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Damon Hill has revealed that his father's death made him want to follow in his footsteps and become a Formula One driver.
The 1996 world champion, speaking to The Guardian, said that after being prepared for his father Graham's death during his double world championship winning career, when he died in a plane crash just months after after retiring in 1975, the news came as a shock.
I was 15 when my father died," said former Williams driver Hill. "His death was an emotional nuclear bomb. 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. I dealt with things by telling myself it was no good feeling sorry for myself. We were lucky to have had the time we had with him."
However, Hill said that after wanting to emulate his father for a number of years, his passing allowed him to become his own man.
I absolutely worshipped my father, but when he died, the spotlight was turned off and I had the chance to be myself," said Hill, the only second generation driver to date to win the championship after his father did. "There was this sense of relief. I didn’t have to worry about whether my dad approved of what I was doing. It was a complicated feeling of freedom, at the cost of his life."
While Damon Hill admits that he doesn't miss racing, he said that his racing career helped him understand his father much more.
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," Hill revealed. "I do know I haven’t missed it that much since I stopped. 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," he added. "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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