Being a nepo baby isn’t always easy. It certainly wasn’t easy for Damon Hill, the Formula 1 driver, having Graham Hill, the 1962 and 1968 World Champion, as a father.
Graham Hill was a driver out of a comic book – his moustache, sideburns, long hair and polo neck conspiring to produce a figure of extreme dashing flamboyance.
As Damon says, ‘If your dad is the star of the show, then who are you?’
In footage together, the young Damon was shy and diffident – tongue-tied when he’s interviewed with his father by a bubbly Bruce Forsyth.
One of the many virtues of this heartbreaking film, written and directed by Alex Holmes, is that, as a nepo baby, Damon has been documented in gripping footage since infancy.
And then, in 1975, Graham Hill was killed in a plane he was piloting, aged 46.
Damon, 15 at the time, saw the newsflash on telly and had to pass on the news to his mother. She screamed, ‘I knew it was too good to be true’ – because Graham had just given up the killer sport of racing.
It wasn’t the first time Damon had to break this sort of news. In 1968, aged seven, he told his mother about the death of the champion Jim Clark, 32, in a German race. Damon says of his father’s death, ‘That was the end, really.’ But it was also a beginning.
The film, available on Sky and Now TV, has the grand arc of Greek tragedy. Hill admits he never wanted to be a racing driver – his heroism is all the greater for his lack of egomania.
Now 64, Damon retains the gentleness of his childhood. But there is a deep steeliness and determination underneath the sad, nervous eyes – so dark-edged they look kohl-rimmed.
Hill was galvanised by his father’s death to fill the yawning void of his absence. And the way to do it, he resolved, was to emulate his father and become world champion.
It’s a near-impossible thing to do. The plane crash didn’t just mean a farewell to his dad. It was also goodbye to a rich, glamorous childhood. The plane wasn’t insured. Graham Hill didn’t have the right flying licence. He had borrowed money to get his new venture, Embassy Racing, off the ground.
And so the Hills’ house was sold to pay off the sudden debts. Damon became a courier. Yes, he was a keen motorcyclist but he didn’t take up car racing till the age of 23 – late in the driving world.
By the time he was 28, he was out of work, married, with a child on the way, who happens to have Down’s syndrome.
His wife, Georgie, is the real tear- jerker of the film – clever, unflashy, infinitely loyal and observant. She said of her new boyfriend that when they got together, he was ‘one of the saddest people I’ve ever come across in my life’.
And then the nepotism at last helped a little – perhaps. Damon got a job as a test driver, testing Nigel Mansell’s Williams for Frank Williams.
When Mansell retired, Hill got his big chance in the team. But then death – forever on the starting grid – came calling yet again, when his charming teammate Ayrton Senna was killed in the 1994 San Marino Grand Prix.
Just as in the agonising film Senna (2010), the shock of his death is paradoxically heightened by the knowledge that it’s going to happen. As you watch footage of Senna, the handsome, 34-year-old triple champion, you think he must be invincible...
How brutal the fates are to the film’s participants – and not just on the racetrack. So many are killed or maimed.
Michael Schumacher, Damon Hill’s biggest rival, was struck with severe brain damage after a skiing fall. Frank Williams was paralysed after a car crash.
