A 30-year reunion creates special memories at Goodwood for Damon Hill and Williams

It’s been 30 years since Damon Hill won the Formula 1 world championship in a dominant season for Williams. Driving the FW18, Hill won eight of that year's 16 races, taking pole in nine as he defeated his rookie teammate Jacques Villeneuve to the championship. After tense battles with Benetton’s Michael Schumacher over the previous two seasons, 1996 was Hill’s time to shine.

“The whole year was a standout memory, really,” he told RACER. “It was just brilliant. I got a great start winning three races on the trot, I started every race on the front row, Williams gave me a car that was reliable, mostly – Monaco, which is the slightest glitch, and the British Grand Prix where we had a wheel bearing failure. But those things were very rare.

“The season was otherwise perfect, but winning the title, eventually getting to the end of the season, it had been an interesting journey. I found out that I wasn't going to be driving for them the following year, halfway through the season, and so there were ups and downs. But the most important thing was to come away as world champion, and Williams Renault gave me the chance to do that. So I'm forever grateful for that.”

The car is one of Williams’ greatest hits, and that felt obvious before it even turned a wheel in anger. After Benetton’s performances in 1994 and ‘95, Williams did all it could to ensure ‘96 would be Hill’s year.

“They said to me before the season, they were going to make the effort to tailor the car around me,” Hill said. “So [designer] Adrian Newey was investing quite a lot of time in making sure I was comfortable in the car and things were right. "It was the first car I ever had where I had enough room to play with my feet in the in the footwell, because mostly I was struggling with the room I had, which was limited. I’ve got quite wide feet, you needed a clutch, so it was great to get in this car that was totally tailored, bespoke, Formula 1 car, just for me.

“I could go to sleep in that car without any problem. It was so comfortable.”

His hillclimb run reinforced for Hill how well he and the FW18 suited each other. Jakob Ebrey/Getty Images

At this year’s Goodwood Festival of Speed Hill and the FW18 reunited, with champion and championship-winning car traversing the hill to cheers from the sellout crowd. It was a special moment for Hill, but also for the team as it relieved one of its most famous triumphs.

“It’s wonderful,” Williams Heritage director Jonathan Kennard told RACER. “He's obviously got an incredible connection to the car, and a lot of the mechanics and engineers that we have here worked on that car for Damon in 1996. So it's just a great story. As a Damon Hill fan myself, he's my hero, and I just want to do the best job I can for him. It's an honor to have him back in the car.”

Naturally, with an old car being dusted off to run again, it wasn’t a simple endeavor. The specific car running at Goodwood, FW18-04, hadn’t turned a wheel for several years – not since it last appeared at Goodwood 12 years ago – and was the subject of a major five-month restoration.

“That car's never left Williams, so we had a pretty good understanding of the state of the car and what needed to be done,” said Kennard. “But obviously we didn’t really know until we got into it properly. So it was a case of getting it out of the museum, getting it back into the workshop and stripping it all down back into its component form.

“We even went further and got the tub wall bodywork repainted to make it nice, because it was a bit battered,” Kennard continued. “So literally everything was done on the car – crack testing all the components, load testing the wings, rebuilding gearboxes, bearings and seals, which are specialist parts of these cars, making sure they're all done, and then building it back up together again, shaking it down, making sure it's all working as we want it to be, and then bringing it here.”

Six FW18s were built for Hill and Villeneuve in 1996 and 04 was the pick of the crop, winning the San Marino, Canadian, French and German Grands Prix. Not only that but, in spite of its mammoth rebuild, it’s the one that was in the best shape.

“It's the most complete out of all of them,” said Kennard. “It was fully complete, so it's quite an easy decision to make from that point of view. But for us, the history of the chassis is vital as well.

“This one was Damon's main race car for the middle part of the season in '96, so it's won four grands prix and five pole positions, and should have won maybe another grand prix because he was leading in Monaco when the engine went. So it's a very, very, very special car, and it's nice to then reunite Damon with the car again, and knowing that he's got such incredible history with that car.”

Of course, back in the ‘90s Williams was a factory partner of Renault. Today, although the race team is a Mercedes customer, Williams Heritage’s relationship with the French brand is as strong as ever, with that relationship being key to getting the car rolling again.

“The best way of describing it is we're about as close as a works team as we were in the ‘90s as we are now,” said Kennard. “Renault is an incredible company and we're lucky to have great support from them. Renault is here supporting us with running the engine because we absolutely want to make sure that the engine is running as it should be, and we can’t dream of a better relationship with them. We're very lucky.”

Speaking of the restoration, Hill said, “I can see that they've done an enormous amount of work. I’m ever so grateful to Heritage for making the efforts and to Renault for working on these cars. They rebuilt the engine from scratch. It's incredible.”

It’s been a long time since Hill was in the car, and while a demonstration at Goodwood is far from pushing it to its limits like Hill did in period, he still enjoyed being back behind the wheel.

“Of course, yeah, absolutely. I love it,” he said. “I feel it's so beautiful to go up through the gearbox with this thing because it's just simple. You just pull the lever and it's done.

“That's not like the FW11 [which he drove earlier at the Festival] where you’ve got a gearbox, a proper H box on the side there. You have to take your hand off the wheel. It's easy to get it wrong as well.

“There's a couple of things that have changed,” he noted. “I've noticed that I'm quite scrunched up, and my lungs, they can't seem to expand. And if I was going to go back and do it again, I'd try and change the seating a bit so that I could breathe a bit more.

“[But] I can hold my breath for about two minutes, so there you go.”

As much as he enjoyed driving, connecting with the fans at the FoS was just as much fun for Hill. Jakob Ebrey/Getty Images

The FW18 project done, Williams Heritage now moves onto the next item – or items – on its list. The department is a busy one, constantly restoring, rebuilding, and running multiple cars for activities like this and customers.

“A lot of work's been done, but this is one of one of eight that we're doing at any one time. There's been a lot,” said Kennard. “We still own over 100 cars, and from our entire history, we’ve got one of every car still, every year, and that walkway’s amazing. We're quite keen on that, but we've got multiples of particular chassis. So sometimes we might offer it for sale, providing the customer is going to use it in the way they think it's going to be used.

“It's a big responsibility for us as the department to look after everything properly, as Frank would expect us to be, looking after his crown jewels, properly. So I like to think he’d be proud of what we're doing.”

On the customer side, Williams Heritage is conscious of maintaining the race team’s legacy, but is also open to helping those that buy its cars do what they want. This year it became the first current F1 team to run a car in the BOSS GP series, a competition for retired open-wheel cars that is almost entirely filled with third-party privateers.

“Within reason, we will do everything that we can to deliver on what the customer would like to do,” said Kennard. “And every customer is a bit different: some might want to come to Goodwood and that will be it for them. Generally, we're finding that more people want to use them more and more, and that's what we want. We really want to see the cars running more often.

“We're running an FW25 in the BOSS GP championship this year for a customer … I think the series we're delighted to have us involved. But this proves my point that if the customer wants to do something very specific, we will do everything we can to make it happen. This customer wanted to go racing again, and so here we are.

“And then it’s almost frustrating that we have private track days and nobody sees what we do. It's almost deliberately because it's a private test, but we do a lot of those for customers because sometimes that's what they want, and we're happy to do that.”

But at Goodwood, everyone got to see. And for Hill, it showed that his title win is still very much in the minds of the public, despite three decades having passed.

“It's extraordinary,” he said. “I meet people, particularly guys who are about 40 years old, who go all gooey when they meet me because they kind of remember when they were 10 years old and I won the world championship. So they they're all excited about that because it's those memories that grab you when you're a kid. It is quite flattering to think that people are still affected by that.”