How One of The Beatles Set Damon Hill's Path to F1 in Motion

Where music and motorsport first met

Hill’s desire to pursue a racing career and his love for, and involvement in, the punk and rock music scenes sparked around the same time in his life.

“My father’s death made me want to follow in his footsteps and start racing,” he said in a 2016 interview with The Guardian when speaking about his father, Graham Hill’s, tragic passing in an airplane crash in 1975. “I hadn’t expressed any desire to race cars before he died and I might not have felt any motivation to race if he’d live.” Hill was just 15 at the time that he lost his father.

He was also a teenager living in the UK at the height of the punk revolution of the late 70s. It was the perfect setting for a young person to release any pent up energy and emotions, and that is exactly what he did. From going to his first rock gig to see Deep Purple play at the Wembley Empire Pool in London to watching the Sex Pistols wreak havoc on the Today show with Bill Grundy almost exactly a year to the day of his father’s passing, Hill immersed himself in the UK music scene. Before long, he started his own punk band, The Hormones, and turned music into the outlet he craved while he got his racing career up and running. 

Hill first started racing motorbikes in 1981, expressing little interest in cars until, under the urging of his mother, Babette Hill, he went to Magny-Cours to attend the Winfield Racing School in 1983. From there, his single-seater career took off, as the young Hill showed incredible promise and aptitude for racing. The dream, however, almost came to a complete halt a few years later. 

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The phone call that changed everything

After impressing in Formula Ford and finishing third in the 1985 Formula Ford Festival, Hill was ready to make the transition into Formula 3, but an age-old problem struck: funding. Hill needed to collect £150,000 to be able to compete with West Surrey Racing. He did everything he could, speaking to countless sponsors, his family members, and even asking his grandmother to sell her house, but alas, the day of the deadline to gather his funding had come, and Hill had not met the goal.

And this is where a certain Beatle comes into the story.

On the night of the deadline, with Hill and his wife Georgie thinking that the year’s racing season was a wash, they received a phone call from none other than George Harrison, asking, “Am I too late?”

Harrison had always been a massive racing fan, and was a regular face on the F1 circuit. In his autobiography, Watching the Wheels, Hill writes, “[Harrison] had known my father and was often with Jackie Stewart and Gerhard Berger at F1 races, and I had written to see if he would take interest in my highly speculative career.”

Harrison and his wife Olivia offered to help Hill reach his sponsorship goals, and with that, he was quite literally off to the races. This triggered the start of his racing career, which over the years grew into that of an F1 World Champion. The Harrisons continued to cheer for Hill in all that time, supporting him in their own ways, including having Krishna monks chant a blessing for him during his 1996 Championship run.

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Music’s lasting place in Hill’s life

Unsurprisingly, music continued to show up throughout Hill’s life and driving career. He frequently played with other drivers, including jam sessions after races with the likes of Eddie Jordan, Johnny Herbert and even David Coulthard on the triangle. Towards the end of his F1 career, in 1999, he even featured as a guest guitarist (credited as Damon “Demon” Hill) on the Def Leppard track Demolition Man from their album Euphoria, making him the only F1 driver with a gold album.

Many drivers have hobbies and passions beyond the track, but few can truly say that those passions have had the impact music has left on Hill's career. From the punk and rock scenes that provided release while he was dealing with the loss of his father, to the letter he sent to a fellow musician and motorsport enthusiast, music has never just run parallel to racing in Hill’s life. It has been a shaping force, without which we may have never seen him become the driver and Champion that he is.

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