Confessions of a despatch rider

Damon Hill is being squeezed from the right and is running out of road to his left, searching for an escape route. Is Michael Schumacher up to his old tricks? Are we in Adelaide? None of the above. Hill is on the Chiswick Flyover in West London and the vehicle trying to run him off the road is a coach. And Hill is not in a Williams F1 car but on a Kawasaki Z500 motorcycle.

It’s the early 1980s and Damon is working as a despatch rider in London to pay for his weekend motorcycle racing. At that stage in his life Hill wanted to be the next Barry Sheene, not James Hunt. His first job as a motorbike courier, early in 1982, was with a small company called Apollo Despatch based in a pokey office a few floors up in Villiers Street, near Embankment tube station. The very same company that in the autumn of 1983 a 21-year-old Goodwin laid his neck on the line in the very same line of work.

Hill dreamed of being a World Champion motorcycle racer while I had no greater ambition than to never have a job that required wearing a suit. My plan, if there was such a thing, was to ride bikes in the winter and then travel in the summer.