Time & Perspective Quote by Damon Hill

Hill’s line reads like a driver talking about weather: you don’t negotiate with it, you race through it. Coming from an F1 champion whose career played out under a microscope of tragedy, legacy, and relentless comparison, the point isn’t faux-humility. It’s a survival tactic for living in public.

The intent is to drain “press” of its moral authority. Good coverage feels like validation, bad coverage feels like punishment, but Hill reframes both as the same volatile fuel: attention. That’s a quietly radical move in celebrity sport, where athletes are trained to treat reputation as a scoreboard. By insisting he can’t “have the good and forget the bad,” he’s rejecting the emotional bargain fans and media often offer: be adored now, be flayed later. The subtext is about control. If you let praise in as proof of your worth, you’ve already agreed that criticism gets to define you, too.

It also nods to the specific cruelty of motorsport narratives. Drivers aren’t just evaluated on skill; they’re cast as heroes, chokers, lucky sons, or cold technicians depending on the week’s storyline, the car’s form, or a single mistake at 200 mph. Hill’s even-handed acceptance is less zen than armored realism: take the applause, but don’t start chasing it. The moment you do, you’re driving for headlines instead of lap times.