Damon Hill has talked about what it was like to grow up as the son of a Formula One world champion, especially in an era where fatal accidents were practically a monthly if not everyday occurrence.
"Death was a constant presence in my childhood," Hill told The Guardian newspaper. "My father was a Formula One driver and at the time, F1 was horrific. It was a bloodsport.
"I remember thinking my dad might not be here next Christmas, or next week.
"Part of me felt impressed that my dad was special and did something dangerous, and part of me was thinking: but I don’t want him to die, I don’t want him to be doing this.
"Our whole family was orientated towards my father’s satisfaction. My mum’s job was to make sure everything was right for him. My sisters and I were secondary."
Graham Hill made 176 Grand Prix starts and was a five-time winner at Monaco before deciding to retire in 1975 to concentrate on running his own race team, Embassy Hill. But in a tragic ironic twist, just four months later Hill's plane crashed while attempting to land at Elstree Airfield in thick fog and he and five passengers were killed.
"I was 15 when my father died. His death was an emotional nuclear bomb," recalled Damon, who is currently promoting his autobiography, Watching the Wheels, which was published by Pan Macmillan earlier this month.
"It was so out of the blue – he’d just retired and so my mum, my sisters and I had let our guard down, after being prepared for the worst for many years. It caught us so hard. There was a void – a crater – where he had been."
Hill added that his father's death is what had galvanised him to make his own career in motorsport, ultimately claiming the 1996 Formula One world championship.
"My father’s death made me want to follow in his footsteps and start racing. 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 lived – I honestly don’t know.
"By racing, I was resurrecting my dad. My performances were mine, but they inevitably contained some legacy of my dad’s racing career and honoured his memory.
"In some senses, it was a way of getting to know him as an adult that I couldn’t have done any other way. Knowing what he went through, I did get closer to understanding him.
"But it’s a very difficult thing to carry on in the same profession as your parents if they have been successful."
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