Damon Hill says he learned a valuable mentality during his world championship-winning days with Williams that served him well later in his career.<\/p>\n
Hill joined Arrows and then Jordan in the years following his 1996 World Championship win, revealing he had to change Jordan\u2019s approach to achieve success.<\/p>\n
Damon Hill: Being the innovator \u2018scary\u2019 place to be<\/p>\n
Want more PlanetF1.com coverage? Add us as a preferred source on Google to your favourites list<\/a> for news you can trust.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Hill helped Jordan to their highest-ever Constructors\u2019 Championship finish of P3 in 1999, winning one race with the team, the 1998 Belgian Grand Prix.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cWell, the teams I went to after Williams were teams that were used to trying to copy the people who were winning,\u201d said Hill.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd the thing is, if you copy the people winning, you\u2019re always going to come second to them, because they\u2019re already one step ahead.<\/p>\n \u201cSo you have to kind of introduce the idea that you have to find your own way.<\/p>\n \u201cYou have to, obviously, keep an eye on what the competition are doing. But it\u2019s a bit like, Johnny, do you remember getting in the lead for the first time when you\u2019re in a race? There\u2019s no one to follow, is there?<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a bit scary. Suddenly you\u2019re out there and they\u2019re going to go, \u2018Where have they all gone?’\u201d<\/p>\n Hill continued: \u201cSo 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.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd that\u2019s a very different place to be. It\u2019s scary, because you don\u2019t have a manual. You\u2019re just having to trust that your knowledge is the way forward.<\/p>\n \u201cWith Jordan, when I went there, I had to kind of knock it out of them, saying, \u2018It\u2019s no good copying what everyone else is doing. You need to be able to find your own way forward.’\u201d<\/p>\n More on Damon Hill from PlanetF1.com<\/p>\n Damon Hill sees Brawn-style F1 2026 opportunity for Aston Martin under Adrian Newey<\/a><\/p>\n Damon Hill rejected Ferrari over Michael Schumacher demand<\/a><\/p>\n Herbert recalled an example from his Sauber days in response to Hill\u2019s words, arguing that a driver has more power within a team than they perhaps think.<\/p>\n \u201cBut 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,\u201d said Herbert.<\/p>\n \u201cBecause I do remember that on strategy, when we didn\u2019t have all the computers and everybody telling us what we should and shouldn\u2019t be doing. The driver sort of felt what was going on.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd 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.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd sometimes, you\u2019re right, a driver\u2019s input, we have more power than we think when we\u2019re in a team. Just power generally, as a driver.\u201d<\/p>\n Hill pointed to a potential pitfall which comes with a team not at the top hiring a title-winning driver.<\/p>\n \u201cDefinitely what happens when you\u2019re World Champion is you have a little bit more cache,\u201d he said. \u201cSo if I went from Williams to another team, they were going, \u2018Oh, my God, I\u2019ve got World Champion in my team. He must know something that is of value.\u2019<\/p>\n \u201cSo that gravitas you have, I think, is sometimes misplaced. I didn\u2019t know everything. I didn\u2019t know how to design the car. I think they knew!<\/p>\n \u201cBut the mindset, definitely you know. So you\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n \u201cSo leadership is a big part of that. As a driver, you can instil that into a team as well. You can say, \u2018Listen, you can do it. You just have to change slightly the method that you\u2019ve got.’\u201d<\/p>\n Want to be the first to know exclusive information from the F1 paddock? Join our broadcast channel on WhatsApp<\/a> to get the scoop on the latest developments from our team of accredited journalists.<\/p>\n You can also subscribe to the PlanetF1 YouTube channel<\/a> for exclusive features, hear from our paddock journalists with stories from the heart of Formula 1 and much more!<\/p>\n