Damon Hill may have become one of Britain's finest F1 drivers, but he has admitted he didn't find the transition to racing on four wheels all too easy.
The Brit enjoyed a very successful career at the highest level of motorsport, becoming world champion in 1996 with Williams before leaving the sport at the end of the 1999 season. Prior to succeeding within F1 though, he developed a passion for racing motorbikes.
During an appearance on the Fuelling Around podcast, he explained when his love for racing on two wheels began and how he transitioned to racing on four, which he did not initially enjoy. "I saw two brothers riding this monkey bike round and, obviously, part of my brain is going: 'That looks fun' and I must have said 'Can I have a go?'" Hill said.
"I won a lot of races and actually that happened at roughly the same time that I took up car racing - or my mum met a person who said: 'He ought to get off that bike and try cars because he’s going to hurt himself'. That’s how I got off two wheels and into four wheels. I have to say I didn’t like it at first. I just didn’t like being strapped into a cockpit. It felt very claustrophobic and a car didn’t accelerate like a motorbike did.
“It had no oomph. Until you get more power, you can’t drive it like a motorbike because a motorbike has got way more power. It wasn’t until you get more power in a racing car, or it was wet, that I could actually do something with the damn thing because they’re like a dead weight.”
Meanwhile, moving forward to current F1 times and Hill believes Mercedes face an uphill battle after an underwhelming start to the 2023 season.
After they were Beaten by Aston Martin at the Bahrain Grand Prix, Hill recently claimed Mercedes are facing an even bigger problem as F1’s cost cap means they are unable to spend excessive amounts on improving their W14. Lewis Hamilton finished fifth in the desert this past Sunday, while teammate George Russell crossed the line seventh.
An even bigger worry however, is that the seven-time champion finished 51 seconds behind race winner Max Verstappen as well as losing to Fernando Alonso in his Aston Martin. Team principal Toto Wolff called it 'one of the worst days racing' - and Hill labelled it 'humiliating.'
"Poor old Lewis and George Russell," the F1 pundit told Sky Sports News. "I mean this was a race that Toto described as his worst day in motor racing. They have been humiliated. They were beaten by a customer car."
He added:"“Maybe there’s fundamentally something wrong with the direction they’ve gone in and if that’s the case, then they’ve got a real problem. With the cost cap involved in from one now they can’t just go back to the factory and spend a lot of money and redesign a car.
"So bit of a problem now for Mercedes, they might have to just plug on with what they’ve got and prove everyone wrong with their design." Asked if Mercedes had already written off the 2023 season, he replied: "I don’t think so, no. I don’t think they’ve written it off.
"They’ll have to go twice as fast as their competing team to catch up and that’s the nature of development in F1. They know that the task ahead of them is huge, and it’s all got to be done in the factory and they’re going to have to really have some inspiration or work doubly hard to get back to the front."
