Hill shatters curse of eternal nearly man

NONE OF us outside the new world champion's immediate circle had seen that smile before, the one that beamed down from the winner's perch on the podium at Suzuka yesterday. No more anxiety, no more recriminations. It was all joy and relief, and it seemed to open a window into the soul of the real Damon Hill.

"That's our boy," cried dear old Murray Walker in the same instant, summing up the general reaction as dawn crept into front rooms around Britain. Our boy indeed. Our first sight of Damon Hill had been as somebody's son, which condemned him to a special and unenviable sort of treatment. Somehow he became everybody's son, to be praised and scolded and patronised as if he were our own.

Even the unsentimental Frank Williams sometimes referred to him as "our Damon", meaning to imply a degree of fondness but also conveying the hint that Hill was not to be taken quite as seriously as some of his predecessors and rivals.

It wasn't fair, and it didn't help. Our scepticism was something else he had to fight against, along with the legacy of being his father's boy, an inescapable reality which may have opened doors in the early stages but was no use at all when it came to the real business of driving a racing car. Now he has proved that, in the context of an elaborate and very public battle, a man can fight his own private war between self belief and self doubt, and win.

What Damon Hill did in Japan yesterday, in taking the title by winning the race from the front, has expunged all the humiliations heaped on his head since his vulnerabilities started to appear under pressure last year. It justified the mission that began a year age, when he decided to reorder his priorities and adjust his mentality in order to cope with whatever the season might throw at him. Now he can live with himself.

"A lot of the discomfort I feel is as much with myself as with anyone else," he told me on the way to a test session last winter, reflecting on his bitter failure to take the title in the previous two seasons. "So I have to come back and have another go. I won't be able to race for ever. When that time comes I want very much to be able to look back and say, `Well, I did everything I possibly could, as well as I could, and I'm happy with that, whatever the result may be.' It would be awful to have to bear any other kind of feeling into old age."

It would have been particularly awful for the son of Graham Hill to have lived the rest of his life knowing that he had been unable to match his father's achievements, despite favourable odds. In the public mind he would have become an eternal nearly man.

The statistics show that he took the title by 19 clear points from Jacques Villeneuve, and by eight wins to three. Those who browse casually through the record books in generations to come may look at those figures and infer that he cantered to the championship. But none of the 24 champions who came before him has worked harder or longer for the title.

This was a championship measured not in points or race wins, or even across a single season, for it took many years to achieve. Not just the four years that he raced a Williams Renault in Formula One, either. Maybe 15 years is a more appropriate figure, since that is when he formed the partnership with his wife, Georgie, which gave him the mental wherewithal to begin the job of racing and then to see it through until the greatest prize had been won.

But when he said recently that winning the title would mean "a confirmation of the work I have done", he specifically meant the work that began, in effect, six years ago, when he signed up as the Williams team's test driver. In 1993 the relationship moved into a higher gear after Nigel Mansell failed to agree on a new contract with Frank Williams and Hill was given the chance to fill the vacant seat next to Alain Prost, under strict orders not to hinder the Frenchman's progress to his fourth title.

Hill did everything that could have been expected of him in that first season, winning three grands prix and finishing third in the championship behind Prost and Ayrton Senna. He kept the seat for 1994, hoping to hone his skills by sharing the team with Senna, who had replaced Prost. But when the great Brazilian was killed in the third race of the season, Hill did not shrink from the task of pulling a traumatised team together and fighting Schumacher all the way through a tainted season, winning six more races and losing the title by a single point when the German's half crippled Benetton lurched into his path during the final round in Japan.

Last year he won four races and finished runner up again, but this time he had been thoroughly undermined by Schumacher's gilt for psychological warfare. The worst moment came at Silverstone, where a collision caused by Hill's panicky overtaking manoeuvre put them both out of a race that should have been a walkover for the Englishman.

Humiliated again by Schumacher at Aida and Suzuka towards the end of year, Hill took stock. "I'd been going non stop since 1993," he said, "and I'd run out of puff, to be honest. I knew I was going to win the title, and I'd lost the appetite for the competition.

During the two free weeks between Japan and the last race in Australia, he came to a crucial conclusion. "I didn't have much to do, and it was too far to come home so I had a holiday on Bali with Georgie and then we went to Perth with a couple of friends and spent a few days relaxing. And it suddenly hit me that I'd become a bit of a workaholic. I decided to come back refreshed for 96, with renewed enthusiasm for doing what I love doing but which had become a bit of a job of work."

He cleared his mind, came back to win the final race of 1995 at Adelaide, and then disappeared again to plan an entirely different approach to a season in which his main threat would come from a young and ambitious new team mate, Jacques Villeneuve.

The factors were mental, physical, and technical. The second and third could be dealt with by extra training in the gym and a relentless programme of pre season testing with the new Williams Renault FW18. The first was where his weaknesses had been spotted his opponents, and required special attention.

His solution was the creation of an informal "Team Hill", headed by his lawyer and manager, Michael Breen, and Georgie. It also included his aide de camp, Jamie McCallum; his friend, the photographer Jon Nicholson; the team physiotherapist, Erwin Gollner; the Daily Telegraph journalist Michael Calvin; an American image consultant, Mary Spillane; and, in the end, the team's chief designer, Adrian Newey, who took over the race engineering of Hill's car.

Profiting from Schumacher's lucrative switch to the troubled Ferrari team, Hill began the season with three wins in a row, putting Villeneuve firmly in his place. At that point he was radiating a new found serenity, to which Patrick Head, the Williams technical director, paid a slightly ambiguous tribute in Buenos Aires.

"You can be serene if you're in a strong position," Head said, "and I think he's worked very hard over the winter to put himself in that position. The car's obviously pretty sound, but he's fitter than he's ever been and you can hear on the radio that he's less bothered about what Schumacher and the others are doing on the track. We all had a bit of a drubbing last year. We went away and tried to look after our bit, and he went away and did a fair bit of thinking about his bit. At times in the past, and particularly when he's under pressure, he's been very uncertain and unconfident about what he wanted. He's got himself well organised now. He sits down and has a good clear think before he opens his mouth and starts talking. But the test comes when somebody comes back at you. The question is, will he be as serene when Benetton or Ferrari get their cars right?"

No, he wasn't. As Schumacher wrestled the Ferrari to three wins, and Berger almost won at Hockenheim in the Benetton, and Villeneuve began to accumulate victories of his own, Hill's new demeanour melted away with his 25 point lead. Even the presence of his entourage backfired. Irritated by the presence of a team within a team, angry with Breen's financial demands, and nurturing a lack of confidence in Hill's ultimate ability, Frank Williams broke off contract negotiations, announced that he would be replaced by HeinzHarald Frentzen for 1997 and, in effect, sacked Hill just as the climax of the title race approached.

The brow furrowed, the eyes darkened, and the fingers twisted themselves into knots behind his back as he told reporters how relaxed he was feeling. He began to blow chances, and nerves were the cause. At Monza his bravura attack on Jean Alesi was followed by a banal error. In Estoril he was out raced by Villeneuve. And then, yesterday in Suzuka, he was flawless. So now he can look back and say that his strategy must have been correct, because in the end it did the job.

The path to his title was littered with deceptions and obstacles. The biggest of them all was in his own head, and it is the measure of his triumph that he was able to confront his own vulnerability and conquer it. He may not be the greatest racing driver who ever lived, but he is one heck of a man.