Damon Hill believes he was the first F1 test driver to enter the first team of a championship team and achieved great success with Williams winning the title in 1996.
Hill was hired by Williams as a test driver in 1991 while still racing in Formula 3000, but made his F1 debut a year later with a Brabham team already in financial trouble. In 1992 he managed to spend only a few races, after which Brabham finally retired, but Damon continued to work at Williams that season.
This allowed him to become Alain Prost’s partner the following year, and everything that happened after that is already history. According to Hill, the work he did in the early stages of his Williams career formed the basis of the role reserve drivers play in Formula 1 teams to this day.
“In one giant leap I went from unemployment, a mortgage and a marriage where we had a son with a developmental disability, to being a Williams test driver,” Hill recalled on the Fueling Around podcast. – And then this happened: Nigel Macell suddenly decided that he no longer wants to play for Williams, and I suddenly found myself in partners with Alain Prost – it was cool!
In Formula 1 you have to be a bit of a vulture: you sit on a branch and hope someone slips on a banana peel. Of course, you do not wish harm on anyone, but if in our time someone suddenly becomes infected with the coronavirus and cannot take part in the race, you take his place. So everything happens, and now you are already in Formula 1.
And in those years, the role of test pilot was considered a dead end: if you become a test pilot, then you are not a racer, but a loser. I think I was really the first to succeed in moving up to higher positions, and I’m sure sports historians will pay attention to that one day.
Only later did the job of test pilot or reserve driver become desirable, and in my day if you only got behind the wheel for tests you weren’t even considered a reservist. In my case, the strange thing was that I was working with a current Williams car and was one of the few who had experience driving these strange monsters.
I think that’s why I got the job: I was well known, I knew the Williams engineers, I knew how the teamwork was organized, and someone else would have to get used to all this.
Source: F1 News
I am Christopher Clyde, an experienced journalist and content writer with a passion for sports. I have been writing about Formula 1 news for the past five years and am currently employed as an author at athletistic.com, one of the top sports websites in the US.
