“I got a very late opportunity in F1 and I always thought just getting there was a bloody good achievement,” says Hill, now 61. “I had a good crack with Alain in 1993 and won some grands prix. With Ayrton we never got to find out how I would have matched up. I would have had to dig awfully deep to show signs against Ayrton that I had future world champion potential. But these guys make you stronger, they don’t destroy you, and fate had other plans. I ended up by default being thrown into the front line.”
Parallels on 1994 are often drawn to his father, who galvanised Lotus in a similar way in 1968 in the wake of Jim Clark’s death. “Williams felt they had lost their best chance of winning when they lost Ayrton,” says Hill. “I had to work hard to convince them I could give it a good crack.” Two races after Imola, he won in Spain, and it was just what Williams needed. “By coincidence, the first race Lotus and my dad won after they lost Jim Clark was in Spain. There are some strange parallels, but I wouldn’t compare myself. What my dad did after Jim was just ridiculously brave.”
After the difficulties of 1995, including two self-induced collisions with Schumacher, Hill’s confidence was at a low ebb. Still, with Schumacher in effect taking himself out of the 1996 title race by moving to underperforming Ferrari and a rookie joining Hill in the best car on the grid, there could be no excuses. That winter he took novel counsel to steel himself for the next campaign.
“It was simply a lady who worked with me on how to deal with the press,” he says. “It was the press pressure with Michael that hurt, that I was portrayed as the idiot and he was the genius. It even got to the point where the team I was driving for was echoing what their opponents were saying. It damaged me and my confidence hugely. I went to this woman, Mary Spillane, who advised politicians how to deal with difficult questions. She had a brilliant phrase. I was saying I feel this, that and the other, spilling my heart out – and she said “save it for the book”. She just shut me up. I thought okay, this woman is switched on, let’s listen to what she has to say. She gave me the weapons I needed to close that breach in my defences and learn to cope in a very intrusive environment.”