Can it really be 30 years since Damon Hill won the Formula 1 drivers’ world championship? Yes, it can be and it is, for we are now ushering in the new year, 2026, and it was in 1996, albeit in October, that Hill won the Japanese Grand Prix, his eighth grand prix win of the season and the 21st of his F1 career, thereby causing Murray Walker to utter live on TV the now immortal words: “And I’ve got to stop because I’ve got a lump in throat.”
Hill was 36 at the time, supremely experienced, as fit as a fiddle, and at the peak of his form therefore. Moreover, he had been runner-up in the F1 drivers’ world championship the previous year, 1995, and the year before that, 1994, too. So he was ready; champing – or championing – at the bit; and F1 fans the world over were delighted to see him finally get his life’s ambition across the line that heady afternoon at Suzuka.
In so doing, he became the first son of an F1 world champion to become an F1 world champion himself, following in the footsteps of his famous father, Graham, who had lifted the crown for BRM in 1962 and again for Lotus in 1968. Since then, only one father-son combo have matched that feat: in 2016 Nico Rosberg won the F1 drivers’ world championship for Mercedes, 34 years after his father Keke had won the 1982 F1 drivers’ world championship for Williams, the same team as Hill had won it with 14 years later.
In 1995 Hill had driven well, but, although he had finished second to Benetton’s Michael Schumacher in the F1 drivers’ world championship standings, in truth Schumacher had won it comfortably, 102 points to 69. The previous season, 1994, had been a different story, albeit one involving the same dramatis personae, for that year the battle for the title had gone down to the wire in Adelaide, and it was only a highly controversial kamikaze move by Schumacher that had prevented Hill from powering his Williams past Schumacher’s stricken Benetton and on to take the winner’s laurels. Such things happen, and, stiff upper lip to the fore, Hill took it on the chin, if that is not an anatomically impossible double metaphor. In any case, all in all, many pundits and fans thought justice had been done when the Englishman made things right two years later, or, now, 30 years ago.
Nonetheless, despite Hill’s triumphant 1996, in 1997 there was no Williams drive for him, and he raced for Arrows instead. The car was not a great one, but, even so, he all but won that year’s Hungarian Grand Prix, finishing second to Schumacher, having overtaken him into Turn 1, on a circuit where passing was always notoriously difficult. In 1998 he moved to Jordan, and at Spa, in a wet race that had begun with an enormous startline shunt, he scored the team’s first and his own last grand prix victory. That day every F1 fan in not only the UK but also in the Republic of Ireland, team principal Eddie Jordan’s homeland, had a lump in his or her throat, and rightly so.