On this week #7 - Graham Hill: the champion who walked on water
It's not often that the worlds of rowing and Formula 1 collide, but thanks to two-time Formula 1 champion Graham Hill – born on this week 85 years ago – it happened twice.
Hill grew up not far from the River Thames in London, and when he was 23, he joined the London Rowing Club. Their colours would go on to adorn his famous dark blue racing helmet, with vertical white stripes representing the eight oars on a boat.
It was a design that would later be echoed by his son Damon, who also won the Formula 1 title, in 1996 – making the Hills the first father and son duo to both be crowned world champions.
London was perhaps the most famous rowing club in England's capital city, but it wasn't Hill's first. That was the lesser-known Auriol Rowing Club, which he was introduced to aged 20 by his cousin. Nine months after joining, Hill won his first regatta, then in 1950 he took part in his first international competition, with the Auriol crew just losing out by a fifth of a second to a Belgian crew.
Auriol is also where he met his wife Bette, who was another member of the club. But Hill wanted the next step on water, and at the London Rowing Club, he took part in 20 finals, before his racing career – which he embarked on relatively late in life – took precedence.
“I really enjoyed my rowing,” Hill wrote in his 1969 book, Life at the Limit. “It really taught me a lot about myself, and I also think it is a great character-building sport. You have to have a lot of self-discipline and a great deal of determination. You not only get to know about yourself, but you get to know about other people – who you would like to have in a boat with you over the last quarter-mile of a race when you are all feeling absolutely finished. With seven other fellows relying on you, you can't just give in. The self-discipline required for rowing and the ‘never say die' attitude it bred obviously helped me through the difficult years that lay ahead.”
While Hill's languid personality made driving look easy (he racked up 14 wins, 13 pole positions and 36 podiums from his 176 F1 starts between 1958 and 1975) the truth was that he had to work tremendously hard to achieve everything he did. Perhaps the fact that he was such a late beginner – he didn't even pass his driving test until he was 24, making his race debut in Formula 3 a year later – robbed him of the chance to polish some of the natural ability demonstrated by a few of his colleagues from a young age.
By the time Hill drove his first grand prix, in Monaco in 1958, he was already 29. Yet despite retiring on that occasion, he went on to become ‘Mr Monaco', winning Formula 1's most famous race five times. Despite Fernando Alonso's recent attempts to usurp him, Hill is still also the only driver ever to have won the ‘Triple Crown': the Indy 500, Le Mans 24 Hours, and Monaco Grand Prix (although some people – including Hill himself – define it as winning the F1 World Championship).
After a serious accident in the 1969 United States Grand Prix, where he broke both his legs, Hill's career would never quite be the same. Failing to qualify for the 1975 Monaco Grand Prix – a race he had made his own – prompted him to definitively retire from driving to concentrate just on running the Embassy Hill team, which he had founded in 1973.
Barely six months after hanging up his helmet aged 46, Hill died along with five other members of his team – including driver Tony Brise – when the Piper Aztec he was piloting from a test at Paul Ricard crashed in thick fog on the approach to Elstree airfield, north of London.
