Watching the Wheels

George Harrison died in 2001 on the same date as my father: 29 November. I wish I could have spent more time with him. He had a lot to teach all of us, not least that all things must pass. Barry Sheene died in 2003. He used to phone me up at ridiculous hours of the morning from Australia, just to say hello. I loved these guys. They had a knowledge about life: that it is a fleeting thing that will be gone before we know it. They were of the same tribe as my father and they left the world a better place for having been here. I am privileged and honoured to have been able to call them my friends.

It must have been the most terrible feeling for Sid, dealing with the friend he had previously tried to persuade to stop racing. As soon as he opened the helmet visor it was obvious to him that Ayrton had suffered a severe head trauma because part of the right-front suspension of the car had penetrated the helmet. Sid knew, but then had to go through the procedures that Ayrton himself had helped him conduct on Donnelly in 1990. I can only imagine his heartbreak and distress, having to cope with two fatalities in two days. To Sid they were just boys.

My last race in F3 was the Cellnet Super Prix at Brands Hatch. The race itself was a disaster, but that’s not why I was in tears during the slowdown lap. I cried because I thought I might never do this again.

As I sat among the gently weeping women, I said: ‘We are crying for ourselves. We shouldn’t cry.’ The sentiment was right, but perhaps I should have cried a lot more than I did. If ever there was a time for grieving, this was it. I meant well, but maybe I was trying not to show weakness, taking on my father’s stoicism and trying to buck up the troops. What could I have possibly known about grief by then? It had been less than a week; we were all still in shock. The ‘whole’ grief would lie buried deeply within me for decades, like a genie trapped in a bottle waiting for the right moment to be released.

I had had enough, as I saw it at the time, of people inviting themselves into our lives. All I could think was: ‘For heaven’s sake, can’t we even have Graham Hill to ourselves in death?’ I was angry about it, feeling that Dad had given himself to everyone – but not enough to us. Then he died and deprived us of the chance of ever making up that deficit. Who were these people to us, anyway? He belonged to us, not them. I was struggling with this emotion, and if I was angry, imagine what it must have been like for my mother. But people were just paying their last respects to the great man. We all grieved his loss, together. On the way to the crematorium with my mum, sisters and Fay Coakley, I thought I had come to some realization that helped with these feelings. I concluded that we should be grateful for the time we had had with him, not be angry about the times we’d been deprived of or the future we’d all lost. He had lost the most, after all.

They say that you shouldn’t be friends with your children, but my father had always been my best friend. I loved him and his crazy ways. He was 100 per cent fun, and when he wasn’t 100 per cent fun, he was 100 per cent serious and fascinating. For me, being told through my whole life, both before and after he died, that he was an amazing man confirms the truth. My true privilege was not the wealth, the holidays or the fame; it was having had Graham Hill as a father and having learned directly from him about life, about the right approach to it and towards people. Jackie Stewart called him ‘one of life’s givers’. That was him in a nutshell. Whatever he had, he gave. He gave of himself to everyone he could.

Around lunchtime, I was chuffed to be visited by my school chaplain, Mr Morris. He came up to my bedroom, and I was deeply moved that he had taken the trouble to come just to see how I was. I think he was a person I really needed to see at that precise moment: an adult who understood. It was a kind of healing just to know that there were at least some people thinking about me, Damon.

In a similar line of thought, some mechanics of the time openly admitted to not wanting to get too emotionally close to drivers because you never knew how long they would be around.

It’s a chilling thought that one is as vulnerable – if not more so – post-F1 career. The safety standards in F1 are now remarkable, making it arguably the safest form of motor sport there is. Nevertheless, as Jules Bianchi’s accident in 2015 showed, death always seems to find a loophole in the regulations, no matter how hard we try to make F1 safer. Motor sport is, and will always be, a dangerous game, but outside that heavily protected environment, things are perhaps more risky, not less. It was something that I was mindful of when I stopped racing – especially bearing in mind what had happened to my father.

How talented was he as a driver? The idea of being a ‘born racing driver’ is a contentious one. Mario Andretti, when asked if he thought he was one, pithily but perceptively replied, ‘I don’t know. I’ve never seen a baby born with a steering wheel in his hand.’ Motor sport journalism is riddled with phrases like ‘he’s a natural’ or ‘he’s a true racer’. I have no doubt that some people have innate natural ability, but sports journalists are invariably romantics who worship the sport they have loved from childhood. Their sport is an arena for superheroes only: the ‘gods’ who cannot be related to in human terms.

My father was all too human.