1,000 Greatest Drivers: Graham Hill

I hate to admit that like the other two Hills, he's an overrated champion.

This was harder for me to write than I thought it would be. I ended up not making the anniversary of his death in part because I was finishing up my statistical table for the 2024 IMSA season, in part because I’m going through some burnout and have a lot of other things going on, and in part because I didn’t look forward to writing this because I know Hill is one of the all-time icons in Formula One but he seems to have a reputation as an all-time great that isn’t really accurate when you take a closer look into his career. While I did still give him a #1 season for his first title year in 1962, I think that era was one of the shallowest for F1 competition in history, as Hill’s unrelated predecessor Phil Hill is routinely cited as the worst F1 champion in history (although I did rate him #1 that year because he also won the 24 Hours of Le Mans), and by the time the true legends of that era like Jim Clark and Jackie Stewart really started hitting their prime, Hill started to look kind of washed up. He gets placed in that legend tier because he was the only Triple Crown winner but I actually don’t think either his Indy 500 or 24 Hours of Le Mans wins were impressive. A lot of people think he didn’t actually win the Indy 500 and he solely benefited from a scoring error and his Le Mans win came in 1972 after he was already basically washed up as an F1 driver, so I have to figure Henri Pescarolo was almost entirely responsible for it especially since he won Le Mans overall the next two years as well. Since he was such a likable guy and so iconic, I did not have fun writing that he was a below-average champion. You could seriously make a case that his son Damon was better. I probably wouldn’t because Graham did a lot of stuff outside F1 and Damon didn’t, but I think I would honestly say Damon Hill came closer to matching Michael Schumacher in F1 than Graham did to Jim Clark, and Damon is surprisingly ahead of him in my model. Well, he did win more races so maybe I shouldn’t be that surprised. It’s definitely not as surprising as Tomas Scheckter rating above Jody in my model… I do plan on writing my scheduled Dick Hutcherson column later today and in the intro to that post, I will talk about my December schedule.