The Peter Attia Drive - #86 - Damon Hill: Overcoming loss, achieving success, and finding one's identity

Episode Date: December 30, 2019

In this episode, Damon Hill, 1996 Formula 1 World Champion, opens up about his personal struggles with depression, feelings of inadequacy, loss of identity, and his ultimate path to healing following his remarkable racing career. Damon’s life was given a tragic jolt at 15 years of age when his father and legendary F1 driver Graham Hill died suddenly—the common string that ties together so much of his life and has forged so much of who he is to this day. We discuss Damon’s unique and remarkable racing career including his legendary battles with Michael Schumacher as well as Damon's firsthand account of what happened that tragic day on May 1st, 1994, when his teammate, Ayrton Senna, died at Imola. But this is not just about racing; rather it’s a human story that's cloaked in a racing one. Learn more: https://peterattiamd.com/ Show notes page for this episode: https://peterattiamd.com/damonhill/ Subscribe to receive exclusive subscriber-only content: https://peterattiamd.com/subscribe/ Sign up to receive Peter's email newsletter: https://peterattiamd.com/newsletter/ Connect with Peter on Facebook | Twitter | Instagram.

Hey everyone, welcome to the Peter Atia Drive. I'm your host, Peter Atia. The drive is a result of my hunger for optimizing performance, health, longevity, critical thinking along with a few other obsessions along the way. I've spent the last several years working with some of the most successful top performing individuals in the world, and this podcast is my attempt to synthesize what I've learned along the way to help you live a higher quality, more fulfilling life. If you enjoy this podcast, you can find more information

on today's episode and other topics at peteratia-md.com. [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ Hey everybody, welcome to this week's episode of The Drive. I'd like to take a couple of minutes to talk about why we don't run ads on this podcast and why instead we've chosen to rely entirely on listener support. If you're listening to this, you probably already know, but the two things I care most about, professionally, are how to live longer and how to live better. I have a complete fascination and obsession with this topic.

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Again the podcast will remain free to all, but my hope is that many of you will find enough value in one, the podcast itself, and two, the additional content exclusive for members to support us at a level that makes sense for you. I want to thank you for taking a moment to listen to this. If you learn from and find value in the content I produce, please consider supporting us directly by signing up for a monthly subscription. My guess this week is Damon Hill. Damon is the 1996 Formula One World Champion. And even by the standards of Formula One World Champions, Damon's career was incredibly

interesting and took place during a brief but intense to mulch was period in Formula One. He was Iartun Senna's teammate during the tragic year in which Senna's life was lost. And he went on to have legendary battles with Michael Schumacher. Now you might be thinking if you're not a Formula One fan or a racing fan, why would you listen to this episode? Well, I want to address that up front and say that this is really not an episode about driving. Basically, the driving, the racing, all of that is really a substrate or a vehicle through which we discuss the journey of Damon's life, which

was given a tragic jolt when he was 15 years old and his father, the legendary Graham Hill, two-time Formula One World Champion, died in a plane crash that he was flying. And I think it becomes very clear when you read Damon's incredible autobiography watching the wheels, which I can't recommend highly enough, how much of an impact that had on Damon. Something that to this day, it's clear has still shaped and forged so much of who he is. He's very open in this biography about his depression, and it was when I read his book for the first time about a year ago that I realized I just had to interview Damon. And this interview did not disappoint. He was incredibly open, incredibly forthright about the struggles that he has had, the inadequacies that he has felt, and the journey that he's been on to basically break the cycle that he felt he would have passed onto his kids,

had he not figured this out. Of course, we do talk quite a bit about racing and we go into great detail, and I think that in many ways Damon's account of what happened that tragic day on May 1, 1994, when Eiffens and I died at Emola, is probably the best account you will ever read. Damon's account of what happened that tragic day on May 1st, 1994 when I Arten Sena died at Emola. It's probably the best account you will ever read. In fact, I make the point to Damon that it's really his book and his account of it that probably changed my mind about the events of that day. I could go on much longer about what we discussed in this episode, but I think this is one of

those ones where you just have to sort of take my word for it and listen to it. Again, if you're not a racing fan, I don't think it matters. This is really not a racing story. It's a human story that's cloaked in a racing story. And of course, if you have any interest in motorsport, especially F1, I think the nuance and detail of his career will be illuminating. So without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with Damon Hill.

Damon, thank you so much for making time on what is obviously a very busy weekend for you. It's not busy. I'm not actually working for Sky, which is my usual job, so I would have to be normally in quite early, but I'm working for F1 on a promotional basis. So I get a little bit of extra leeway. So, but even so, you hit the ground running when you're in Formula One and just come from a promotional event for Formula One. And then, journalists want to talk to me because there's Lewis is probably going to stitch up his world title. So they want to know what other world champions are thinking of Lewis's performance, so you have quite a few other various things you get involved with.

Well, I'm going to resist every urge to go down that path, which I would love to go down and talk about all the nuances of the current day, the grid versus your air and stuff, but we'll get to that in time. I honestly just want to start by saying something which is your book is incredible and I can't recommend it highly enough to everyone. So your autobiography watching wheels which came out three years ago is kind of one of these books that's sort of about racing but sort of not. First of all thank you very much for saying that about the book. I'm very pleased I wrote it and I'm pleased because it's reached people who have experienced maybe they've been experiencing depression in some way or they've had some difficulty

in their life. And I just wanted to make it clear that, you know, it's never plain sailing. If you achieve success in sport or achieve success in the world, a lot of people like to gloss over the difficult bits. And I didn't want to make it sound like it was harder than it was to race. But I couldn't ignore the fact that I'd been through an experience and part and parcel of my experience as a racing driver was wrapped up with my emotional life and having to dealt with, the fact that my dad was a

racing driver and then he died when I was 15 and then I became a racing driver and it seemed to be very muddled up. So I couldn't just sit down and write a book about how I became a world champion because actually where does the motivation for that come from and how do you differentiate that between my motivation and my dad's motivation and how much of it was to do with wanting to do something for the family name and how much of it is purely yourself, how the hell do you untangle this stuff. And I think a lot of people also go through these questions. It's a normal thing to do.

It is really not so much that you're a Formula One World Champion. In fact, that is a very small chapter of a book. Of a long book, it's about a 360-page book, and there is literally one chapter devoted to the 1996 season. What's amazing to me is the degree of introspection that comes into this level of examination and the things that you tie back and forth and back and forth, which hopefully, as we get into this discussion, I'll remember some of those things, but it would be hard for people listening to this

who don't know much about you to go anywhere to begin, other than to start with November 1975. I'll give a little bit of background just for folks, but only for the sake of time, but I'd like you to spend as much time as possible explaining your father's a legend. I remember when I was watching old Formula One videos with my wife, and the first time she saw Graham Hill, she was sort of like, wow, that's like a really good looking movie star. And I said, yeah, yeah, he looks like a movie star,

but you realize like he's a Formula One driver. In fact, he's the only person to have won the triple crown of motor racing, which of course prompts the, what is that, you know, then I get to explain, there's two ways you could technically win this, and he won it both ways. Maybe just tell people a little bit about who your dad was and why he was so significant to the sport of motor racing. Well he was, as you say, in the sport

a legend, achievements wise, but I think also charismatically and also in terms of being, playing up to the role of how the public expected him to be and reveling also in being that person. I think he got to know himself because curiously when my mum first met him, she said he was very quiet and very shy and you know, not the person that we got to know. Eventually, as a star of the sport and also someone who was very well known as a great racon to her, a after-dinner speaker, someone who dressed impeccably, he had all his shirts made in Savo'ro and his ties and he was... Like not a hair out of place, the mustache, the sight, I mean just...

I'm the mustache, right? The mustache or the mustache? Fierish ways of pronouncing it, if any way you come from. But he would, yeah trim it in, you know, to, you know, millimeter perfect. And that was his trademark because in the early days, they didn't have a close-face crash helmet, so you could see the guy's face. And there it was. This guy with a, you know, the wacky races, you got dicked acidly and you got, you know, all the stereotypes of that type, you know, you have David Niven, who was very suave with a pencil moustache, and they'll say, you've got aeroflin, and so he was kind of in this mold, if you like.

I don't know whether he was trying to be that person, but he certainly, he didn't have to pretend to be anyone else. He had the attributes to be that person, and I think he loved being that person and so he created interest in himself as a person out of the track and I think he was a lover of life, he loved meeting people, he loved communicating and he loved finding out about everything, every aspect of life in every different strata society and yeah he went at it in a 100%. What is your earliest memory of him? So you were born in 61? 60.

16th. He won his first Formula One title in 62, if I'm not mistaken. There are lots of pictures of you as a kid around. I don't remember that. Yeah, of course. But the legends of the sport, right? I mean, so if you go on Google and you go Damon Hill

and there's a photograph up there at my christening with Bruce McClaren, Sterling Moss, my godfather, Joe Bonnier, Taffy Vaughan Trips, is there, my dad's there, Tony Brooks is there, it all came to my christening. So I grew up in that, that was his world. And when do I remember that what was the first thing I remember? It's very, very difficult to pinpoint it.

I can't, because I would have been taken as a very young child to race events. And I probably didn't even know what was going on. I probably heard the noise and that's about it. But I think it becomes apparent when you go to school, when you go to, for the first time, you meet kids who have heard of your dad and you haven't in a way. You know, you're kind of... It's just dad.

Who you're talking about. And then you become, yeah. And actually the teachers are very conscious. So I think you pick that up that there's something unusual about your dad. And then you start to look at the world for a different prison. By the way, it was Jim Clark in that photo. Yes. How could we have forgotten Jim Clark? I know that.

Shake my nose. Yeah. Which speaks to another interesting point of your dad's era, which is how many of those guys died in a car. And I think I've talked about this before on the podcast. Probably my favorite documentary on all of F1 is called One. I think it was came out about five or six years ago. I remember that one. It is just such a beautiful depiction of those transitions in that era

that your father lived through, the Jackie Stewart lived through, that these guys lived through. It is kind of a miracle that they came out alive. It is statistically, I think they knew that they had, if there were 26 drivers in those days on the grid. Some years it wasn't unusual for them to lose two, and that's like 12 to one chance of surviving. And then you start stacking that year on year.

Year on year. I mean, when my dad did Indianapolis in 1966, two years before that, two guys were killed in the race and they carried on racing. It was 1964, so it's just terrific. And he just, you know, so two years later he was doing the race. I mean, he said he would have known the history of the race. And he had got that, he wasn't going to be cowed attitude. I think that they had, I sort of put forward the theory and I don't think it's anything, it's not my personal theory but I think

it's quite well understood that if you were born during the war era and you grew up during the war era and my dad would have just missed active service, he'd had to do national service after he left school but you would have grown up knowing that, guys, just a bit older than you would have been flight spitfires or bombers all going, going fighting the Germans, and it's going to their lives for everything. And you wouldn't, people were not expected

to make a big deal of that. So driving racing car was seen as Jolly Jakes. You know, it was seen as a lot of fun. And you got paid. And you could get killed. But you know, it's better than having to go and get shot at with Akec Gounds. It was such a different era.

And I was actually for totally unrelated reasons talking with my driving coach today about something. And I mentioned that I was going to be speaking with you today and he said, you know, I wonder what his thoughts are on the following. So he was telling me about how when he was doing 24 hours a day Tona a few years ago during the race prep one of the organizers said to all the drivers he said look guys You all are young enough that you don't know what it was like when your probability of dying here was very high But I want you to pretend for a moment that it is that dangerous and act accordingly to the other drivers.

And what he was really getting at was in the era that your father raised in, there was a bit more of a genuinely approach to racing. Well, I think it was, you could describe it as that. I think there was a respect for the other competitor because you knew that person was prepared to take the chance of being a racing driver and accept the risks that ensued, but I didn't mean they liked it at all. It was awful. For them, it was dreadful. I think Jackie Stewart made it very clear in his book that going to a guy's funeral and seeing the family every other week or whatever, twice a year or you know, guys you race against, they must have felt slightly responsible

themselves. So I think the gentleman thing was is more appreciation that they didn't want to be the guy responsible for losing someone else's life. And I think that is that was quite strong in that in their day. It's interesting. You bring up Jackie Stewart, of course, who retired after 99 99 not 100 grand breeze even though he had one more in a season and he sat that out after Sever died as he made.

That's interesting because it'll kind of come back to your retirement in a way which was drawing a line in the sand and saying at this moment, I don't have the desire to do this anymore. Even though you guys were separated by decades, it's still interesting to me. It still was dangerous when I was doing it. Don't forget, you know, it was not only a few years after Ertum was killed, that I was still racing. So I think the risk factor you are rolling the dice. You know that the more times you do this, the chances of something going wrong increase. And the comparison has often been drawn to gamblers, but

of course, when you're gambling, you lose money. You don't necessarily get a powerised or get all that burnt to death. I am interested in this issue of humans being able to put danger to the back of their mind. I'm recently watched the amazing El Capitan from Free Solo. I mean, it's uncomfortable to watch in the documentary and that anyone hasn't seen it, they have to see it.

It's incredible. Because this, and I forget the guy's name, terrible, to remember names, but this very interesting character who pulls it off, He is described and is sort of described himself as a bit of an oddball. They go into his background, his family, upbringing, reasons why he might have had a difficult upbringing and maybe was that a reason for him taking these risks in an effort to identify himself or impress his mother or show off in some way or what is it, what was the motivation for doing this incredibly dangerous thing? But wherever

you cut it, he managed to put fear in the back of his mind. You could not have done what he did without being able to go, okay, I'm going to put the palpable tangible fear. We all could identify watching this documentary, this guy clinging to the side of a rock with nothing to help me. It's just terrifying to watch it, but he managed to do it with the power. But sort of you and sort of all the drivers of your, but let's think about this. Let's think about Emola in 94. And let's not even think about Emola. Let's think about Monaco the next race. I mean, it had been 12 years since Phil Neve died. And then in one weekend, you see three

of the most devastating things. It's only a miracle Ruben didn't die, right? But Ratson Burger dies, Sena dies in your car. And then Monaco and Venlinger. Yeah. Exactly. So it's impossible to say that you were getting in a car thinking you're, I and Venlinger. Yeah. Exactly. So it's impossible to say that you were getting in a car thinking you're, I mean, you're immune to that.

I mean, this is about as dangerous a time as ever to be an F1. Yeah. It was, there was a frequently high incidence of accidents that meant that driver got hurt. So suddenly, with raining, I think Nikki Lauda described it perfectly, said, you know, that God had had his hand on F1 for all this time and now he just took it off, you know. And that seemed to be what it was. It was like, okay, breaks are off guys. You know, you've had a good run and now we need to rebalance the odds.

And it was just happening one weekend after the other, even in testing as well. And, you know, he had people like Pedro Lamis accidents. And actually before that, even Johnny Herbert was really killed and marty Donnelly, who was my teammate in former three, and then he got killed in her death. And so, so did you, I mean, when you were in that car, were you, what were you blocking out of your mind? The possibility that it would be me, I guess.

I don't know, it just, you know it's there, but it makes you concentrate about it. See, if something goes wrong with the car, there's nothing you can do about that. But if you make an error, then you pay the price, and that's your fault. So, you do concentrate a lot harder when you know that the risk of injury is great. Well, before we come back to that, let's go and finish the story again for folks who aren't familiar with with your father. It all changes November of 1975. November 29th, if I recall the date. I think the way you describe it in the book is really, really difficult to read truthfully because you don't gloss over the little details

of the night. You're watching TV with your sister, your mom is in the other room, and you hear something on the TV. And I think what it, what it tells me and what I'm hopefully I'm telling also connecting with other people who've had similar experiences, we don't get over things like that. It's the worst thing that you can imagine happening. I'd like to think that, you know, I think a lot of therapy is about

people getting over those experiences, but I don't think you can possibly ever unremember the emotions. What you can do is you can recognize that those emotions had a relevance there and then at that time, and if you've locked them away and haven't revisited them and kind of exercised them, then they come back to you in other situations

when you're not conscious of why you're feeling those emotions at that time. So, they can be reduced in that way, but if I want to go back to that moment right now, I will get the same sensations that I had back then. And I don't want to put you through that. I can feel it in reading the words, let alone hearing you say them. But for folks listening, I mean, your father was in a plane crash. And one of the things that stood out in reading it was how vividly you remember your mom

screaming. That strikes me as like incredibly palpable. Everything that you just said a moment ago about the challenge in processing that and all those things, how old were you when you finally realized that was the case? That those are unresolved issues that can't just be forgotten? Yeah, I think not until I stopped a couple years after I stopped racing, I think.

Well, it's one of the issues, as I just mentioned before, is that you'll mind, who am I? Am I different to my dad? Because if I'm different to my dad, I have to live longer than him. And I was 42 and he died when he was 46. So there's anxiety, creeping anxiety that comes with this, you know, you're following a pattern and you don't want to follow a pattern because it's a bad pattern to get into. So you have to differentiate that. If to change course somewhere, that was one of the big pressures for me as a driver was I had a family. I didn't want

to put them through what our family gone through. You talk about that on a couple of occasions in the book, which was, and I don't know if it was deliberate, but you keep making the point, you weren't afraid of dying for the sake of your life, but you were very afraid of it for what they would go through. Because obviously you'd experienced it. Yeah, I think I would, I mean, if it would be at all possible to be angry with oneself, if one had died. You don't want to be, yeah, you don't want to do that. But at the same time, in humans in all kinds of situations, whether they're

in the military or they are in the emergency services or they do some other job, that we, as adults, put ourselves in the firing line somewhere at some point and our children may be too young to appreciate that, but when they become older, they will also see that. There is a... We can't go through life in cotton wool. You know, we have things we have to do as humans to fulfill ourselves. I would hope that by taking chances, I mean, when I say taking chances, I mean calculated chances that have a benefit somewhere, somehow, that my children would also not be afraid

of doing those things. So speaking of fear, I can't imagine what it's like for your mom to lose her husband when she has three young kids, teenagers. I guess your sisters would have been teenagers as well at the time, right? Yeah, my eldest sister was 16, but my younger sister was only about 11. And you're already at this point into motorcycles? Yeah, for fun, riding in the fields and in the woods on small motorbikes and off road bikes. I hadn't got a road license then.

It's kind of amazing to me that you didn't have a carting background. You were, by your own admission, very late to auto racing, that you could be as successful as you've gone on to be. I think just to sort of move the story along a little bit, let's go to when you decide you want to be an auto racer. Well, I wanted to race bikes from quite a young age. I was impressed, but when my dad died, a friend of my dad's, who was a Peter Gethine, actually, he was a, he actually raised for my dad, but he was a former one driver. And he took me and a friend of mine down to

Brands Hatch, not long after my dad had died, just because he knew I liked motorcycle racing. When he come and have a look at these bikes going around Brands hatch, I'd never seen anything like it in my life. And I'd been to so many Formula One races, literally sitting there yawning, as Jim, the Jack is Jackie Stewart goes and wins another race. It was like he used to go past you, used to go and spend our, any of us some holidays, we'd go to the Monza and we'd be parked up in some grandstand somewhere. My dad went to the race and we'd literally sit there and Jackie's trip would go past and then about half a minute later

if one else would go past and we'd go on for two hours and then you were going, you know, it wasn't, didn't do it for me. A car was in there. It was because the driver isn't using his body in a car the way he's using his body on a motorcycle. I really, I think that's a big part of it. I think I, I mentioned before,

I kind of like sports where I, you're the projectile. I'm the projectile, but I'm also the acrobat, you know? And I think that is very difficult to see that in car racing. And I think that's one of our big problems with people appreciating the current crop of Formula One drivers.

They might appreciate it when they're watching in the race in the wet. And sometimes you can see the speed and sometimes you can see their reactions. But not nearly as clearly as you can when you watch a ski or you watch a surf or you watch a guy on a motor GP bike. It's abundantly clear that they are controlling the vehicle.

And I think that happened to me. So I went to bike race and I saw these bikes go past and I just couldn't believe there was a guy sitting on the bike doing that sort of speed into and having ridden a bike myself. I just thought, ooh, me do that. You know, there's one of those dumb moments you just, you can't think straight be. And you just like the smell of the bikes, like the noise of the engines, you like the whole thing. So that was my ambition to go

bike racing. And my mum was just about to say, what was your mum's reaction? Well, can you imagine? I mean, to me, it seemed like a long time ago, but actually it was only three years or four years ago since my dad died, which is nothing in terms of those things. So I go, mum, do you mind if I, you know, race bikes? And to her eternal credit and bless her, you know, she recognized the situation which was that my dad had raced. How could she deny me her own son the opportunity of doing something that, and she had admired my dad for his bravery and skill as a racing driver as well. So, here was her son, only a few years after the tragedy coming the same, do you mind if I ever go out racing bikes? And she said, I don't mind, I think

she took a deep breath, but she said, I don't mind you doing it, but the longer she do it properly, I don't know what that means. I mean, what's it mean? Go as fast as you can. I don't think. I would just enjoy it as don't get hurt, but. Yeah, I think that's, but she knew there was no way you can stop guys and girls from doing these things. So she let me do it. And I mean, she never said, no, you're not doing it.

Which is not the case with some drivers. And Jackie's doing it being one. His mother never spoke to him because he raced behind her back. She told him you're not to go racing and he did. And then when he retired, he phoned her and said, I'm retired and she said, you're best off out of it. That was the end of that.

She didn't actually ever say, well done, I'm winning three world championships, as far as I know, she just was a bit still cross within for. Wow. So how did you make the transition from racing motorcycles to racing cars As far as I know, she just was a bit still cross within for. Wow. So how did you make the transition from racing motorcycles to racing cars and given the fact that you didn't have this long lineage of carting that most of your peers had, do you still think there's something about the motorcycle that gave you an advantage that

they were missing? No, I would have been much better if I've done carting. I mean, that would be the right route to take. I had to unlearn stuff and then I had to, I think particularly, you learn stuff in carting about racing, which I had not learned cart before wheel racing and the tactics they employ. And I'm thinking clearly that someone like Michael Schumacher and people like Johnny Herbert, they were used to these guys putting their cart inside the inside and chopping you up and all that stuff. In bike racing, they don't do that. They do it a bit more now, but in my day, they didn't do that sort of thing because you'd go down, both go down,

you know. So it wasn't quite the same energy bargey in bike racing. It was more of a clean pass each time. So why did you decide to make that transition? Well, I enjoyed by racing, I'd done okay, but I had a bit of a... I didn't really pick it up properly, and then I had to go back to the beginning and start racing and club racing, and I thought, well, I still love doing it. So I was basically failing. I'd bitten off more than I could chew, and I wasn't making any progress. So I had to decide whether I stopped or whether I carried on, and I thought, failing. I'd bitten off more than I could chew and I wasn't making any progress. So I had to decide whether I stopped or whether I carried on and I thought well

I'm gonna do it because I enjoy it. So I literally bought a bike Ran it myself on my own budget and went to Brands-Hatch and I started winning things and about the same time at this is happening To this about 1980 I 84 okay, I started winning these bike races and then somebody at the same time had said, because they knew I'd race bikes and I don't think my mum, my mum must have said, well, he's not doing very well and it's not, it's not really happening. And they said, well, you should get him to have a go in a car. So she says to me, one day, a friend of mine says you can have a go at his car.

He runs a race school in France, so it's called the Wimfield School, and his name was Mike Knight, and he'd offered you a go. And I said, well, I haven't got the money to do it, and I'm not spending any money I spend on my bikes to do it. It's just, don't worry, they'll, they'll let you have a go for nothing. So I thought, well, if someone's gonna let me drive their car for nothing, and I'm gonna go for a weekend in France for just for a bit of love, then I'll do it. So I turned up absolutely, no real interest or plan to do it. I just

did it for the crack, as you are, it's safe. And I did quite well. What kind of car? It was a Formula Rena. 2000? Yeah, I think so, yeah. Yeah. And at school car, it's the same school that Prast and Tom Bay and all the French driver Lafitte had been to and one of the things they had Which was also attractive to me was fully paid if you did well if you won the school scholarship You get sponsored to compete in France in a championship and they'd pay for it Renew Elf would pay for it And I was absolutely rubbish. I'm not a commercial person. I was absolutely hopeless at getting sponsorship. So I was always sure of cash. And so I want to talk about Sega later on 10 years ago. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I can come back there.

So I literally was a pragmatic decision. I just thought, well, this doesn't seem to be going anywhere. The car racing, the bike racing thing is struggling. But just at that time, I started winning everything on bikes. I started to, I found the knack and just recently a friend of mine gave me some DVD that someone had put together of some sad person that stood by the side of the track at Brands Hatch and video taped everything in those days it was a video camera. And they put together a DVD and I was watching myself before I came out here actually of my bike racing and I'd watching myself before I came out here actually of my bike racing and I'd never even seen it before. And you know I looked quite good on a bike and I was and I

won everything. I literally won everything I did that season, but it happened just at the time that the car racing thing was starting to take on. So I had to make a decision at the end of the game. Am I going to really seriously be able to do this as a career by racing? Or am I going to... What were the economics of motorcycle racing at that time? I could do a season for a cup of grand on my bike. What could you make? Could you support yourself? No, wouldn't win anything.

If I went to national level, you could... I think some of the races had £10,000 prize money, I'll say. But was that all grand pre-racing? And the only real guy who made the money was Baruchine. You know, there was just very few people really learning and living. If you wanted to go and do the Isle of Man and risk your life and you could earn a bit more money, but it seemed to be a poor equation. I'm just going to pause for a moment for the listener in the show notes. We are absolutely at this moment going to link to the Isle of Man TT. If you have any

interested in understanding what we're talking about, you must watch this or you can just go to YouTube and search Isle of Man TT as in Time Trial. And you're going to watch something that you will think is being played in fast forward. It is not. And Damon, I still don't know who has it more dangerous there. The spectator or the guy on the motorcycle. It is the craziest thing I've ever seen. Yet I can't stop watching it. Yeah, I think a lot of people feel that about it.

I think they feel, they have mixed emotions. I've been there to watch, I haven't been to the main event, but I've been to the classic TV TT and they have guys going just as fast. And you have mixed emotions about it, you're watching this, you're like, oh no, please don't do that, you know, because it looks so dangerous, but it also is awesomely impressive. And I've been around the aisle a man on a bike myself and I've gone, oh, this is, this is kind of, there's a kind of

spooky thing during your on to go faster. It's very seductive racetrack. Was there any point in here, Damon, as you're wrestling with this to be the motorcycle guy, to be the car guy? Was anything the back of your mind coming through the lens of your father and wanting to either emulate him or go in an orthogonal direction to him? Was that at all part of your conscious mind at least? I think there's something fundamentally genetically, there must be something in the genes to make you want to do this thing, which he must have had because he talks about the first time he ever drove a racing car and he knew immediately, he calls it a light bulb moment, you know,

it was just he knew immediately he wanted to do that. And that was the first time I got on a motorbike, I'd turn the twist grip and it was like a part of my brain just lit up. And my grandma rode a motorbike, my granddad never even drove a car. So my dad's dad never even drove a car. So where did he get it from? Well, he must have got it from his mom, from his mom. And they now, with epigenetics and so forth, they can kind of show that patterns of experiences seem to be passed through the genes. So it's quite possible that something came through that side. But for whatever reason, I had instinctively got what it took

clearly to drive a car or race a bike. But the motivation to do it, I think, was also to get to know my dad in the way, in the sense that I was doing something that he did and then you have somewhere relating to him, even though he wasn't there, but was he ever not there? Is he still here now? I mean, we started off talking about my dad, you know, you're evoking his image, you're evoking his character.

He's not even just went like that, just then that sounded like my dad. It was really, you know, it's a very hard thing to differentiate yourself from your parents. And I don't necessarily believe that it's possible to be completely an individual. I think consciously, you can say, okay, this is what I want to do. I'm doing something different to the my way my parents, I know they would disapprove

of that or that's not their thing, but I like it. So that's a differentiation. That's a genuine thing, but they're still there, aren't they? Influencing somehow somewhere. It's interesting that you say that. I still think this idea that driving to get to know him is kind of a, it's one thing to reflect on that. I just wonder if at the time you could have even consciously articulated that, or if that's just part of this incredible journey of introspection that you've been on through your career, but especially afterwards. Yeah, there were some parallels that have been drawn, I think I might have drawn them in the book,

which is that when my dad was racing, he lost his teammate Jim Clark, and then he went on to become World Champion 68. And so in some senses, you know, my experience with being teammates to Airton, and then you lose your teammate, and then the team is kind of looking for a new direction and you kind of carry the banner You you pick up the banner and try and try and get back to what we were there to do in the first place

Which was win. I feel like I've been through a Similar experiences, but my dad was you know, he had extraordinary ability to cope with tragedy. He he actually Organized the race team when they were at Hockenheim with Jim Clark when he died and the guys didn't really know what to do and he got it all together and helped them. And I heard recently Emerson Fidipaldi talking about how he had nacks and once my dad was there with Joe Ramirez organizing his extraction from the car. My dad was a very practical and,

in that way courageous person. I'm esposan, some ways I'm glad I didn't have to go through some of the things he went through. But to be an adult, you ultimately have to be able to cope with the experiences that adults deal with. That's not always the nice stuff. So how do you manage to get into the Williams car?

I've heard the story before, it's pretty funny how I think Martin Brundel was probably ahead of you in line to at least get the test spot, right? Yeah. And then did he go and take the spot at McLaren or what? There's two drivers, very similar names, Mark Blundel, who was the test driver. Oh, Blundel, that's right. And this Martin Brundel, who was actually actively racing, but Mark was the test driver at Williams,

then he went to McLaren, so there was a slot available at Williams. And so I went to Williams. And this is 92? 91, actually. So end of 90, I went, became the Williams test driver in 91. 92, I was still the test driver. Mark had moved on to McLarenaren and they eventually became a McLaren driver. But when the end of 92 arrived and Nigel had left. That's right. So Nigel won in 92 and then

promptly retired to go to Indycar. But yeah, but not till very late in the day. So Frank had let Rukard a bitrazy go because he thought that he'd keep Nigel and he'd already signed Alan Prost and when Nigel found out that he'd signed Alan Prost, he said, I think he decided he was going to do Indykar. Was the implication that Nigel would be number two to Prost being one? I don't think he'd be free. I think he'd already been with Alain in Ferrari and I think he didn't want to be sharing the team with Alain. So it may have been that he'd got an attractive deal from India.

I don't know, but then whichever way it happened, there was a space left at Williams that Frank had really kind of not managed to fill because everyone else had been signed up. So Ricardo wanted to come back from Benetton, but they wouldn't let him go. And so I was the guy there who knew how to drive. So this is for the 93 season. So the 93 season. And you had spent much of the 92 season basically learning the ropes on this active suspension

car. Let's pause for a moment for people who aren't steeped in Formula 1 to explain what a technical step forward, the active suspension car of 93 was. Some people describe that car, the FW-15, as the most advanced car in the history of Formula 1 for its time. Being the Santa fan that I am, I still favor the MP44 as the greatest car of all Formula 1, but the case could be made for the FW-15. What does active suspension mean? How would you explain that to somebody? Okay, so it's a ride height control. So why is ride height important? So it's the distance the car is held off the ground. Lower sinter gravity is a good thing. If you're very high for ground then you get a lot of roll moment on the suspension which the drivers don't like.

You can't change direction that quickly. But the main reason is aerodynamic. So they found just after they banned tunnels and ground-effect cars, they went to flat bottom cars which they thought would eradicate the dangers of having too much downforce on the car. But what the engineers did eventually was sure enough they found a way of making the flat bottom of the car work to create more... Sub-entery effect. Sub-onto the ground. And the car work to create more sub-entery effect. Yes, sub-onto the ground. And the closer you can get it, and the more you can control the gap, the more effective it is.

So active suspension is a clear advantage over passive suspension for the very simple reason that when a car is loaded, it squashes the springs and it gets close to the ground. So it means a lot of the time, the car is not at the optimum ride height. It rides back up again on the springs when the car slows down. So you get this variance in ride height. If you can keep the car at the optimum, fast or slow, then you've got a huge advantage. That's what active suspension was there to do. But it has a lot of other interesting side effects in that you can then, you can change the attitude of the car all the time. So you could even stall the diffuser on the straight so you could lower the back.

It's above a certain speed. I just love it. I love hearing you talk about this. So you could play with it a lot. We tried all sorts of things like making it roll into a corner. So it would have stagger on it, and which they use in Indy cars. So if a corner goes right, you'd make the left side of the car pop up a bit and the car it roll into a corner, so it would have stagger on it and which they use in Indy cars. So if the corner goes right, you'd make the left side of the car pop up a bit and the car would lean into the corner like a motorbike. Yeah, it's just unbelievable.

So do you remember in 92, when you were testing these features out in anticipation of the 93 season, not actually knowing that you would be the driver? Yeah, I didn't know I'd be the driver. I knew that Nigel was making a good job of making it work. And I knew that if I was in that car, I would also be up the sharp end of Grand Prix racing,

but I was never more than a pipe dream. You know, I honestly thought, I was 32 by then. Yeah, let's reflect on that for a moment. Today, a 32-year-old rookie, it's an impossible concept. They wouldn't get you in, you wouldn't get in the car. I just don't think any team would put someone about age in the car. I think a lot of people will look at it from the point of view that what's his long-term future like.

You know, they're even looking at drivers now who are, I think, the youngest average age of a grid in any year of Formula One at the moment. But they're looking at drivers who are 28 and thinking they're old now. I mean, Sebastian is 32. It's hard to imagine Sebastian as a rookie now. I mean, he is 12 years into his formula one career at the age, and four times a world champion

at the time that you were entering your rookie season. And to your point earlier, not coming from a carting background. So you could say, I shouldn't have been there, Pete. You know, honestly, it was just pure. I was down and out. In when I was 29, we'd had Oli. We were talking about my first child

and he got down syndrome and I'd lost my drive in former three. And I had to literally, I'd just bought a house. We had a mortgage interest rates had gone up to 17%. Can you imagine that? I mean, it's horrible. I've got to believe. Imagine Wall Street now, or you know, 17% interest on a mortgage. And I just had my first child, and he turns out it's got Down syndrome. So we're Georgie and I just working out, well, what's that mean for the rest of our life? What do we, what's the, and I still wanted to raise cars. I mean, I was mad. You know, what, why, what madness was this that made me press on because it turned out okay

in the end? There's a line here, which it's a, it's a quote I'm sure I'm bastardizing. And it, it's basically like, chance favors the prepared mind. The context of the quote, and I can't even remember if it was Einstein or Louis Pasteur, but there was a scientist who made this point, and the idea was, you look at scientific breakthroughs and you think it's an inspiration or a flash of genius. And the point is, no, it's not. It's a lot of hard work. It's toiling, it's failing. It's doing the experiment over and over again. It's failing. It's failing. It's failing. And if you pay enough attention, you're going to see the right thing. Great scientists always talk about this idea that what separates the good ones from the great ones is the great ones are able to see the right thing at the right time.

They're able to extract from the data that which others don't see, but that requires being there, that requires being in the trenches. And in many ways, I think that that's what that 92 year was. You put your head down, you were in the trenches, you showed up every day, you test drove that car, you basically helped Patrick and Adrian make what would, like I said, probably be the greatest technologically most advanced F1 car ever.

And you sort of did it without an agenda of, well, I'm doing this because it's gonna get me here. I mean, that's sort of my reading of it as a distance, which was, it was just being in the moment and putting your head down and doing this amazing job. And so, when the situation arose with Nigel going to Indycar, I mean, I think Williams was incredibly lucky that you were there. Well, I'd like to think they felt that.

I think I did do a lot of hard work, but I didn't design the car. I worked with the engineers, I worked with Paddy Lo, who was the computer guy who worked on the suspension, and we did play with lots of stuff that we eventually used, and I helped shape it a little bit, traction control and stuff like that. But they have to get feedback from a driver. That's the point, right?

Yeah, but that's the point. Actually, it was at starting to get to the point where they don't need as much feedback as they used to because they can see it on the computer. So they actually were going, well, okay, we know what the gear change is doing. We're in control of that. We can give you a throttle that can do this and if you've got that potential

much on the throttle instead of a cable, we can make it do this and that. We can see all things, what they can't do is put their bum in the seat and go, that's a scary thing, which is not scary for me. The driver can't override the negative things that we're giving to him. The driver still played a part in that sense. But what I did do was, I think I was a known quantity, and I think I worked well with the guys, with the engineers, and they had Alan Prost. So it's not they didn't have anyone. They had someone in the bank, but they took a huge risk putting a guy and he's never done a couple of races

with Brabham, but they'd never run at the front of Formula One and they clearly thought, well, he doesn't have to run at the front. Alan Prost, he just needs to back him up. Were you intimidated by Prost? He strikes me as sort of a pleasant guy. I mean, no, he would never not to any of my knowledge that I've ever been felt like Alan would do anything on the hand to, you know, to, I think he was very, very decent chap and I think he was clearly very fast and I could learn a lot from him.

So I thought if I could beat him, then that's very much to my credit. And sometimes I did. What did you learn from him technically in terms of like technical driving ability and what did you learn from him at the meta level in terms of philosophy? He's a very quiet guy and it was quite interesting. The things that I remember were him speaking to his wife on the phone before a race. And he'd make a little phone call and he's a

clear, a very affectionate person. And he was quite happy for me to see that. He didn't do that in private. And when I spoke to him about the car or something like that, he, I mean, I never, I would never have gone up to him and gone, I don't know, how do you do this or how do you do that? You learn by watching the results of what he's been doing. I speak to the engineers that running his car, and they say the amazing thing about Alan Prost is, it doesn't usually brakes. He's very, very light on the brakes, but he's incredibly quick.

Right, very light on the brakes, and very little hand movement, right? Yeah, it was never fighting the car. No, he minimal movement, so obviously micro movements, so he's very clearly ahead of the car and able to anticipate it. And what he didn't do was throw loads of things at the car. He just fine-tuned it. And he fine-tuned himself.

I think he knew he was quick and I think he knew how to make a car go quick and he knew how to race. And when you look at some of the very early races, the Kyle Army race with him and Senna, Senna was brutal with him. And in an album, there's an equally tough back in that active car. He wasn't intimidated either.

He was the head of a fighter. But he'd never show you that. You know, he wouldn't out of the car. You'd never know that the guy was such a formidable competitor. What do you remember about Dinington in 93? Ah, well, what do I remember of that? That would be hard. I remember my brain was fried because I was saying, why every time I put a set of tires on does it do the opposite of what I wanted to do? And at the same time, Senna would just stick on his tires for a bit

longer and,, oh, God, that was just so embarrassing. We lost count completely. How many pit stops we'd done? I mean, I have no idea what was going on. It was, and half the way through the race, you just go, this is gone so horribly wrong. It's a fast. But you suddenly find out you're second, you're running second and you're going, how the hell did I get there? I stopped six times, you know? So for a guy in his first full season with the top team, it was a bit of an unopener. But I look back at that race and I just think, why did I let Ed and through so easily? Yeah, because on the first lap, again, it's of the stuff of legends, right? How he drove

in the rain and that he could pass you and post on that first lap in an inferior car. He had a lot more experience than me. Yeah. And truthfully, I just think there was nobody on the grid that was as comfortable in the rain as though he was clear to say he didn't like the rain. You know, I remember in an interview once, where someone made this point, which is, you know,

I heard that you're so great in the rain, and he's like, I don't like this. I just practiced in it, you know? But there's a funny picture of the three of you on the podium, do it with the two of you guys in your blue fire suit, sort of like couldn't believe, you know? But it was particularly hard for Alain, I think,

because it was a humiliating experience, you know? I think, I got it. It all went horribly wrong for Alain in that race. And I remember the press conference as well, Atten, kind of, He sort of made the point. Oh, he was just brutal. Yeah. And it was a tough one for Alan, because, um, yeah, Erton could be very, very harsh and humiliated

Alan after that race. I was not one of our finest weekends as a team or for Alan, but it was a great... They talk about it as Erton's greatest raceain, but it was a great, they talk about it as Ertund's greatest race. You were a third that season, correct? I was third that season. I was second to Alain, I think. You were second, okay.

Which is amazing. You better check that, because I don't know. I honestly don't know. But where's the first? No, third. I think maybe I was third. You're right. Yeah, I think that were third. Yeah.

So at the end of the 93 season, was there any doubt that Prost was going to retire? Was there a chance he was going to stick around till 94 or was he very clear that it was one and done? I'm sure it was clear that with Frank that he knew he was only there for one year to get one more world championship. Okay, so he's one and done and then all of a sudden world championship. Okay, so he's won and done. And then all of a sudden, Senna gets what he's wanted for several years now, which is he has wanted to come to Williams certainly in 92 and 93. Of course, people know the backstory. Prost had an anti-Senna clause, you don't get to have us both. But there's interviews where Williams talks about how he wanted center in the 80s. He wanted center in 84, 85. Yeah, but he gave him his first formal untasty. I don't know why I didn't sign in then.

Yeah, I feel like I need to go back and sort of watch some of those old interviews because he sent us first team was horrible. And then he spent three years with Lotus before he went to McLaren. So you must have been pretty excited, right? I mean, you're thinking to yourself, my first season in Formula One, I'm third overall, I've just been partnered with one world champion and I know I get another. Yeah, and before that was Nigel as well. That's right. So you have to read. Yeah, completely. I was completely spoiled from that point of year. I mean, I had a chance to see close up how these guys worked, which is something money can't buy. I mean, it was, it's great for me. I, you know, I really like the idea of having... So where were you in... So going into the 94 season, is Josh your second or

third? Second child. Second child. Was Josh born yet? Josh was born in 92, yeah, 1991. Okay, so Oliver, Josh, the Tabitha, not yet. Not yet. Okay, so you have two little boys. The interest rate, I hope, is been refinanced at this point. The 17%. I think when I got the test drive, I was able to cut with the interest a little bit. And then I got signed up and I was actually a full-time driver

in 93. I think I didn't have to sweat quite so much, but it wasn't. So when the active gets undone for 94, when you're in preseason testing for 94, you are probably the only person in the world that can appreciate the difference between the FW 15 and the 16.

What are your first thoughts on that transition? I thought it was going to be different, but it was very, I found the car quite hard to drive, get a time out of and be consistent. What was the clearance on that car, the ground clearance? Oh, wait, it's quite low. I mean, incredibly low. Not as low as the, sorry, on the passive car,

it wasn't as low as the active car, as much high, they had to make it quite high up. But they were generating a lot of downforce. And I think they had... I think it could have been more difficult for them to get used again to controlling the downforce without the active. So it's a little bit of relearning stuff they'd forgotten, I think. Now, were you at all worried worried that you feel the car in any way was unsafe as you embarked on the first race that year? No, I never felt it was unsafe. I thought it was hard to drive. But I thought that's just because I'm Damon Ellen, that's it, and Senna. So I couldn't go out and match these lap times. I just thought this is, for me, it was a new comparison and a new benchmark. So I drove that car knowing that there was, you know, we

had work to do on setup because it wasn't quite as good as it wasn't in the optimal range that you wanted it to be in. And so I think everyone at Williams and Atom were trying to work out how he got there. But then we were also distracted by, I think, a little bit by the performance of the Benetan, which had suddenly come up on the rails and was winning races. So it was the first race that year? Was it Australia? Brazil. Brazil was the second, I thought.

Second. Well, I had this race in IED, didn't we, which was in Japan as well. You're right. It was Brazil. Asia was second. Yeah, okay. So, Senna's on pole loses control of the car, doesn't finish. Yeah.

Second race. Senna's on pole loses control of the car, doesn't finish. Well, he got knocked off, didn't he? Oh, that's right. Yeah. And then, sorry, he's had non-finishes. He said, two't he? Oh, yeah, that's right. Yeah. And then so he's had a non finishes. He said, two non finishes, your second, you know, second, but long way behind Michael. And Michael's won both. Yep. So you're heading into Emola. Hmm. And you're on your heels. The team is on its heels. Yeah. A lot of

disquiet, I think, I mean, I think Edson was having doubts about, you know, he was quite surprised at the way the team worked and the performance of the car, he was a bit baffled by that and then there was, he was worried that maybe Ben and Tim were doing something with their traction control, they shouldn't have been doing and stuff, so there was, it was a definitely off-balance situation, but I was not the lead man in that situation.

Did you share Senna's belief, because he had talked about how after he got knocked out of the Pacific Grand Prix, he was listening to, he could hear Shumaka going by, and he could, he claimed, he could hear the traction control. Yeah. Did you share that view that there was something in that car

either software or hardware-wise? I never heard that myself. And all I had to go on was that, I had to believe that there was something fishy going on. But it was not something that I could control and not something I had any influence over. So I pretty much stuck to back, got back to work and on the car we had, which was in testing, you do what you could to try and

get a balance on that and feel comfortable with it, comfortable. In the same way that you probably remember exquisite detail about the circumstances and the days around your father's tragedy, do you have that same sort of recollection of Emola? tragedy. Do you have that same sort of recollection of Emola? Aspects of it, yeah. But I think it was different because I was also racing myself and I think... You had to focus on what you had to do. Yeah. I think you don't feel shocked. When you're racing, I think you have the protective wall around you a little bit, I think you managed to remove yourself from overfeeling things. Obviously when you're sitting at home watching TV, you're

pretty unprepared for something. But when you go to racetrack, you're kind of more prepared. Yeah, and also you'll, you know, something happens, you kind of know how to just pull cold water on it and not let it affect you too much. So were you shaken at all by the crash on the Friday? Yeah, I was surprised at that, but you just thought, it looked horrific, but he got out okay, it was concast and you just thought, well, that hurt, you know, that was... Were you of the view that the car is still safe enough, that, you know, the crash is the crash, but you're protected in the car.

Was that kind of your view? Yeah, I think so. I think I believed in carbon fiber and that it was incredibly strong. It's going to hurt you. Like, hell, if you have a big shunt, but you should be okay. Yeah, I think we did think that the worst was over a little bit. What certainly wasn't anything like it was with aluminum cars that ruptured a fuel tank or something like that. So you...

So what did you think on Saturday when Roland died? It was horrible. You know, it was a horrible thing. I drove because they stopped the session, but I still was on the circuit, so I drove past and saw them attending to him. And was your first assumption to another horrible shunt, but he's probably okay? Or did you know this? No, I didn't. I knew that that was not a good one. There was something about it.

I don't know what it just, I just looked like. There was a much more. See, you know, you know, also the, the location, it's not going to be a small impact or a place like that. It's going to be pretty far high speed. And I don't know. It's just something about it. And then the fact they stopped the session and more time goes by then eventually you start to fear the worst.

It's so eerie to see, I think I was telling you I was in Emola this year and spent the entire day there and went to obviously where Santa crashed and went to where Ratson Berkras. We saw all the crash sites and it looks like the margin for error is so much smaller than it appears on television. And Roland's crash, you don't really see well on television. When you go back to the pit, did you go back out to qualify again? Or did it was the session completely on? Do you know, I don't know.

We didn't run the car after that on the Friday. We pulled on Saturday. Saturday. Saturday. No, I don't think we did. Because Arathon was, he was really shaken by this. I mean, he seemed to be... He seemed almost angry, actually. Yeah. I think it was derailed a little bit by, or upset by Rubens' accident. I think it was in a very high emotional state. I think he'd

had a lot on his plate. And I think I talk about that in the book. I think people have had a lot on his plate. And I think I talk about that in the book. I think people have wondered about his condition. And I know that he'd spoken to my wife because she was in the motel and he was speaking to her about having a family. And she said, what's it like having a family, you know? And because she said, you want me to leave? Why do you get changed? And he said, no, you just want to, you know, talk and that was on race day. So I think he internalized a lot. I think he took a lot upon himself. I think he felt enormous responsibility for people in Brazil and the projects he had to do with helping young people. And I think he really felt that he had to do with helping young people and I think he really felt that he had a job to do, which he couldn't somehow racing enabled him to do. Through his racing, he was able to be

at the center. Then he could do these great works that he had. Did you know he took an Austrian flag in the car that day? No, I didn't know that on the day. No, I only read about that later. I have always believed that Senna's crash occurred because of a technical problem in the car. I always thought the steering column broke. It's really your book that has probably changed my view on that. I think the way you describe the accident, coupled with your experience in that car

that has probably, not probably, it has changed my mind. And it's also made me come to accept something that I think had always been a blind spot to me. You see, when you idolize somebody, it's very hard to believe that they can make a technical error. You just can't believe it, right? So I think if you idolize Senna, you can't really believe that he lost control of the car. It's easier to believe that the steering column broke. And there are lots of good, you know, I mean, we create narratives. That's sort of what we do.

And you could go through all of the stories about how that cockpit was built and how the steering move was in the wrong position. But they had to add an extra couple of inches to send a steering wheel. And of course, if you look at the shear forces on that, that's going to be the thing. And you can watch the onboard camera. And yet, in a very unemotional way, you sort of dismantle a lot of that logic. You're right. I mean, it went through it in quite a lot of detail. Well, that's because I had to, after the event, to go back through stuff with the engineers to see if I could share any light and what had happened. The data I was able to see showed me what concurred with the onboard footage was that he was putting opposite

lock on on the car and controlling the car. And my argument has always been that if the steering wheel column broke, you'd put more lock on to make it work. And if you imagine your... So let's explain this to people because I think for people who don't drive a race car, they won't know the difference between lock, opposite lock, understeer, oversteer, etc. I mean, I think you do a masterful job explaining this. But let's go back to set the stage a little bit. Temorello is a sweeping left hand.

It's a very fast left hand corner that is taken basically flat out, assuming your tires are up to snuff. Now you also mentioned something really interesting, which was the line that he took. You were surprised at the line he took on the first flying lap after the safety car left. There was a couple of bumps, a couple of indents, like it

had subsided, the road had slightly subsided close to the curb on the inside line, which is the racing line. But I didn't like going on that line because I upset the car. For me, I upset the car. So I stayed wide a bit and it was, it seemed to miss the bumps. But yeah, the reason of that, because I didn't want to go where he went, you yeah, the reason I did that, because I didn't want to go where he went, you know, not because of what happened to him, but because for me, it was in a harder ride, but I'm not at in center, and he was at in center, and he drove the car, he rung

everything out of every car he raced, you know, and I think that you mentioned that the only real flying lap he had, which would have been what, lap six, he had the third fastest time of the day. And that's with 65 kilos of fuel and cold tires. Yeah, they were cold, not as pumped up as they should have been because they had to go around the safety car. Well, it wasn't called the safety car then called the safety car then I can't remember anyway So it wasn't a quick answer slow safety car. The super slow safety car So there are I my own is that there are really what I say and what I believe is that I don't believe the steering column broke

For two reasons one is if the steering column broke then your instinct is to Keep steering and that means your hands would have he would have just right if the steering column broke, then your instinct is to keep steering. That means your hands would have just... Right. So that's for the listener, what that means is you're describing that as lock. So if you're steering column breaks and you're doing a left-handed turn, you're going to be turning left as far as is humanly possible. Yeah, because your brain will not...

It's disconnected. So you're a passenger. So you just instinctively put more on. And even if you don't put it on, if the steering column broke, then there'd be suddenly a less resistance to the lock that he's putting on and his hands would put more lock on because it's suddenly released. But instead, you saw the opposite. So explain what opposite lock is and how it's used to correct for a rear

loss of traction. So it's the attitude of the car changes in relation to the direction of travel. So when it's oversteering, the nose of the car is pointing more to the inside of the corner than, or let's say the back of the car or the middle of the car is actually at an angle to the line of travel. So what happens? So is it safe if I describe that to people as when you're over steering the rear of the car is turning faster than the front of the car into the direction you want to go? It's more like a compass, imagine a compass, right? A compass spins from the middle. So if you want it to point dead north, that's good. If it starts to point slightly west of where you want it to go,

which is north, then in order to get the whole thing to keep going north, you have to turn the wheel to the right. So the direction of the point of the car is to the left, you put the steering lock on, to the right, and that means the back of the car would act as more like a dart. You know, it'll actually start to straighten up, and as the car straightens up, you put lock back on, so you point north. Understeer is where we're going, we're going to go into understeer. But I think initially he was understeering because he reduced throttle. Yeah, I don't think it was ever understeering. I think it was, he only ever got oversteered because he was turning into the corner,

so he's putting lock on to make the car go around the corner. Oh, you don't think he ever understood. You think this was immediate loss of rear traction? I think it was a change of attitude, because you can see from Schumacher's onboard camera that he bought the car bottoms. And when the car hit the bumps, the car lost downforce and starts to slew slightly

to the back of the car car come down to the right, so he puts a little bit of right lock on to compensate and then he puts more back lock up. When that settle down he's put lock back on to go left again. So the first one he recovered? Yeah, well recovered, he just did what he expected it to do. The next one, it was even greater and you get more of an opposite lock on. And it suddenly snaps to the right.

And I just think at the speed he was going, the loads he was going, I think it's entirely plausible that the tank slapper don't, and we call it the tank slapper in bike racing. It was just a massive sideways, and with low tire pressures, you would have got a lot of lateral movement on the tire, and then it springs back.

And at that speed, it can throw you off the track. I mean, I don't see that, you know, at not detracting anything. I think he was so motivated to win this race, that I think he was putting himself right out there at the end of the branch. And maybe even a guy like Erton couldn't drive that car beyond a certain point. Without something giving somewhere.

And I think the way you describe it and you go into more detail in the book, we don't have to go through it here now because I want people to read this book. It's so great. But the way you talk about even being able to see like one of the radio lights or something on the wheel, the yellow light. And so you actually have this frame of reference to actually see when he goes from lock to opposite lock. And I think there was just something about reading your account that along with reading Adrian

Newe's accounts several years ago, that really sort of changed my view a bit and made me realize like even your heroes can make mistakes and can lose control of the car. I mean, it's a lost control of the car in business. Lots of time to do that. In Brazil. And we push the cars to the limits and ourselves to the limits. And my argument really in the book is that if you put someone

under even someone as brilliant as Erton, under a lot of stress with lots of different doubts, lots of different questions, lots of different problems, and then you put them in a very competitive situation and you expect them to perform with a clear head in the same way that they have done in the past. I think something's gotta give somewhere, you know? You add in the fatality of the previous day,

the emotional state, the guy the determination to win the fact that he's in a different team. It's not going the way he wanted it to in the championship. If you set, if you put someone at air to that situation, is he going to back down? No, he's not going to back down. He's going to be at and center. He's going to go and go further beyond where he's ever been before because that's what it and center was. He's not going to go, okay, I'll feather the throttle through Tamboretto. Do you

want me at center? So you write about something which is that, in the days that followed, the last thing that was on your mind was to go to Brazil for this funeral, not out of any lack of respect for Santa, but probably out of the need to be with your family, frankly, and... Also, I didn't wanna go to,

I know, it's not all that. It's also, yeah, it's bringing back memories that the last time you were at a funeral was obviously a very traumatic experience for you were at a funeral was, you know, obviously a very traumatic experience for you. But Jackie Stewart nudged you to go. Yeah. Jackie rang me and said, are you going to Etn's funeral?

I said, oh, I don't know. Jackie, I can't, you know, and he said, you will regret it for your, you know, to your dying day if you don't go. He basically didn't set me straight, but he made a very important point to me, which is that you have to do this in a way. Because you're gonna be a racing driver, you can't just sidestepped the nasty bits. He's about the most capable person to say that.

There's no one that could say that to you with more credibility that was still alive at that point. And in the absence of my dad being around, he was a kind of surrogate, father figure to me, giving me the right advice and impressing on me, the importance of being there. And he was absolutely right. So eternal gratitude to Jackie for that. Not something you want to do. You don't want to get on a plane and go to Brazil and go to some to be confronted with the box they put someone in when they

alive anymore. You know, it's horrible. But when, you know, Ense funeral was the most extraordinary event, you saw how he affected people. And that's what he'd lived with. That's what he'd been carrying that nobody in F1 really saw. They didn't really see him in that. They thought he was a racing driver. There's a bit nuts at times, you know, and a bit over-emotional, or maybe that's what they saw. But they didn't see the way to the nation. They didn't see the way to the nation. They didn't see what he represented, and the hope he had given people in Brazil. It's really amazing to this day. I mean, I talk about this elsewhere.

I can't meet someone from Brazil who, when I start talking to them about Senate, even if they weren't alive, right? Like, or even if they were five years old. Our nanny, for example, is Brazilian. And she was four, maybe five, the day he died. It's her earliest memory of life. Because that's every Sunday, that's all you did was you watched Santa race. And the country stopped for three days. And more than a million people line the streets for this funeral. And to this day, I mean, it's like,

if I'm in an Uber and the driver happens to be from Brazil and we get talking about Senna, it doesn't matter if they're 20 or if they're 60, this is the single most important person they'll talk about. But yeah, they're emotionally, you know, very strong nation. They're so passionate about everything. And they loved what Eton had done and given them. They'd been through some tough times, and the football is one of the things that left the nation.

But Eton had taken them to another place as well and was proud to be Brazilian and and it was a very, very cool, true blow to all those people in Brazil. You know, they couldn't really understand what had happened. I don't think for a long time it was too shocking. My daughter wanted me to ask you this question when she knew I would be speaking with you, which was, first of all, she was like, oh my God, he's on TV. When I told her I was eating Thai TV because of course every Sunday we get up to watch Formula One.

So she knows you as the guy on TV. She's less, I had to remind her of like all you've done. But her question is, were you afraid to get back in the car for the next race? Well, because now you've got two weeks for the dust to settle. Yeah. You've fully processed that two drivers have now been killed in the span of two days. Another one lucky to be alive. So you could have easily lost three drivers in three days. Well, I'll put it, I'll put it like this. The enjoyment of driving had evaporated from that point on, it was a task I had to do. So how long did that feeling persist?

I think for a good maybe a couple more races or something or maybe certainly Monaco was a tough one. I didn't wasn't sure whether I could cope with carrying all the hopes of the entire team. You know, I was not at the Zenner. It was abundantly clear. You know, I was okay, but I wasn't gonna be able to do the things that they wanted from Xenna. So that was a wobbly one.

How much fear did you have of physical harm versus the pressure you're describing of, wait a minute, like two years ago, I was a test driver and now I'm the potentially the guy who's carrying the hopes of one of the most storied teams in Formula One. Because those are two sort of different things. I mean, they can overlap a little bit, but one of them comes back to this real visceral concern of, I can't let happen to my family.

What happened to me? Yeah, I think I did have the brakes on being pushed into taking unnecessary risks. So you might say, okay, well, you're not a proper racing driver if you, that's what Edna would say, you know, if you stop taking risks and you're not a proper racing driver, well, listen. Did George talk with you about this at all? Well, I mean, when you say talk, I mean, was your wife in this moment of, at this point, it's back to being gladiators, right?

I don't think so, because I mean, if you're gladiator, I've done a worse like being gladiator. I think you're basically trying to hurt someone else, and I'm not that sort of person, so. But in terms of the risk, I guess. Yeah, you're showing your skills and you're also competing. And I think that's the key thing is to actually, you want to be the first guy. You don't want to be the second guy. So getting out there and racing is partly what you love doing.

But then when you've just had an experience like that, it sort of soures it a bit. And I think there was just too much pressure on everyone. Did you talk with Jackie about this more? Because again, in the absence of your father who would have been the perfect person to have talked this through with you, did you feel like I want to understand from someone who's lived through this,

losing teammates, for example. This was all tied up or lip. I have said, I was affected with the thought that because Edons accident was incredibly public, you know, and shocking and so forth. So definitely my wife did not want to hurt children to see anything like that happen to me. So protecting the kids from any potential shocking incident was also part of our lives then I think after that. And was I think increasingly part of my modus of going racing. My dad raised with three children. A lot of racing drives in those days had kids, including Jackie. Inzo Ferrari used to say that a driver with children was a second-alap slower. Well, there was a lot of world champions with children.

And I think that some, in some sense, is the goal is to survive. So if the goal is to survive, then you're doing the responsible thing by performing to the very highest level you can possibly can without going over that threshold. And you know, Erton didn't have children. You know, I think it's very easy to think of as racing drivers could get to the position where they think, well, if I get hurt then that's my own stupid form. You know, but when you've got a family, you think, if I get hurt, someone else is going to get hurt as well.

That's a slightly different thought. In the last point I want to say about that weekend is something else you wrote about in the book, which again, I think just speaks to the beautiful level of detail you bring to these, all of these little stories that just don't get told. Was when you showed up for Monaco in the Williams truck and sure enough, there's Senna's clothing. Well, it wasn't, I mean, wasn't expected.

Yeah, it was just, it's one of those things where you talk about it. Like, and it's so obvious when you talk about it, which is every day a driver goes, takes off his street clothes, puts on his racing kit, gets in a car, but invari invariably sometimes that driver doesn't come back. Yeah. That was something that a detail which is a really hard thing to consider, but of course gets lost in the sensational stories. Is that, you know, that happened a lot with people in my dad's era and they, someone would have to go and clear out their room. They'd have to go back to their room, get their stuff, pack it up, and make sure we got back to their family. Or their loved ones. Imagine that.

Yeah, imagine how many times that took place. They're very poignant experiences, and also even just to think about that, you know, we have all this stuff around us, you know, and we're certainly not there. The stuff somehow we linger in the stuff we have, and we leave other people with that responsibility to deal with it. Do you remember any of that from your father? Well, yeah, absolutely. I mean,

do you remember actively helping your mom with, I've never actually thought of it until I read you writing about it, right, which is this idea of like, well, there's still a drawer full of socks and shirts and pants. Yeah. You know, so what does one do with these? Well, you know, and of course, then you have to decide whether you're going to throw it away. So for a long time, I think my mom kept a lot of my dad's ties for me. These were ties that were about 10 centimeters across the 1970s ties, like bright colors, but they were my dad's ties. So, you know, he kept them quite sweetly. She kept them because she thought maybe I'd like them, not to wear myself, perhaps, but,

you know, as mementos and things. But what do you do with... You should see in the race, you have to let go of this stuff. And if you look at it, you'd think, well, I could wear it, but it's a bit odd wearing your dad's clothes. You're still attached to it because of... It brings you close, it's a relic. But can you let go of it? Can you go, okay, we're going to throw this stuff away. We don't need, Bay.

I mean, Bay, all the sorts of fans out there, they love all that stuff, wouldn't they? But is it disrespectful? You go through all those thoughts, you go through it, you just go through all these little questions and you can't find the answers to them. You know, what is the right way forward? The other thing that's sort of interesting about this story,

at least to me, thinking about it through these lenses is, I don't get the sense from the book, and you're never explicit about this, but I don't get the sense that Frank or Patrick sat down to have long discussions about this either. Is that am I correct in assuming that or whether times when they wanted to know how you were doing and they wanted to talk about your head outside of the car? No. But then they have their own stuff to deal with as well.

So it's not normal about me. They also are going through Imagine what it's like for Frank. He signed Erton to raise 15 imagine it's like for Patrick I can't imagine it his car and people are saying it's failed. He's having to go to Yeah, what is Adrian? I mean, how do these guys all feel? Yeah, it's the everyone had a lot of stress to do with the engineers the guy works on the car Not an easy time for for any of them. So it's one of the contradictions with us, but we focus a lot on the driver and some ways the public see the driver as the public facing person, the person of the most interest, you know, but it's not all about the driver as well. You work with the, you rely on the team, you work with the team, they went through a lot, they were really battered after that experience and some of them still today don't want to talk about it.

As you head into the second half of the 94 season, all of a sudden the gap between you and Schumacher is narrowing. And as you head into Suzuki, I think you're separated by a point Right. What was the situation in Suzuka? I had to he Yeah, well if he finished ahead of you, he would win. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, but then he crashed Hmm trying to cut you off that was in Adelaide. Yeah, so it's a Zuka He oh, sorry, I'm sorry, sorry, sorry, I miss book. So, Suzuki was the second to last week, which you won. I had to beat him to keep the championship over there.

And you did, yes. Okay. So, Suzuki is the race that you... It came down to match play, basically. Yes. It was followed by hell. And you wrote something very interesting about this, which was you have this moment where you feel like you can't do anymore.

In the book, you actually describe this as you call out to Errton. And you say, like, if you're up there watching me, I need your help right now. And then you describe the next lap as an out-of-body experience. And I'm reading that. What you're describing sounds exactly like the way Senna described his 88 qualifying session in Monaco, which was he wasn't driving the car. Like he was part of the car, the car was being driven. And I don't know if that was just a coincidence that because you didn't reference anything about Monaco, but it was just interesting that you talked about having this thought of calling out to him for help as your former teammate and then driving,

I think the word you used as you were possessed. Yeah. That's anywhere I can describe it. I mean, it was, I'm sure that there's a perfectly logical explanation or one that can be described or explained quite. In scientific terms, yeah. But logically, you know, I think that we all know that every now and then we do something, we hear people say things like, I don't know how I managed to lift the car up or something

like that to get it off some kid or something. You know, we have more potential than we are aware of and sometimes it to release that potential, we have to play tricks with our mind and we have to say, imagine that pain isn't there and you know I've had stories of people who you know got dreadful pain but they can manage to cope with it by so meditating and all these things to do with fully exploring what the mind is capable doing have got lots of very strange stories attached to it and I think people are right to be skeptical of them and question them. But if I had tricked myself into, through

not deliberately, but just simply, I wanted to win that race, I knew I had to win that race. And I also wanted us to win for it and as well, there was an element of wanting to beat the Benet and team because of this story, this story, this experience we'd had in 94. So I was massively motivated to win that race and I'd run out of steam, I couldn't go any faster and he's catching me and I knew he was going to get me on the line and I just thought, okay, I need some help from somewhere. And so I just said, me in my mind, it was a kind of like air and if you're there, I can need a bit of a hand and I swear to God,

it was like someone had got my foot and planted it flat on the floor. I couldn't lift it off. I couldn't lift off. I'm going through the S's. I'm going, oh my god, my hands are like, my hands are just correcting the car. And I literally was disconnected

from what my body was doing. And it was just like I was willing it to win. You know, willing it just purely through thought, through some sort of telepathic kind of way I was controlling things. And eventually I got halfway around, I just, oh no, I got like, I'm sorry, I'm going to have to come back here. This is all going to go horribly wrong. And I sort of, I can remember literally feeling like I was coming back into the car and at the hairpin and going, well, I'll take it from here. You know, I'm sure we can finish this off.

And now people listening to this will go, you're nuts, you're making this up, you know, but that's what happened. And I can't explain it in any other way than I just did. It was, you know, I beat Michael in the wet. So let's be honest, that little me beating Michael Schumacher. Someone must have helped me. Well, it's funny. I'll pause for a moment only to say something for the person who's listening to this who isn't a die hard F1 fan. Many abundant has actually, with the benefit

of the retrospectoscope, said you're arguably one of the most underrated world champs ever. I mean, you're incredibly modest, you're so uncomfortable sometimes. Do you remember when they did the, this is your life special about 20 years ago? I found a clip of this on YouTube. Have you ever watched it? No.

Well, what? I think no, you're talking about. You know what I'm saying? TV show, this is your life. Yeah, they got me on that one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You have to go back and watch this, because I'll tell you what I can't get over on that show

is how uncomfortable you are being commended. Mm. Just think about it. The whole show is singing the praise of the person whose this is your life. They're bringing all these people out. Everybody's talking about you and blah, blah, blah, blah. They're bringing all these people out. Everybody's talking about you and blah, blah, blah, blah. You might give me a feel on couch. I know.

I'm sorry. I'm just talking about it. But the level of discomfort in watching you be praised by people is it's palpable to watch. Now, maybe, maybe I'm just a bit more tuned into that now because I, you know because I've read everything you've written. But that was my reading of that. Now I could be wrong. I'd be curious to know what your wife or someone who knows you well would think or what your children would think if they saw that. Is that just dad's countenance or is that actually dad being uncomfortable being praised

in this way? I am uncomfortable being praised in this way. I am uncomfortable being praised. I mean, there were times when I was in therapy, which I talk about in the book, where my therapist is going, well, I think it did really well. And I'd be going, oh, no, don't say that. I want you to criticize me. I want to know how I can be better and what I've done wrong.

And now I'm much better with that. I mean, honestly, if someone says that was a great shot, even if it's rubbish, I go, okay, well, that's very nice of you to say so, I really appreciate it. But I don't know, yeah, it just made me feel really queasy about getting compliments. I don't know why.

I'm sure that's an awful failing in a human being. I don't know, I don't know if that's true actually. What I do think is I think we celebrate far too much people's achievements, the paths they don't warrant so much celebration as we give them. I mean, what does it mean? Racing driver, yeah, everyone wants to race and they don't want to win for everyone else. They want to win for themselves.

So it's a kind of selfish activity. Yeah, every now and then you want to win for someone else, and you, yeah, it's nice to do that. But is it so praiseworthy? I don't know. I mean, I think it depends, right? I think it depends on, I mean, I understand your point, of course, right? You know, compared to a missionary doctor or someone who's, you know, out there saving a life or something like that, maybe not, but it's still a metaphor for life, right? It's still the substrate by which we can take lessons and expand. And it still pushes the boundaries of what it is that we're capable of. And I think there's something about that

that Senna is a most extreme example of that that we've probably ever seen in all of sport where one individual's passion and pursuit is, first of all, it's a tool by which he was able to help millions of people in his own country directly and financially. But I think more importantly, it's sort of a hope that people cling to. And, you know, in the words of David Foster Wallace, you know, we all worship something. There's such a thing as atheism. So we're all in the pursuit and worship of something.

I think also there's something that just maybe just occurred to me, but I think also that I've learned to appreciate that opportunity doesn't come to everyone. And some people look at somebody who's got had an opportunity and they've done something with it and they've done the right thing with it and they've gone, oh thank god you did that. I didn't get the opportunity to do that, but I'm glad you did because that's what I would like to done. And so when they get praised, if you get praised for something, it's not you they're praising, it's celebrating the fact that somebody has had an opportunity and they've

triumphed over the something. And you're right, that's what gives us all hope. But maybe if we got the opportunity, we do the same or it's a generosity when you're celebrated, celebrity, I think you'll say congratulations because it's sad we're celebrating something for all of us. I think that's something which I perhaps never really properly understood. I felt a bit like a kid getting too many Christmas presents

or something. I don't know. Well, you almost got the Christmas president 94 because as we head into Adelaide, of course, now you're down by a point. If Schumacher finishes ahead of you, he wins the championship. If you finish ahead of him, you win the championship. And he crashes. And all you'd have to do at this point is finish the race and you win. And then something is wrong with your car. If I recall, it was suspension. Yeah. So what happened is we were racing Hammer and Tongues and a long way ahead of everyone else. Yeah, because Nigel was on pole.

Nigel's on pole, but had a horrible start. It was basically a two-man race. Two-man race. And it was sort of Suzuki part two. We went straight back into the battle we'd had at the previous race. I did put him under a lot of pressure, but then he started to creep away from me. And he got so far away, I couldn't see round, it was like a street

track that went around block serves 90 degree corners and he'd just gone round the 90 degree corner. I couldn't see that he'd gone off and hit the wall and come back on. So when I came around the corner, I'm right on his tail and he's coming back on the track and obviously not up to speed. And I thought this is my chance. I'm never going to get this again because he was he'd already managed to pull away from me. So I thought he's slipped up. He's got managed to get back on the track and I'll have a go at passing him on this corner here. So I went down the inside but he closed the door. I mean, touched my car and damaged the suspension. He

crashed out. So his race was run, but unfortunately, my car was also damaged and I couldn't carry on either. So he'd won the championship. And a lot of people were very cross about that. I'm gonna have to say, I look back. At the time, I thought, oh, what have I done? That was a stupid, clumsy move I just did. But... Three British of you. Yeah, three is. Come.

Well, when I look at it again, it still looks like that to me. But anyway, what I didn't know was his car was probably terminally damaged anyway. So if he knew that his car was damaged, then he knew he had to do what he did. And if he didn't know, then it was just a defensive move that worked for him luckily, I suppose, because my car got broken. I think the hardest part of that story for

me, sort of cheering you on is, like, you're just thinking, come on, guys, you don't need the suspension to be perfect. It just needs to be good enough for you to limp to the finish line. There ain't no limit on you don't limp in a full long car. They pair things down to the bare minimum. If one part of the suspension is buckled, it's going to just snap the moment you hit the brakes or put any load on it. It's going to collapse.

How does that race put the exclamation mark at the end of the most emotionally draining season of your life, which is the lowest low. And it almost, you come within literally one foot, there are 30 centimeters of width. And you could have had the highest high in the season. You know, I could also have been at the same phase. I mean, is that basically why?

Cause I've heard you in interviews in the last 20 years, you've never sort of complained about that race. You've always had a very, and maybe this is, I don't know how much of this is, is just, you know, you're being polite and it's not your nature to versus like you really had a sanguine view of, you know what, look, I gave it the best I could.

It's amazing that I was the second, you know, I had the second most points that season, but I don't have hard feelings about it,'s sort of the way I feel you describe it. I think in 94, I gave it everything I had and wanted so badly to win. I want to ask you a question. Did you see, did Michael set himself up somehow the villain was in some way what happened to Eton was not his fault, but I mean I think a lot of people kind of complicate. Here's the thing. I mean I'm gonna just put my bias on the table right. You can see my laptop over there. It's got an MP4 for me. I mean you've got

I'm a Santa fan like no other. I've never liked Schumacher. I have to be honest with you. I never I always felt he played in a gray area of the sport. Let's look at 94. Well, I'm just saying, I asked you that question because I sort of knew that that was the situation, not for you personally, but there was definitely some animosity towards the way Michael went about racing. Yeah, and part of that's not fair to Michael, right?

So part of it is, I think if Michael had not raced at Emola, I don't think Santa would have died. That's not Michael's fault. No, the way is not. It's not his fault. But that's sort of the view that I carry, right? Was Santa was convinced that Schumacher was riding traction control. I probably think that's true. Remember, Benetan refused to submit their data to F1 after that race, incur it a huge fine. Several races later, they get busted for using an illegal fueling filter. I mean, they were always sort of doing something a little bit gray. So I think there are some fans that just immediately fell into a Schumacher is not the good guy.

But you can also look at Etten and say, Etten was someone who's very volatile. And if he felt that someone had treated him badly, he would almost never forgive them. I don't think he ever forgave Prost for Monaco with 88-4. I think that was the beginning of the end of that animosity. And I think maybe that was a weakness. It is.

And my wife asked me about this. She goes, you sort of have a double standard with Sennah. Like, you know, you're very quick to overlook his flaws. I don't know that that's true. I think what it is. I think, I think it's how open a book he was and how volatile he was that I actually see as appealing. It's the, there's no ambiguity of where you stood with him. It's kind of Greek theater, isn't it, with, with Erton? Yes. He's kind of destined. He hadn't got any choice in the matter.

His life, his personality, the things that made him who he was, these forces were driving him. And you look back at some of the earlier interviews. I mean, there was an amazing interview with Prost in 90 maybe when he was so upset at Santa, but he made this point which was like God Santa acts like he can't die in a car You know, he drives like someone who's immune from death, but he said but he's not You know, of course never would anybody imagine what that would foreshadow four years later.

So, yes, going back to your final race in 94, I thought Schumacher was out to lunch. I mean, I thought that was completely unfair. But what should have happened was that the people who run the sport should have said, you can't do that. They didn't. They didn't do that with it. And when he crashed into Prost in Suzuka, although I always thought that was sort of payback for it. It's not.

It's not. I know. I know. You can't run. We can't let drivers have that. Yeah. You can't be mercenaries. No, it's not. It's not death wish. You were, I mean, whatever that film was with Charles, but you're too young to remember. No, I'm totally remembered. You know, so you can't take the law into your own hands. That's what they're there for. They're there to stop things getting out of hand. And they just abdicated their responsibility to running things properly. And you know, that meant that open the door for everyone in all brushes of sport to go about the sport in the way they saw it being executed in Formula One. For as everyone looks down, it sees Formula One as the pinnacle of everything.

That's the way they work it. So, in American racing, they're a lot tougher. It's incredible. You know, they can be quite tough on drivers who are bad driving and stuff like that in the States, particularly on ovals as well, because it is very dangerous. So we're going to skip the 95 season just for the sake of time because there's still so much I want to talk about post-retirement. But into the 96 season, you're racing very well.

You've now got this new upstart. The another son of, as you describe him, right, from my home country, at what point, even though it came down to the last race, it's sort of a nail-biting season all over again, your form looked incredible that season, right? I mean, was there a part of you that was starting to accept halfway through that season that this is your season? Yeah, I think before the season started. It was always a one year contract. I didn't know it was going to be my last season with Williams, but you know, I knew when we got to Monza, my Monza, which was a bit

later in the day, but I mean at the start he's, and I thought this is got to be perfect this season. I've got to not be distracted and I've got to polish the job. I knew I had a chance, the car was brilliant and I knew I had a guy who'd never done a lot of the tracks he was going to go to, so no matter how fast he was or motivated, he was at a disadvantage to me. I had no excuse not to beat it really. And he was a good teammate. You know, he was cocky and irritating at times, but charming with it as well. Would track, was it esterol when he claimed he could take the non-racing one?

You did that at the start of the season. Like in pre-season testing, right? Pre-season testing. He's sort of fat down and was, I think he did it as a way of getting noticed by the team and the engineers by saying, you know, do you think anyone could overtake round the last corner and boasting really and catching everyone's attention in the process and we'd sit there and go, can I, can I just completely mad? What was he thinking? What's he talking about? Anyway, did it. That's the amazing thing and he couldn't have passed a better person. No,

and he did it and also I was, I was in the post-race cooldown room with him as well and Mike was very cross with him because he claimed it was dangerous and the irony of that is unbelievable. But that's the extraordinary thing about these guys is they are never wrong in any situation. They're mind, they've tricked their mind to believe they have to be right in every situation. And there's only one rule and it's their rule. That's their way they approach it. And someone told me the story about Jack Nicholas being asked in an interview once by someone, some get together with the public and meet the fan type thing. And the guy asked him, Jack,

when you three putted in the masters in whatever he said, I never three putted in the masters. You know, you did, I saw you, I was there. I said, no, I said, never three putted in the, I never three putted my whole career. You know, you just basically explain that people who are that competitive and train their mind, they don't see themselves as making mistakes. Well, and you could almost argue that's a trait.

Like that's a feature of their greatness is the ability to completely suppress anything that could be negative or that could reflect on them having made an error. Now, I've always found that interesting because you take the opposite, like you're someone that comes in with a totally different personality, which is highly willing to accept, oh my God, what did I make a mistake here? How can I learn from this? Which, tactically, maybe a mistake.

Well, that's the point I'm going to make is the evidence would suggest both phenotypes can produce success. So I don't know that it's necessary that one has to be blind to their mistakes to be successful. In fact, I would argue that that's a harder way to live your life, isn't it? I would say that Alain Prost was self-critical, openly self-critical and willing to accept a little bit of his fallibilities maybe. And I think that in studies with sports psychologists, they have identified the people who are the best people, are more self-critical of themselves. So they actually,

they'd see themselves as a working progress and they're always trying to improve, whereas the ones that have a problem are the ones that feel they've got it all and they don't need it, they've got nothing else to learn. And it's a kind of harder position and it's easier to fracture, and you have to say in some cases when Michael was racing and things weren't going well, he fell apart, it didn't compute, I think, in some cases. And I think he showed a certain fragility, but most of the time he was so strong as a competitor that, you know, his confidence with what gave him also some power over when everyone else.

When that season ends, you take a concord over to New York, you end up on Letterman. Well, they put a car, yeah, they said, do you want to go on the show and they put a fake, yeah. I didn't choose to go concord over to New York. You end up on Letterman. Well, they put a card. Yeah, they said, do you want me on the show and they put a fake? Yeah, yeah. I didn't choose to go concord, but they said he was there. Yeah, yeah. Well, it's kind of amazing. It would be only a few years, three years later, four years later, that plane would be grounded, never fly again. So you kind of got the surprise from Letterman when you were on your sort of victory lap, so to speak, right? Because you pulled out a picture of your dad, which again was done in good spirits.

It wasn't, it was done as a way to basically make a point which was you were the first person to ever win a Formula One championship as the son of another Formula One champion. And I don't think at that point in your career, by the way, anybody would say, well, of course, once you're the son of a champion, it's easier for you. I mean, if anything, by that point, you had established, you didn't have a single

break your way in terms of being the son of Graham Hill. In fact, I think even Letterman rift you about it a little bit that you still got, you lost your seat. They didn't help me keep my Williams drive. No. I don't think Frank saw any benefit in that just having a son of around the place. So no, I don't know. I don't think Frank saw any benefit in that just having a son of around the place. So, no, I don't know. I don't know whether I... I know anybody can answer that one. I mean, is it easier? Is it less easy? I don't know. A lot of the guys whose dad didn't have successful careers, they went on to be successful racing drivers. There's lots of sons of out there. Did you think about it when Josh was racing?

Yeah, I did. I thought it must be difficult for him. You know, it must be difficult because he can't just go racing and be treated like... Everyone knew that this was... Someone who could potentially be a third time... You know, third generation world champion, no pressure son. I think that Josh was very mature and could cope with that. But nevertheless, it's a fact. And you kind of don't know how to deal with it.

But you kind of ignore it. You can't, you don't want to keep banging on about it. But it's there all the time. It's just a factor of life. And you're going, oh, well, that's it. You know, that's... Now we've got to get back to the racing. And actually, the only thing that really makes any difference, and the only thing that people really care about is where do you finish? So the next year, 97, you're in the Aero's car and then you spend the last two years with Eddie Jordan, right? Yeah, yeah.

You managed to win a race in the Jordan car, right? Yeah. Was it hungry? No, it was spa. It was spa. So your last win was at spa. Yeah, epic circuit. Yeah, but I knew, and I couldn't do that again. That was

a two race in the wet. I'm 38 years old, and it was exhausting mentally, physically. It was really tough. If I'm finding this difficult now, I just... What did you decide at the end of 98 to come back for another year? What did you have left to prove at that point? What about two-year contract? So I thought the car was getting better and I just, at the end of 18, why would I come back? Yeah, I know you had a few contracts, but I mean contracts aside, did you still have... I want, it's very difficult to just give up.

It's very difficult to go, okay, well, I mean, you know, I've not had a good weekend, but, or good seas, now, it's quite hard, but I'm still fetish, youngish, you know, and I still think there's a chance. And so that part of you overrides the one that can be utterly brutally objective and say, you know, you should stop now. And so I got halfway through 99 and Thought I can't I can't carry on with this. I've got to stop. Gotta get out and I wanted to stop at the British Grand Prix But Eddie Jordan had got someone else signed up and made a commitment to someone to get me out of the car And I said, well, I don't want to leave it on a, least to go out saying thank you to everyone and finish my career where I started

at Silverstone and British Grand Prix and everything. Can you see your way to just letting me do that? That was then suddenly it got all complicated and suddenly I got locked into doing the whole rest of the season. So let's go to the very last race, your last race as an F1 driver, 99, Suzuki, right? Yeah, so by that point, I've just gone wrong in the race somewhere. And I just thought, I'm a lap down. I've just had to come in for a front wing. We got no, Chuck, we're in a way out of the points. It's just, it's just, I just

thought, right now, in a wheel could fall off. I could hit a bar and kill myself. And then it would all be in stupid, wouldn't it? Why risk it? So I came in. And what did But right now, in a wheel could fall off, I could hit a bar and kill myself, and then it would all be in stupid, wouldn't it? Why risk it, so I came in? And what did you say? I said, I'm finished. What did they say? They were, what's wrong with the car?

Nothing. I mean, it's a lot like Mickey Lotto in 1975, 76, right? Yeah, they're not happy with you if you retire a car, but screw them. Sorry. They don't understand. You are putting your life at risk and affecting potentially your family and all that stuff. And there are times when it doesn't matter. This was really a crescendo for you, right? This was, it's your last race, but it was the

moment when you finally sort of said, wait a minute, like I am now secure enough in my skin I may formula one world champion and on my terms today. Yeah, this is enough. No, exactly. I done it their way my whole career I had always given everything I had for the team and I gave everything I had for winning and I got the sack and After a bit you just go, hey, listen, there's a deal. They're doing a deal. You've done a deal with them. Okay, it says in the contract, you will always give the best of your performance. I gave the best. I had nothing left. You know, do you remember that evening or the next night you were, I guess it would have been

probably a, was your, was your family at that race? No. So how long before you got home, do you remember, say, two days maybe? Maybe, yeah. Yeah. What was it like that first time you came home knowing you were retired? Was it the greatest feeling? Was it a sad feeling? It's a very good, I don't, I don't actually remember.

I think I was very relieved and happy. I thought I was how I'm in dry. I thought I'd escaped. That's what I thought. I actually, all of those things came home to roost. You know, the things you put back behind you, those fears and wherever worries that you, imaginings that you have, you kind of go, well, you know, you can stay there for a bit. And then when you step out of the car, you just think, I made

it. I made it, I made it, I made it through one piece. It's like getting to the top of the mountain, El Capitan, and actually, the worrying thing is, whether you come back and do something dangerous again, you have to kind of, so I didn't, I stopped racing, and I thought, right, that's it, I'm not going anywhere near anything dangerous for, as long as I come, you know, I'm still relatively sane about things like that.

I did do carting when Josh was carting. I got back and I got pumped up again and started racing a few guys, but took a few risks there, but generally up into quite a good. But this is kind of interesting, right? I mean, there are a lot of people when they leave the peak of their profession, their identity is so wrapped up in that thing. And again, this could be being the F1 driver, this could be being the big shot lawyer, the big shot doctor. But I see this pattern all the time, which is people that have this inability to go from being at the apex to living, quote unquote, the normal life.

You never really seemed to, I mean, you went through something different, which we're going to talk about, which was now that you had more stillness around you. I think you were able to appreciate the depression. You were able to go back and confront some of the tragedy of your life that I don't think had been fully processed. But you also didn't have as much of this struggle it seems with your identity being first and foremost a driver. I think I felt like I denied my identity

by being shoehorned into being a racing driver. I mean, I think I did the racing. I don't think I ever thought that's who I was. I knew I could do it and I liked doing it and I felt strongly that I was a very good driver and I could beat people and I gave it 100%, but I just thought that's only a small, your Formula One wants people to be a certain way. You know, they want particular types of heroes and and I just thought, well, I'm maybe I'm not that person and I don't want to be what you want me to be. So I've got to be me and I want to go racing the way I go racing and I get a little bit, but I also, perhaps,

was not cut out for that role. I don't know. Have any of the younger drivers ever come to you as they're entering the twilight of their career and asked for advice or just wanted to talk about that transition? Not one. Not one driver has come to me and go on, I wanna be a four-on-driver, what do you do? It's amazing. I mean, it's almost not a conversation that never happens with racing drivers.

They hardly ever speak to anyone out any other racing driver about getting advice. It's not like tennis or golf or something like that with half coaches. It's really peculiar. I was like, I had my dad, you know, my dad when I was younger, so I kind of gleaned quite a lot of knowledge from him, but maybe it wasn't clarified because I was only very young, but I did ask drivers occasionally for a bit of advice. Got some help from James Hunt once. He just said, think you're doing a good job. And that was really helpful. That made me feel great, because I thought that he's a guy

who's respected, actually giving me some thoughts on what he thought I was doing. I'm trying to rack my brains to see if I've got. I also didn't get advice as such, but I'd used to speak a little bit to Nikki louder. And... Were you close to Nikki at all? I only a little tiny bit, not that close, but because he raised against my dad, I kind of felt like he was cognizant

of that side of my life, if you like. So a bit of a connection there. Jackie, of course. Jackie would give advice. But as far as the people coming to me and going, how did you do it? I think probably people looked to my career and thought, I don't want to do it like, the way I did it. So, I don't ask for my advice. You wrote about how you weren't specific as to when this occurred after retirement. So I can't tell if it was two years after or ten years after,

but you wrote about how you were on a family vacation somewhere and you were You were sort of sitting there I think just with Oliver and you you wrote that you were frustrated confused and angry and then you had this moment of sort of clarity and I don't know if you intended it to sound like a turning point, but it sounds like it was I believe to sound like a turning point, but it sounds like it was. I believe you were already in therapy at this point. You were already speaking with a therapist and you were already confronting your own depression.

But what is it about that moment? I mean, depression is such a depressing word. People, you talk about depression, you can sense people, go, oh, please, don't talk about depression. And I, my comment on depression is that depression is a way of telling us we're going the wrong direction. So it's a profound signaling, a running out of energy, an energy that is, is depleting. And it's actually starting to go the other way. It's actually starting to drag you down and it's because it's trying to tell you something. You are sort of doing this to yourself.

You actually need to reorientate your perspective on things. How do you do that? That's easy to say and as anyone has had depression, knows. Someone can't say to you, just cheer up. It's the most useless advice one could give. Do not understand the meaning of depression if anybody thinks that that's what it's about. It's almost like you run out of ideas completely and it's not even the buffers, it's the black hole, isn't it?

So, the abyss, I remember I did actually go and see Rothko exhibition tape model, I think it was. I was looking at one of his paintings and there's the usual thing, there's horizons. They are literally horizons aren't they? One of them was a very sunny looking painting, so it had the sun above. If you went down, it went darker and darker until it went down And I remember looking at this painting and just going I don't want to go down there And you felt like you were on a path to there or that there was some sort of pull like if you didn't make a change

That's where you go. I think you mentioned identity and I think that is fundamentally important and I think that people who have had an overwhelmingly powerful parent, let's say, they haven't fully devolved their own identity. They haven't had the chance. So I think, you know, my dad's famous and then he dies. Who are you? Are you your dad's son? Are you?

Who are you? He wasn't around long enough to kind of, it didn't manage to get to that point where I was confirmed as me. My mum and my dad were distracted. They have this career going on, his career going on. I think I didn't fully develop a, an identity. I knew I had somebody that people responded to and my friends when I went to school, but it wasn't a fully developed personality, it wasn't a real rounded thing,

it was sort of half cooked. And when I stopped racing, I just expressed something that I had. Maybe I was just, you know, play acting my dad. Those are the sort of questions you, you, I didn't really achieve it. So to be 40 years old

and to be thinking those things has got to be somewhat jarring, right? Because you're sort of saying, wait a minute, who am I? Like I haven't figured this out right now. And what if I've spent the last 20 years pursuing something that wasn't really about me? No, exactly. And there was, I definitely, an agenda, part of it was to re-constitute the life that we had before he got killed. So I managed to get us back. I used to wear us, but of course my my mum had lost her husband and my sisters lost their dad.

But I had a family. But in a way, in part, in my mind, if I restructured my family, then we'd restructed the family that was shattered, that was destroyed, so I'd rebuilt this thing. So there was this, is a misplaced concept. It doesn't apply because it's not, you can't put back together the family that died.

My dad not gonna come back and, so my kids were growing up. I was thinking all the time, well, I would have done anything to have my dad back, but they had their dad. They didn't know what that was all about. Did you ever feel at time, well, I would have done anything to have my dad back, but they had their dad. They didn't know what that was all about. Did you ever feel at some point that you had an obligation to them to figure this out because the irony of it was,

you lost your dad because he actually died, but if you didn't figure this out, your kids were gonna lose their dad, not because he's physically dead, but because he's emotionally absent or emotionally dead and for lack, you know, at the risk of sounding too dramatic. Well, and I think the more you dig in, the more you realize that your parents' relationship was not as ideal as it should have been, and when you're younger, you idealize them,

and everything's wonderful when clearly it wasn't. And what you don't want to do. Did you ever talk to your mum about this? Yeah, I did actually go and start to talk to my mum about her relationship with her husband, but she was quite defensive. Not defensive, but she had created explanations for her relationship with her husband. And he clearly had, they'd had difficulties. But then if I started to criticize him,

then she would suddenly come to his defense. And do you think part of that is just her stoic nature? You know, you write stories about her upbringing. I mean, you know, she almost died during the war. And then on top of that, she's standing there as one of the wives during the most dangerous era in the history of this sport, where about a one in three chance, your spouse is gonna die over the course of their career.

And they're saying all the time, this is a noble thing to be doing. Well, why, really? You know, was it that noble when you got family and stuff, is it really that admirable that you're putting all that at risk? And of course the irony is because he retired He was home and dry. Yeah, he retired about six months before this crash. Yeah, he was 46 He stopped he had this team that he was developing so everybody thought everyone breathed a sigh of relief eyes in the

Gorge the bullet he does the bullet and bang. Six months later, it got even worse than anyone could have imagined. It wasn't just him, it was his young protégé driver, team designer, team principal, the chief mechanic, engineer, all gone. And one big catastrophic bomb. And it makes you go through life slightly. You're never quite sure what's around the corner. That's the horrible thing. If you knew in, call it 1985, right? So you're 25 years old. if you knew then what you know today or if if you

could go back and talk to that guy then but as yourself now what would you tell the 25 year old version of yourself now I would try and dispel from him a lot of erroneous notions about how the world works and who really cares about what you think and what you do. And I would say just don't waste a lot of energy thinking about those things or trying to make an impression on people because you think that would help you. It doesn't work like that. You know, you just don't worry about that. If you've got a job to do, do the job. If you do it well and you do it better than other people, then that will work. That will help you. Focus on what you think you can do, not on the things you can't do anything about and don't waste a lot of energy worrying about them.

I probably would say that. And I'd also say enjoy it. Just, you know, don't put yourself through torture because you think this is something that means a lot. We're going around in circles, chasing each other, and trying to come first. That's all it is. Yeah, it's interesting, right? You talked earlier about the nobility of the sport in the 60s and 70s when it was basically the most dangerous thing you could have done. It was almost pornographic. Some people actually, I think, looked at from the one and put off. They thought it's a disgusting thing.

And now I can see that, that I can understand why they felt that way. I think that anybody in the sport at the time or even today, we like to embellish it and make it seem like it's such a wonderful thing. And it is, it's impressive. It's incredibly impressive, but let's not get it too far out of context. You know, it's just a lifestyle choice for a lot of people and it's a show of brilliance

in certain fields, but it's not going to really change the world for the better. A few people's weekends get a lot better or a lot worse. But do you think that there are benefits from Formula One, for example, in terms of advancing safety, technical achievements of vehicles? I think what Formula One does brilliantly is that it shows people if there's an issue or there's a problem, they can solve it. They're absolutely brilliant at not stopping when there is a challenge. There you go, where's the challenge? We can't, well, we'll do it.

We'll find a way around it, we'll do it. But that's the impressive thing about formal one. I mean, Max Mosley, do you remember a couple of days after the Senate crash? He was very recently become the president. But I remember this press conference and he said, I think very recently became the president. But I remember this press conference and he said, you know, I think very aptly,

the question isn't why did Senate crash, although that's all anybody wanted to talk about. The question is why did he die? Because the reality of it is, if you took a hundred drivers in the exact same crash, 99 of them probably would have lived. It was a very flooky death. Flooky.

And also, the thing to consider is that just to explain to people, you didn't understand there was a part of the suspension that penetrated this crash on it. And the force needed to do that wasn't that great. If he'd crashed at a very slow speed and this suspension had happened to come back then, and we've all been in crashes like that. Guys, we've all crashed. You know, even formal Ford, you've got suspension arms and wheel flying all over the place. You don't have to be going that fast. You imagine just throwing a wheel at you at 20 miles now. It's going to go through your head. Yeah. So that to me was

Yeah. So, that to me was the big step forward in Formula One safety, which is, you know, there probably just as many crashes today, is there were in the previous generation, but people aren't supposed to die. There's an amazing place where Formula One really did step up, and I think made that different. plays were Formula One really did step up and I think made that difference. So I don't know, I think you're... But then we back into that loop of when you take away the risk, do we appreciate the skill and the...

And do you think the pendulum has swung too far today? Well, you know. I don't know how you want to, I just, I, because you don't want to say there should be more risk. No, you don't. Well, there's a guy who constantly reminds me is an engineer that there's a difference between hazard and risk. So the hazard is what can happen and the risk is the potential of that happening. So the chance of that happening.

So, you know, the chances of being hit on the head by a flying wheel are slim because not that many people have been killed, despite all the flying wheels, in most parts. Yet, well, we can name two, three people who have been killed by that, just saying, a nada brought in the halo. So, we believe we have eliminated the hazard. The chances produce, I suppose, because it's got somehow get through the halo. So we've taken away one of the hazards to someone being hurt. That's got to be a good thing. So we have to then replace the challenge. Or if we take away some of the challenge of the sport, then we need to then replace the challenge. Or if we've taken away some of the challenge of the sport, then we need to find a way to introduce other challenges

that will be appreciated, whether that's, I don't know, giving the car's more power or more difficult to drive, or if it looks easy and it's too easy, then nobody cares, they're not going to be watching. You mentioned how after you retired, you didn't even watch the next decade of racing. I mean, when Schumacher was... I was going to...

Yeah, you knew what was happening. I find you what the result was going to be. So he just cleaned up the knee for about five years. And I actually, I was at a low point with regard to the way this sport was run at that point too. Nothing personal against Michael, but I just thought this is putting on a show for the benefit of just one person and a team. I just didn't see that's what people wanted. I mean, unless you're a German.

You know, we're telling, I suppose. You also said something that really got my attention. I'm writing a book right now. And in this book, I talk about this practice of going to funerals. And it's funny because you had talked about how much you did not want to go to Senes funeral, which makes all the sense in the world. But in the last couple of years, I've

come to find funerals to be an amazing grounding experience and a reminder of for any individual how insignificant we are, you know, like I've never been to a funeral yet where the earth stopped turning on its axis. So that gives me pretty good confidence that there is no one of us who's so special or so relevant that somehow our departure from this planet will change the rotational force of the Earth. It'll change it for us.

Exactly. Only for us. And more importantly, to be a little less glib about it, it focuses you on sort of what matters, because it's what people are talking about at the funeral that probably matters more. They tend to talk more about the type of person you were than what your achievements were. It's much more about maybe what kind of a mother you were, then what kind of a lawyer you were. And I could help it notice this line in your book that is literally just, it's one sentence

and it almost goes unnoticed, which is that you found yourself reading obituary's a lot. And not of anyone famous, of people you didn't know, tell me a little bit more about that. That comes back a little bit to what I was saying about applauding and celebrating people in public eye who've done stuff. And you read other lives of people I'd never heard of, but maybe in their own career and their well-known, but it's unbelievable. The kind of lives people have, and the things they do, modest people do extraordinary things. There was a guy who was a kind of diplomat who managed to stop a revolution just by going up and standing in front of the guy who was head leading them.

Just in signifying a apparently looking guy would do something extraordinary or woman. And it's those stories which I think are profoundly moving because you don't know who these people are, they're out there now and you might meet them and you don't know what they're capable of doing in an extraordinary situation. They could be the people who suddenly do something really, you might have just passed them by every day, they're lives. They've people have dismissed them as being ineffectual and they'll do something really remarkable. Now, how has that insight helped you in your journey?

I think it's made me wonder whether I'm one of those people or not. I'd still, I've shuddered to think that something might happen and might have to kind of make a decision as to whether I go in a burning building or not, but there are people who do that, but they do that without even batting an eyelid, you know? You just think, just being a racing driver, is it that brave? I'm enjoying what I'm doing as well, you know? And people's capacity is well for work. I mean, some people's just unbelievable what they can pull off in one lifetime. So human beings are extraordinary creatures, that's the right word. And I like learning more and more about them.

I like learning more about what we're capable of and what some people are capable of. I know I have my limitations, but I'm still in awe of people are skilled, or people are educated in all kinds of ways, and are able to make things happen as well. Some people have the amazing ability to get things done, whether it's Elon Muscle, you know, or that guy is doing the ocean cleanup thing, you know. It's amazing. Some people just have this ability to... I'm absolutely rubbish at making anything happen.

I don't know why. I shock him up with an idea, and I can't seem to get it to take hold. And then probably because I doubt whether it's any worthwhile. Do you think your kids would say that you've been rubbish at being a dad or do you think your kids would say that I remember one of the things you talk about. I don't think it was in this book. It might have been in, I don't remember, maybe it was in this book, but you talk about how upon retiring the thing you look forward to most was taking them to school, you know, this idea,

which again, that struck me as a little odd because I have to, you know, we can't help but read the stories of other people and put ourselves in them. That's the nature I think of what we do is we are so self-centered as individuals, we always tend to extrapolate through our own lens. And I just, there's a part of me that feels really sorry for someone to be at the pinnacle of a sport as an example and then have to retire. And there's a part of me that thinks, God, that must be awful. Like, at least I don't know what it's like to be great, you know? So there's joy and mediocrity because I can't imagine what it would be like to be the

best in the world at something and then to be off that stage. And I guess I was just sort of pleased for you that even though I knew, because I know how the story unfolds, that there is this huge journey you have to go through, I thought, how much better is it that at least you have this, you have these four kids that mean so much to you? The world can completely change with one generation. And it's all about how we nurture our children in what we advise them in and the opportunities we give to them. You know, it would only take one generation of people who didn't want to kill anything

or anyone. Isn't that kind of amazing when you think about that, that your children and your father are separated by only one generation, and yet there's very little in common in their experiences? There's very little in common in their experiences. Hmm. Yeah, well, it's extraordinary. The amount of change that's been in the world in those two lifetime. Do your kids ask about the grandfather much?

I think a little bit. Yeah. I think they know about him, but I don't think they... Maybe in time, but I don't... I don't think they let it rule their lives, which is the Graham Hill was a huge thing in our lives. All of our, apart from me and my elder sister, but not so much my younger sister, but his absence was a big thing in her life.

But for our lives, it was all about this thing called Graham Hill, which was a kind of concept, which over, touched everything you did. You borrow a quote from Lincoln. Dealy? Yeah. Well, so I believe it was Lincoln who originally said, if you have six hours to chop down a tree, you spend four of them sharpening your ax.

Yeah. You basically paraphrase that as if you had 10 years to chop down a tree, you spend nine of them sharpening your ax. Yeah. The way I read that is that it took a while for you to put this book together. You had to sort a lot of things out

before you could write this story. That's right. I couldn't really put pen to paper before that. And so I felt like I knew I had a foundation or something I can write it on because I was all over the place with my ideas, my thoughts about things. You know I used to think, I used to listen to programs on on Radio 4 about philosophy and mathematics

and stuff that comes into your head like Godel's theory of incompleteness and Vic and Stein's where of we cannot speak there or we must remain silent. I mean, these things are very profound. You can only have it's being or nothingness, it's which is such as argument. You know, there either is something or there isn't. How do you get something out of nothing? And no sort of thoughts. And it would be, And no sort of thoughts. And it would be, for me, I had to get some sort of bloody answers from somewhere. And you know, and then you realize that they spent an awful lot of time energy trying to work them out.

And they were probably lots of martyrs for me and they didn't get them answer, did they? They didn't get an answer, you know? Nobody got an answer. That tell me who's got the answer. Peter, maybe you're the man. I definitely don't have the answers, but I think I'm just really impressed with the journey. It's this journey you've been on that is really amazing. It's a journey that is well worn. It's a journey that men and women, I keep saying, and women, all of us humans have been making for thousands

of years. We've all asked that everybody's gone through or in every epoch. They've been wanting to know these answers. They're like, oh, cool. And it's natural to want to know those answers. And I think it's new here. the writings and the philosophies of ancient civilizations, they're all fascinating and have some kernel of truth in them that somehow got appreciated by another group of people somewhere else without the influence of Western civilization or something like that. You know, it's something that is eternal and something which is profoundly compelling about being a human being. I mean, I was going to mention something. So here's something

when I was quite depressed, I had a tree that was given to me. A tree, which was given to me for my 40th birthday by a famous rock band person who couldn't make it to my party. And it was a piece tree. It was an olive tree, okay? So I had this olive tree, which I kind of treasured. No, I really must plant this tree and get it watered at some point. And it got attacked by aphids, some sort of bug. So I spent ages picking these bugs off the thing.

I didn't want it to kill the tree, but I was killing the bugs. So I'm thinking, hang on, what do I do? Do I let them kill the tree? Do I kill the bugs? Do I leave it? Do I leave it be? Do I not have any involvement? What is my purpose here? What should I be doing? That's the kind of stuff that should I be doing? That's the kind of stuff that stops you in your tracks when you're heavily in those mindsets. You kind of get caught between those unresolvable questions. Maybe I should have just chucked the whole thing in the skip, but you know. I think you're special in the sense that I don't think enough people spend time thinking about these things. I mean, I think these are the human questions and

it's really easy to just not think about them. It's really easy to live a life that is unexamined. I don't think I examine my life as closely as I can because quite frankly it's not comfortable. I would say, Peter, I think I don't do it as much as I used to. I actually now have got to the point where I go, I think that's an unanswerable one, I think we'll just let that one go. And actually, that is liberating in that sense. You know, I don't have to stop everything until I've gotten asked to that. When you look at that same painting today, the painting that starts with the sun and it gets darker and darker because you go down, the painting that once made you think, I don't

want to go any lower. Where do you see yourself on that painting? I mean, the sunny bit. Yeah. I don't feel like I'm going to slip into that abyss. And I think that it was, the abyss was a complete loss of identity. I think the abyss is no identity. And I think when you have questions about your identity and you don't know who you are.

And on that point, I would say, what I've also realised is that identity is very much a compound of your relationship to others. And this is where it becomes, I think it becomes a healing thing. When you recognize that here you are, is what you are to other people as well as who you want to be for yourself. Yeah. Well, that's very well said. I'm not sure I could add anything to that. Damon, I have really enjoyed this discussion. I've wanted to speak with you for such a long time, and I'm I Don't remember what the first thing was that made me reach out to Luke who was obviously who introduced us and say hey if there's any chance You think Damon would be willing to speak. I'd love it if you'd make that introduction, but I wish I could remember what it was

But I read something that you wrote or saw something you said in an interview and I thought this is a person who is gonna have a unique perspective on a human condition. I think Everything that we've talked about today. I think I think emphasizes that and I'm really grateful for it And I think that I can't stress enough to people listening to this, that you don't have to be a motorsport fan to enjoy your autobiography. I think it's a great story about overcoming loss. I think it's a great story about struggling with one's

identity. And I think anybody that reads it's going to get something out of it special. So I thank you for writing it, because it doesn't strike me as a book that was easy to write. It was under a lot of pressure, but I think it's sort of eventually unfolded very surprisingly to me. I think I'm a believer in things coming to fruition and then there's the right time for things.

And I do want to say thank you very much and deep for your kind words about the book and compliments and I'm not uncomfortable in just receiving your praise. Because it's lovely to actually recognize that it's communicating, isn't it? And I think that someone is connecting to your communication like that. And that's very satisfying, very fulfilling,

so thank you very much. My pleasure and thank you for everything. Thanks for being here. Thank you. Thank you. You can find all of this information and more at peteratiamd.com forward slash podcast. There you'll find the show notes, readings,

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