1,000 Greatest Drivers: Damon Hill

A real demolition man.

If you don’t get the reference, Hill played the guitar solo on the relatively obscure late-period Def Leppard song “Demolition Man”, but that was certainly not important enough to mention in the actual article. (Maybe if he had played on either Pyromania or Hysteria, it would have been.) While I don’t think Hill was ever the best driver in an F1 season (in every one of his prime years it was Michael Schumacher except for 1993 when it was Ayrton Senna), I will certainly give him credit for being more likable as a human being than Schumacher. Even if he was definitely a below-average F1 champion, it was hard not to support him winning the 1996 championship after Schumacher’s dirty tricks campaign in 1994 (even though I think 1994 was Hill’s best year, not 1996, and I explain why in the capsule). As I said, I do think he was mainly let down by his lack of longevity (although he admittedly had a fairly high peak) and the fact that he really did rather little in series outside of F1. There are other champions who definitely had worse F1 careers (like Mike Hawthorn, Phil Hill, Denny Hulme, and his teammate Jacques Villeneuve) who I would probably rate higher overall because of what they did outside of F1 (Hawthorn was a prolific sports car winner and set the fastest lap at Le Mans four years in a row, even if causing the Le Mans crash ended up overshadowing his entire career; Hill was the only driver to win the F1 title and Le Mans in the same season; Hulme was the all-time winningest driver in Can-Am; Villeneuve won a CART title and Indy 500), so I might end up only rating Hill over Keke Rosberg for his entire career. Having said that, it’s still hard to not root for the man after what Schumacher did to him, and I definitely respect him. And at least he had that one great day in Hungary…