, but I read something that you wrote or saw something you said in an interview, and I thought this is a person who is going to have a unique perspective on a human condition. I think everything that we've talked about today I think emphasizes that and I'm really grateful for it. And I think that I can't stress enough to people listening to this that you don't have to be a Motorsport fan to enjoy your autobiography. I think it's a great story about overcoming loss. I think it's a great story about struggling with one's identity and I think anybody that reads it's going to get something out of it special. So I thank you for writing it because it doesn't strike me as a book that was easy to write.

It was under a lot of pressure, but I think it sort of eventually unfolded very surprisingly to me. I think I'm a believer in things coming to fruition and then there's the right time for things. And I do want to say thank you very much indeed for your kind words about the book and compliments. And I'm not uncomfortable in receiving your praise because it's lovely to actually recognize that it's communicating, isn't it? And I think that when someone is connecting to your communication like that, then that's very satisfying, very fulfilling. So thank you very much.

My pleasure. And thank you for everything. Thanks for being here.

Thanks Beer.

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