Hill - Review 

Rating: 4 out of 5

I REMEMBER watching Damon Hill be denied the World Championship by Michael Schumacher in the 1994 season and the profound sense of injustice that followed.

Likewise, I recall the euphoria - the lump in the throat type of admiration and joy that silenced even the late, great Murray Walker - when Hill finally became World Champion in 1996. I had gotten up in the early hours to witness it (just as I had in 1994).

I also recall the sense of devastation and loss that surrounded the death of Hill’s teammate Ayrton Senna at Imola in 1994, events unfolding in real-time as the unimaginable became real.

So, entering Hill, this compelling documentary on the long path to glory that Damon Hill took to realise his dream of becoming World Champion, there was already a lot to unpick emotionally.

And yet Alex Holmes’s film remained even more emotional than I would have dared to imagine, unpicking as it does the father-son relationship at the heart of Damon’s journey, the trauma he carried throughout (and which became exacerbated by Senna’s death) and the hardship and unfairness he often had to endure.

First and foremost, the film opens with a tribute to the legacy of Damon’s father, Graham, another racing legend (a World Champ and 5-time Monaco winner), with whom he had a distant relationship… but whose success financially provided the foundation for a happy childhood until tragedy struck.

Hill Sr was killed in a plane crash at the age of 46, not long after he had retired from driving to set up his own team. Somewhat unbelievably, Damon recalls learning of his father’s death while watching TV and having to go into the kitchen to inform his mum.

If that wasn’t horrific enough for a 15-year-old to have to contend with, the circumstances surrounding Graham’s death (lack of insurances, etc) also financially ruined his family.

It is from the point of having nothing that Damon decides to correct the wrongs of his father’s past, restore reputation and become a winner. But the path to self-imposed ‘redemption’ is far from easy.

Hill secures entry into F1 by becoming test driver to Nigel Mansell, knowing that a step up into full race driving is unlikely. But he gets a slice of fortune when Mansell retires unexpectedly, in protest over the appointment of Alain Prost as teammate, forcing Williams to scramble to find a No2 (eventually taking a risk on a test driver who was both fast and knew the car).

A year later, in 1994, Prost was replaced by Senna, who was expected to win the Championship as easily as Prost - only to be faced with new regulations that blunted many of the advantages the richest teams had over the rest of the pack.

It was to prove a decisive season. Imola soon followed: an eerie chapter, during which Hill’s wife reveals a genuinely haunting anecdote about her last meeting with the late racing legend.

Damon himself barely had chance to process his own feelings of grief and mortality surrounding Senna’s death (and what it revived about his father’s memory) before being plunged firmly into the spotlight as Williams’ new No.1 and taking the fight to Benetton and Schumacher, culminating in that devastating last race showdown in Adelaide in which the controversial German appeared to blatantly take Damon out.

The subsequent inability for Damon to process any of this took a heavy toll on his mental health and his performance level suffered in the subsequent season, as his rivalry with Schumacher also intensified.

In 1996, Hill did return with renewed vigour and positioned himself at the forefront of the championship (in part because of Schumacher’s move to a freshly emerging Ferrari) but then had to contend with more internal politics that saw him surplus to requirements at the end of the season. Basically, 1996 represented his best shot at ever achieving his dream. Teammate Jacques Villeneuve now posed his biggest threat.

Ironically, although we know and get to see the positive outcome of Hill’s journey, its achievement somehow feels less crowd-pleasing than it should.

But this is largely because Holmes’s film is more about the journey than the triumph. It’s an acknowledgement of the often complicated dynamics of father-son relationships, of the unspoken cost of success and fame, and the equally unspoken effects of trauma and not dealing with it.

Hill’s own takeaways mirror this. He observes, at one point, that he was never likely to have achieved everything he wanted, not least because you cannot correct the mistakes of the past. But there’s also a quiet sense of pride that he was able to achieve some of it (most notably his goal of becoming champion) and took comfort from the feeling that his father would know and be proud.

It’s a stoic documentary, in many ways befitting the thoughtful, considered man that Damon Hill always appeared to be.

It also serves as a terrific companion piece to that other great F1 documentary Senna, by Asif Kapadia, given some of its obvious overlap.

In short, Hill left me moved and inspired all over again.

Certificate: 12A

Running time: 90mins