Just as Damon Hill played second fiddle at Williams Racing to Ayrton Senna, this film follows in the wake of Asif Kapadia’s 2010 high-octane, high-tragedy single-name documentary Senna. Where that film was all raw, experiential cinematic chicanery, Alex Holmes’s film is more traditional, rooted in interviews with Hill and his wife Georgie. However it has quieter, but equally profound, lessons to impart in its emphasis on the driver’s need to live up to his roistering father Graham, and on the real meaning of victory in the most alpha of environments that is Formula One.
“It’s almost like I was trying to get back to the start again – get back to the place where it all went off the rails.” That’s the quasi-mythological racing line taken here; Hill is referring to the premature death in 1975 of his championship-winning dad aged 46 in a plane crash, which also financially ruined his family. But his redemption doesn’t go smoothly. After Hill sidles into the sport by becoming test driver for Nigel Mansell, team principal Frank Williams constantly doubts that he has the right stuff. Consigned to the support driver slot when he finally makes the team, more ruthless operators, Senna and Mansell included, are always circling.
