Back when Hill had a mountain to climb

Damon Hill emerged as a candidate for a Williams race seat in late-1992 after Nigel Mansell opted for the US and Riccardo Patrese left for Benetton.

Hill had been the team’s test driver for a couple of years, and had impressed the likes of Patrick Head, Adrian Newey and Paddy Lowe, all of whom supported his candidature.

A partial ’92 season with Brabham, which gave him two race starts before the struggling team collapsed, also helped his case.

Eventually a somewhat reluctant Frank Williams gave him the nod, calling Hill to the Didcot factory on a wintry Friday night.

“We had to work quite hard on Frank to accept Damon as a driver,” Head recalls.

Hill thus found himself thrust into the limelight alongside new signing Alain Prost.

“The big interest was around Alain, and how would he acquaint himself with this strange car that had a computerised control platform,” Hill recalls of winter testing. “And it wasn’t like anything he’d driven before. Nigel had got the hang of it. But he’d gone, and Riccardo had left as well.

“So I was the only person who had the continuity. I had to act as a kind of bridge to the new guy, Alain, about what to expect from this car. But I hadn’t done much running in the passive car, so I didn’t have anything else to compare it to.”

Hill’s season got off to the worst possible start when he spun on the first lap at Kyalami: “All I had to do was a half-decent job. Still to this day I have no idea what happened, but in the race I just went round Turn 1 and suddenly I was backwards. It was a horrible first race.”

From there things started to improve, and he scored a landmark pole position in France.

“It was all because I missed my brake pedal when I was going into the chicane on the last lap on my qualifying run,” Hill recalls. “So I literally braked later by accident! I was starting to find my feet a bit by then.”

The first victory came a few weeks later in Hungary: “Alain had a problem at the start, so I was on my own, and there was no competition. I think Patrese was second and I could see him in front of me. That’s how far ahead we were!”

Wins at Spa and Monza followed, and Hill ended the season in third place in the points behind Prost and Senna.

“I was very happy with it,” he says of his first year. “It was a good-ish performance. But I think there was always the question whether or not I was of the Nigel calibre, or the Alain calibre… or whoever. And that’s a fair point to make. But I was getting better, definitely.”

He’d also continued to impress the right people: “In South Africa he certainly did look very lost; he had some silly spins in practice,” says Adrian Newey. “It looked as if it got to him a bit. He sorted himself out and kind of got on with it, and his rate of progress through the first half of the season was really great to watch.”