Damon Hill says he learned a valuable mentality during his world championship-winning days with Williams that served him well later in his career.
Hill joined Arrows and then Jordan in the years following his 1996 World Championship win, revealing he had to change Jordan’s approach to achieve success.
Damon Hill: Being the innovator ‘scary’ place to be
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Despite winning his sole title with Williams in 1996, Hill was not retained by the team for the following year. After a single season with Arrows, Hill joined Jordan, the team where he spent two seasons before retiring from Formula 1 at the end of 1999.
Hill helped Jordan to their highest-ever Constructors’ Championship finish of P3 in 1999, winning one race with the team, the 1998 Belgian Grand Prix.
During the Stay on Track podcast, Hill was asked by co-star and three-time grand prix winner Johnny Herbert, what he learnt and took with him from Williams to make himself better at his future teams, Arrows and Jordan.
“Well, the teams I went to after Williams were teams that were used to trying to copy the people who were winning,” said Hill.
“And the thing is, if you copy the people winning, you’re always going to come second to them, because they’re already one step ahead.
“So you have to kind of introduce the idea that you have to find your own way.
“You have to, obviously, keep an eye on what the competition are doing. But it’s a bit like, Johnny, do you remember getting in the lead for the first time when you’re in a race? There’s no one to follow, is there?
“It’s a bit scary. Suddenly you’re out there and they’re going to go, ‘Where have they all gone?’”
Hill continued: “So the guys at Williams, they were innovating, and that meant that they had no book to copy. They had no instructions. They were making up the future that everyone else was going to follow.
“And that’s a very different place to be. It’s scary, because you don’t have a manual. You’re just having to trust that your knowledge is the way forward.
“With Jordan, when I went there, I had to kind of knock it out of them, saying, ‘It’s no good copying what everyone else is doing. You need to be able to find your own way forward.’”
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Herbert recalled an example from his Sauber days in response to Hill’s words, arguing that a driver has more power within a team than they perhaps think.
“But a driver needs to do that, and needs to be able to teach them, in many respects, just to think differently and out of the box,” said Herbert.
“Because I do remember that on strategy, when we didn’t have all the computers and everybody telling us what we should and shouldn’t be doing. The driver sort of felt what was going on.
“And I do remember one race at Sauber, in Barcelona, and I was the only driver to start on the soft tyres, which actually worked out being a risk worth taking.
“And sometimes, you’re right, a driver’s input, we have more power than we think when we’re in a team. Just power generally, as a driver.”
Hill pointed to a potential pitfall which comes with a team not at the top hiring a title-winning driver.
“Definitely what happens when you’re World Champion is you have a little bit more cache,” he said. “So if I went from Williams to another team, they were going, ‘Oh, my God, I’ve got World Champion in my team. He must know something that is of value.’
“So that gravitas you have, I think, is sometimes misplaced. I didn’t know everything. I didn’t know how to design the car. I think they knew!
“But the mindset, definitely you know. So you’ve worked with people like Patrick Head and Adrian Newey and so forth, who knew where they were going and how to go about doing it.
“So leadership is a big part of that. As a driver, you can instil that into a team as well. You can say, ‘Listen, you can do it. You just have to change slightly the method that you’ve got.’”
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