Rewind: Hill's 1996 win, and Villeneuve's warning shot
Tuesday, 21 March 2023
Damon Hill led a Williams 1-2 to win Albert Park's maiden world championship Grand Prix in 1996, but rookie teammate Jacques Villeneuve laid down an imposing marker.
The Australian Formula 1® Grand Prix of 1996 was unusual, momentous, revealing, and a sign of things to come. And while Damon Hill left Melbourne as the first victor of a world championship Grand Prix on the Albert Park circuit, he wasn't the only winner. A title tilt begun, a star rookie laid down a marker, and the fans voted with their feet. As opening chapters to a sporting story go, Melbourne 1996 had it all.
First, the unusual part. After the 1995 F1® season ended in Adelaide in mid-November, the 1996 campaign kicked off less than four months later in Melbourne. Back-to-back races in the same country wouldn't happen again for the next 24 years, and only because of a global pandemic (Austria, 2020).
Momentous? The move of Australia's F1® showcase to its second-largest city brought with it a level of excitement that only solidified Melbourne's reputation as a sporting capital the equal of anywhere in the world. Some 401,000 people flooded through the Albert Park gates in 1996, with an estimated race-day attendance of 150,000. It would be 26 years before that figure would be topped by the 2022 four-day crowd of 419,114.
As for revealing and a sign of things to come, count Hill and Williams teammate Jacques Villeneuve in both camps. Hill came to Australia as the winner of that most recent race – in Australia – in a season where he finished runner-up for the title to Benetton's Michael Schumacher for a second consecutive year. Schumacher had taken the world champion's number 1 with him to a rebuilding Ferrari, leaving Hill in the box seat for the '96 title. Villeneuve, though, had his own thoughts on that.
The Canadian was an F1® rookie, but not like most; at 24, he was the reigning IndyCar champion and Indy 500 winner, and had proven immediately quick in pre-season testing. Just how quick was evident when he beat Hill to pole position by 0.138 seconds in Albert Park's maiden qualifying session; he was the first debutant to qualify on pole since Carlos Reutemann in Argentina 24 years earlier – and nobody has done it since.
"I was coming from racing in the 'States, in IndyCar, I wasn't coming from Formula 3000," Villeneuve explains.
"Damon had been in racing for a long time, and everyone was expecting him to get pole. So to clinch it – it was very close, a few hundredths (of a second) – was a little bit of a surprise, and then I think it allowed people to respect everything that happened afterwards."
Villeneuve wasn't done shocking the F1® world on Saturday – he led Melbourne's first race for the first 29 laps on the Sunday, briefly relinquished it to Hill in the pit-stop phase, and may well have won but for a late-race oil leak that saw the white paintwork of Hill's trailing Williams turning brown as the laps counted down.
With Villeneuve told to back off to stop his engine exploding, Hill eased past with five laps left. While the Briton was Albert Park's first victor, both drivers could consider themselves winners – and before long, they were winners of bigger prizes.
Australia 1996 was the first of eight Hill wins in a campaign that saw him become world champion before an ill-feted move to Arrows for 1997; Villeneuve then secured the 1997 title with seven victories, the most recent time Williams won a championship.
Hill took just one more victory – for Jordan in Belgium in 1998 – after his title-winning season, retiring at the end of the following year. His career was late-blooming – he won his title at age 36 – and groundbreaking, as he joined his dad Graham (1962, 1968) to become the first father-son duo to win a world championship.
Of Hill's 22 Grand Prix wins, Melbourne 1996 ranks as one of his most important, and more memorable.
"Jacques hit the ground running and made a splash because he out-qualified me – everyone was very excited about this new arrival," Hill reflects.
"It was one of the best days of my career, and started my championship off on the right foot. And it was a big success – Melbourne took to F1® and gave us a fantastic reception and start to the season."
