‘Hill’ review: Intimate portrait of F1 driver Damon Hill

Dir: Alex Holmes. UK. 2025. 90 mins

Everyone has a past, but former racing driver Damon Hill’s might be considered heavier than most. The son of two-time world championship Formula One driver Graham, Damon’s life was rocked when he was 15 by the death of his father – not on the racetrack, but in a plane crash. This polished, pacy and often melancholy documentary sees Damon consider his career partially through the prism of his father’s death as it catalogues his progress through the sport to his own 1996 world championship win.

 A focus on the personal, as well as the race track

Alex Holmes has a knack for selecting intriguing subjects, having previously considered the inspiring comeback of US cyclist Greg LeMond in The Last Rider and Tracy Edwards’ first all-female crew round-the-world yacht race in Maiden. Along with reflections from Damon himself, Hill also features considerable contribution from the driver’s wife Georgie. Her thoughts round out the emotional element of the documentary, while also quietly celebrating her importance to his success. This focus on the personal as well as the race track should help the film reach beyond Damon’s obvious petrolhead fanbase when Hill hits television screens as a Sky Exclusive in the UK and Ireland later this year, following its world premiere at Glasgow Film Festival.

Graham’s success on the racing circuit means that there is a wealth of archive footage and interviews from which Holmes can draw. This is smoothly edited together with family home videos by Cinzia Baldessari, so that a collage of the personal and the private emerges. Damon acknowledges the privileged upbringing he had, even though motorsport took his father away from home a lot. The family’s relief when Graham retired was short lived, as the plane accident happened not long afterwards. Worse still, Damon learned about it from a newsflash on the television – a moment he recounts in raw detail. The financial burden Graham’s death brought to the family is one of the things that kick-started Damon’s career in the sport.

“He was one of the saddest people I’ve ever met,” Georgie says as she recalls how she encountered and quickly fell for her husband. This sadness bubbles beneath many of Damon’s recollections, particularly during his early years in the sport when it seems he felt compelled to follow in his father’s footsteps out of responsibility, rather than love of racing. 

As Holmes begins to chart Damon’s rise from test driver for Williams in 1992, the past remains intertwined with the present. Sometimes it is a connection between father and son evoked by the editing together of footage from the two different eras  – a choice that works well, although one overlay of Graham’s face on to his son’s feels pushed too far. 

Just as often, it’s something more concrete. The moment, for example, in which Damon  struggled to reach the track for his try-out for the testing job only to realise it was the anniversary of his father’s death. The death of fellow Williams driver Ayrton Senna on the Imola Circuit in 1994 is also a critical event, as Damon recalls how his father must have felt when his Scottish teammate Jim Clark was killed at Hockenheimring, West Germany, in 1968.

Those looking for the rush of the race will find it here in the on-board footage from inside the car as Hill talks about how he vied for the championship and, particularly, his rivalry with German driver Michael Schumacher. The off-track archive footage is frequently shown in slow motion, which helps to emphasise the velocity of the races Holmes includes. This slowing down of key exchanges also makes us more aware of the look on Damon’s face, his pensiveness in early interviews or the merest flash of anger when Schumacher bats the peak of his cap after losing to Hill. 

This may be a bit of a race around the F1 winner’s career in general, but Damon’s willingness to share his feelings makes it a moving and compelling watch.