‘I was angry at the world’: Damon Hill on pain of his father’s death and how it fuelled his rise

‘It was like having a nuclear bomb’ is how former Formula One champion Damon Hill describes having to tell his mother that his father had died in a plane accident. Photograph: Sarah Lee/The Guardian

“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.”