Damon Hill is going back to the car that defined him — and Williams is doing it with the sort of intentional, heritage-first swagger the team has sometimes struggled to project in the modern era.
Thirty years after sealing the 1996 world title, Hill will take his championship-winning FW18 up the Goodwood Festival of Speed hillclimb in July, as part of a wider Williams presence across the four-day event in Sussex (9–12 July). It’s not just a feel-good lap for the cameras either: the team says its Heritage crew has carried out an extensive restoration and returned the car to period-correct specification for the weekend.
For Hill, the FW18 sits in that rare category of machinery that doesn’t merely “win races” in the abstract — it carries a whole season’s emotional weather. 1996 was a tense, relentless year inside Williams, with Jacques Villeneuve arriving and immediately turning a title fight into an internal examination. Hill emerged with eight wins and the championship, clinched at Suzuka, and in doing so completed a family milestone that still lands with a thud: Damon and Graham Hill remain the sport’s first father-and-son world champions.
He’s driven the FW18 since that title year — including a reunion at the 2021 Silverstone Classic — but Goodwood is a different kind of stage. The hillclimb is intimate and unforgiving, the crowd close enough to read body language, and the cars run in a setting that values theatre as much as speed. If Hill is going to relive a career peak in public, this is the place where it feels most human rather than ceremonial.
Hill, who rejoined Williams as an ambassador ahead of the 2026 season, will also be honoured on the balcony of Goodwood House on Saturday 11 July — a neat nod to the fact this isn’t only about a famous driver in a famous car, but about Williams choosing to lean into its own story at a time when the sport is marching into a new era.
“I am delighted and very excited to be reunited with my championship-winning FW18 and Williams who made it all possible at this summer’s Festival of Speed,” Hill said. “To see the car return to Goodwood 30 years later, and to share that moment with the fans, is truly amazing. Thanks to the team at Grove for their work in getting the FW18 back on track. I’m looking forward to getting back behind the wheel!”
Williams’ Goodwood line-up has a pointed modern edge to it as well. Team principal James Vowles will drive at the event, alongside reserve driver Luke Browning and team ambassador Jamie Chadwick. That mix matters: Williams isn’t just wheeling out a trophy asset and hoping nostalgia does the heavy lifting. It’s putting faces from its current project in the same arena, effectively stitching the past to the present in front of one of the biggest motorsport crowds of the year.
“Goodwood is an incredibly special event that showcases the best of British motorsport, and it’s an honour to be taking on the hillclimb alongside Damon, Jamie and Luke this year,” Vowles said. “To see Damon reunited with the FW18 as we mark 30 years since his World Drivers’ Championship is hugely meaningful for the team and for motorsport fans. Moments like these bring together our past, present and future, and that’s something we’re proud to celebrate.”
It’s hard not to read a little intent into that. In the contemporary paddock, “heritage” can be an overused word — a convenient marketing layer applied to anything older than last month’s launch livery. But when a team goes to the effort of returning an iconic chassis to period-correct condition, then hands it back to the driver who actually carried the pressure of making it a champion, it lands differently. It’s Williams reminding people that its history isn’t a museum piece; it’s an identity the team can still trade on as it tries to build the next chapter.
And for Hill, there’s something quietly satisfying about the timing. He’s stepping back into the FW18 not as the man still trying to prove he belongs, but as the champion that season ultimately confirmed him to be. The noise of 1996 — the scrutiny, the politics, the binary judgements that came with driving a front-running Williams — has long since faded. What’s left is the clean, mechanical memory of a great car and a title that didn’t come for free.
Goodwood, at its best, has a way of stripping everything back to that: driver, machine, and a stretch of tarmac that asks you to be precise. Hill’s FW18 run should be one of those moments that reminds even the most jaded F1 lifer why this sport still bothers to celebrate its past.
