'I was angry at the world. I wanted a normal life'

Damon Hill on dealing with the pain of his father's death, driving alongside Senna and his battles with Schumacher

- Donald McRae

It was awful and to this day I feel the tension that I experienced," Damon Hill says of the moment he heard on television in November 1975 that his father, Graham, the two-time Formula One world champion, had died in a plane accident. Hill had to leave the living room to find his mother and tell her what had happened. "It was like having a nuclear bomb and I dropped it on my mum. Of course it was accentuated by the fact I was 15, which is when you haven't got the defences to deal with it."

The extent of Hill's devastation is captured in a moving new Sky documentary which tracks his decision to follow his father into motor racing and eventually match him by winning the F1 championship in 1996. Early in the film his wife, Georgie, remembers how he seemed to be one of the saddest people she had ever met.

"I was angry at the world," Hill tells me. "I was furious. I'd had a belly-full of growing up as the son of a famous racing driver and people being interested in me because of that. I just wanted a normal life where people didn't give a damn about that and I could establish who and what I was. Georgie was unimpressed by whoever my dad might have been, so she was an oasis."

Six months after they started seeing each other Georgie suddenly realised why he seemed so bereft. They drove past the graveyard where Hill's father was buried and, finally, the dam broke.

"I remember it like yesterday," Hill says. "I thought we were going on a trip down memory lane and I'd show her where I used to live. It hit me completely unexpectedly. Until then I had moments where I wept about my dad but they were rare. But there's something about crying which soothes."

In the film he speaks of his fleeting desire to have been on the plane with his father. Death, at 15, seemed easier than life.