Damon Hill doesn’t talk about “culture change” in the sanitised, corporate way that phrase gets thrown around in modern F1. He talks about it like a racer who’s been dropped into unfamiliar garages and quickly realised the biggest performance deficit wasn’t always aero load or horsepower — it was habit.
Reflecting on his post-Williams chapters with Arrows and Jordan, Hill says the most useful thing he carried out of a title-winning environment wasn’t some secret setup trick or mystical champion’s insight. It was a mentality: if you spend your time copying the front-runners, you’ve already accepted you’ll remain behind them.
“The teams I went to after Williams were teams that were used to trying to copy the people who were winning,” Hill explained on the *Stay on Track* podcast. “And the thing is, if you copy the people winning, you’re always going to come second to them, because they’re already one step ahead.”
That’s a line that lands because it’s painfully familiar to anyone who’s watched midfield teams chase the same trends year after year — and still find themselves arriving at solutions after the leaders have moved on. Hill’s point isn’t that you ignore the competition. It’s that you can’t make a strategy out of imitation and expect it to become identity.
He described the difference using a driver’s analogy that’ll resonate with anyone who’s ever led a race, or even just found clean air at the front of a pack: it’s unsettling, because the reference points disappear.
“You have to, obviously, keep an eye on what the competition are doing,” Hill said. “But it’s a bit like… do you remember getting in the lead for the first time when you’re in a race? There’s no one to follow, is there? It’s a bit scary.”
That word — scary — comes up again when Hill talks about Williams in the mid-1990s, a team he remembers not as a perfect machine, but as a group comfortable with the discomfort of being first. At Williams, he says, the engineers weren’t looking for a template. They were writing it.
“The guys at Williams, they were innovating, and that meant that they had no book to copy. They had no instructions. They were making up the future that everyone else was going to follow,” he said. “And that’s a very different place to be. It’s scary, because you don’t have a manual.”
Hill’s career arc makes that contrast sharp. After winning the 1996 World Championship with Williams, he wasn’t kept on for the following season. One year at Arrows followed, then two at Jordan before retiring at the end of 1999. It’s a sequence that forced him to recalibrate quickly: from a front-running organisation that expected to win, to teams that had learned to survive by looking up the road.
With Jordan in particular, Hill felt he had to actively push against that reflex.
“With Jordan, when I went there, I had to kind of knock it out of them,” he said. “Saying, ‘It’s no good copying what everyone else is doing. You need to be able to find your own way forward.’”
It’s easy to caricature that as a champion arriving and delivering a motivational speech, but Hill frames it more as a practical requirement: if you want to take points off better-funded, better-established rivals, you need to be willing to bet on your own reading of the problem. Otherwise, you’re perpetually reacting.
Johnny Herbert, Hill’s co-host and a three-time grand prix winner, backed that up from his own experience, arguing that drivers underestimate how much influence they can exert — especially in the days before strategy was stitched together by simulations and real-time models.
Herbert recalled a Sauber race in Barcelona where he was the only driver to start on soft tyres — a call that, at the time, was a genuine punt rather than an algorithm’s output.
“Sometimes… a driver’s input, we have more power than we think when we’re in a team,” Herbert said. “Just power generally, as a driver.”
Hill’s take on driver influence is more nuanced, and it’s probably shaped by what happens when a world champion walks into a midfield factory: everyone wants you to be the answer, even when the real answer is a better car.
“Definitely what happens when you’re World Champion is you have a little bit more cache,” Hill said. “So if I went from Williams to another team, they were going, ‘Oh, my God, I’ve got World Champion in my team. He must know something that is of value.’”
He’s candid about the limits of that “gravitas”. He didn’t suddenly know how to design a car because he had a trophy on his CV — and he’s honest enough to say so.
“I didn’t know everything. I didn’t know how to design the car,” Hill said. “I think they knew!”
What he did believe he could bring was a working model of how a front-running team thinks when it’s not hunting, but being hunted. Hill name-checked the kind of leadership he’d witnessed at Williams — shaped by figures like Patrick Head and Adrian Newey — and argued that the driver’s real value is often in reinforcing a team’s belief that it can lead rather than follow.
“But the mindset, definitely you know,” he said. “Leadership is a big part of that. As a driver, you can instil that into a team as well. You can say, ‘Listen, you can do it. You just have to change slightly the method that you’ve got.’”
Given what Jordan achieved with Hill in that period — including a race win at the 1998 Belgian Grand Prix and their best-ever Constructors’ Championship finish of third in 1999 — it’s hard to dismiss the argument as nostalgia. Hill isn’t claiming he transformed teams by sheer force of personality. He’s pointing out that progress often starts when a group stops waiting for permission to be brave.
In a sport that loves to talk about “learning from the best”, Hill’s reminder is a little more uncomfortable: you can study the champions all you like, but at some point you have to accept the loneliness of making the first call. That’s where the risk lives — and, occasionally, where the jump up the order begins.
