It was not a pretty sight. We had no points from the first three races and here I was, almost last after one lap. From there, things could only get better and, to my pleasant surprise, they did. I started moving up through the field and ended up improving my position by eleven places. Then, while I was standing eighth, with an eye on picking up a point, the car broke down.

It was frustrating, but it proved one thing - it was a fighting recovery and underlined my determination to give my best, whatever the circumstances. I want to do well, to win and battle. The experience of driving is great, but that's not what racing is all about. If the sport did not have a competitive element to it, I wouldn't find it nearly as stimulating.

It is not enough to drive around a circuit purely for the hell of it. What keeps me going back to motor racing again and again is the competition - the opportunity for most of the world's best drivers to pitch themselves against one another. You are under enormous pressure to perform and, under those circumstances, you get a good idea of how your skills stack up against the rest of the field.

I look at my tally of results, the number of races I have won and the pole positions I have held, and I tot them up in the same way an actor might look at the awards he has been given. They are my measure of achievement, a record of what I have done in Formula One, and I'm proud of them.

You cannot trade them in and they cannot be taken away from you. They are there for the record books and, when I stop driving, I will be able to look back at those results as a testament to all the hard work that went into climbing to the top. The question is, though, what pushed me to climb that high in the first place?

I have tried to understand the source of my motivation and ambition, because perhaps it holds the secret to getting the best out of oneself. There is a heavy cost to being a Grand Prix driver - the risks you face while driving and the family and social life that you miss out on - and I want to know why I have been so willing to meet that cost.

Whatever the root cause might be, it manifests itself in my competitive drive. Whatever it is that I'm doing, I have to set new targets and challenges to fire my motivation. There has to be something to aim for to keep me interested, some ambition has to be fulfilled - but the question I always ask myself is why? What is this bug that forces me to keep on pushing myself? Is it something particular in my make-up, or is it just human nature?

For a while, I was worried that I was trying to overcome a deep-rooted dissatisfaction with myself and needed to achieve something to be proud of. My father was a world-famous personality so, growing up, I felt strongly that I had to go into the world and establish myself on my own terms. I dreaded the thought of being seen as someone who has had success handed to him on a plate.

Ironically, despite all the accusations that I have been helped in my career because of my name, it would actually have been much easier to have walked away from racing at the very start, and avoided all the obvious comparisons. I considered this, but the bottom line is that I enjoy racing and I enjoy going fast. If I had not been a racing driver, then I would have been spiting myself just for the sake of avoiding comparison and I was not prepared to do that. To a great extent, I became a racing driver despite, rather than because of, my father's reputation.

It still took me time to understand and deal with his legacy, but eventually I realised that there was nothing I could do about what other people thought or remembered. I never fought against my father's performances and, regardless of the respect I still have for him, his achievements are not relevant to mine. I have my own problems and challenges, and there is nothing to be gained by trying to emulate the way he handled himself. We are different people and, despite all the questions about my father that have been put to me over the years, I made my own way in life and set goals for myself. Just like him, I have had ups and downs, and have always dealt with them as best I could.

You can't tackle motor racing in a half-hearted fashion. It's a sport that requires a lot of effort, through training and stress, and there has to be a pot of gold lurking at the end of the rainbow to push you on, a meaningful reward that will make all the effort worthwhile.

For many drivers, the source of the ambition to become world champion does not bear further analysis. Like Everest, it's just there - 'I'm a driver, I want to get to the top to prove that I'm the best.' Fine. It would be great if a driver was declared the best upon becoming champion, but that doesn't happen automatically. I remember watching a television interview with Jacques Villeneuve the morning after he had won the title in 1997. The interviewer kicked off straight away with 'This doesn't mean much, does it, because you had the best car?'

Winning the championship is merely a step on the way to being regarded as the best. If winning is the goal because it is a rare experience, then that is reason enough, but you have to realise that it's not a feeling that will last for ever. Unlike a trophy, you won't be able to hang on to that emotion, or hold the attention of the world for your achievement indefinitely, but it's nice to have had it once!

Of course, the experience is addictive and draws us all back for another hit, to relive that moment, to get that high again, but sooner or later it will slip beyond each driver's capabilities as surely as winter follows summer. Then, it's just a dream, as it was in the beginning, with only a few photographs to help convince you that it was real. I don't display any of my trophies or hang pictures of my greatest moments in my house, because I feel that as long as I'm still competing, whatever I have done in the past is irrelevant to the present and I don't want to have to keep reminding myself or my guests about how brilliant I used to be. I'm not that sad, yet.

Grand Prix literally means 'Big Prize', but, in truth, there is no actual big prize for winning in Formula One, at least not in the way that most of us would expect. It's not like the Indianapolis 500, for instance, where the winner is not even out of his car before the giant-sized 'check' is presented to him, so that all the viewers can make the connection between winning and reward.

In Formula One, the system is a little more complex, but it does ultimately follow that the better you do on the track, the better you can potentially do off it. Rather than there being an automatic return, there will have to be a negotiation with the team, the sponsor or whomever. It makes for an interesting relationship between the driver and the team boss, because there always seems to be a disparity between how each party views the reasons for their mutual success.

However, if a driver devotes the best years of his life to racing a car, he had better be a good negotiator or not care about the money. I tend to think it is prudent to earn as much as possible during my career, since I'm poorly qualified to do much else once I've retired from Formula One racing.

While money may be an objective, it is not necessarily a motivating factor. I was offered a deal once which was aimed at motivating me to win by linking payment directly and solely to race wins. Since I do not race to win money, I felt that, by accepting such a deal, I would have confirmed the team's wrong impression of the source of my motivation. Winning and money are totally separate issues, but it's hard to convince set commercial minds of that fact.

Even so, after a point, greater financial reward becomes an abstraction. I have met enough rich men who would have given anything to have stood on the top of the podium if only money could buy that. And I have also seen plenty of rich racing drivers who looked like they had nothing left to live for after a poor result. Not winning hurts.

Fame can lure us to do things we might otherwise not consider, but fame is a two-faced friend. I don't mind having my picture all over the place for having done something I'm proud of, but I was once presented to the world as the 'Prat' after knocking off Schumacher at Silverstone in 1995. To change that particular perception can certainly be a motivation.

Perhaps I would be better off not analysing why I want to win. Then again, it can be no bad thing to think through the motivating factors before embarking on a perilous and emotionally stressful journey. Imagine if you won the title, having made all those sacrifices, and found yourself unsatisfied and disappointed. The sense of anti-climax would be enormous.

Quite often, in fact, it is the struggle itself that is the most enjoyable part of any competition. That is what you have to look back on and, by seeing the efforts you had to make, the end result appears all the more valuable. If a driver's first title is a walkover, he might wonder whether it is worth all the effort; if he has to fight to the last race, he feels like a true champion.

When you get into Formula One, your first target is to win a race. If you're lucky enough to do that, and most people aren't, then you have give yourself new targets. If you've won one race, you've got to win another. Maybe you've got to aim to win two in a row, or pick up a certain number of victories in a season. Most of all, though, you want to go for the world championship.

What happens if you manage that feat is a more difficult question. You've achieved the ultimate challenge and, although the obvious thing is to try to repeat that success, you start to ask yourself what's next. Going for another title is not as appealing a proposition as it sounds, because winning one championship is a huge mental and physical struggle. At the end of the season, you are exhausted in every way and the last thing that the rational part of your mind wants you to do is put yourself through that amount of strain all over again.

It was two full days after winning my world championship in 1996 that I finally woke up and realised what I had done. It was almost as if a voice in my head suddenly said, 'It's okay, Damon, you can have a cup of tea now and put your feet up.' For the previous forty-eight hours, my life had been chaos of press interviews and appearances. Although I was talking about the title, I didn't have any time to think about it for myself. It was only when I had some peace and quiet that the whole thing sunk in.

What I had was a feeling of relief that lasted for a good couple of months, a feeling of satisfaction and contentment that it had turned out all right in the end. At that point, all the struggles, pain and cost were worth it. I had set out to do something and, to my immense delight, I had done it.

Having won that world championship, I looked at my career in a fresh way. Chasing the championship had provided me with ambition and motivation for most of my career, but now that focus had changed. I found myself questioning my future and wondering whether I should carry on accepting the risks of driving a racing car now that I had achieved my ambition.

After all, it looked like I was going back to square one. Joining Arrows was not going to give me the chance to retain my title and the general opinion was that, at thirty-six, I had won my one and only world championship and, quite possibly, my last Grand Prix. It wasn't a view that I liked to hear, but I would have had difficulty arguing against it.

I considered retiring after the disappointment of losing my Williams seat, but I was not prepared to throw away all my experience and abilities by giving up, even if I was champion. I felt I had more to put into the sport and I didn't want to sit at home, watching enviously from the sidelines. I made the firm decision to carry on, and if that meant trying to take Arrows by the scruff of the neck for a year, then so be it.

It was frustrating though. I had learnt so much and, having crossed the Rubicon by winning a title, I knew that if I ever got the opportunity again, things would be a lot easier. Now I knew how to win a title and what the mistakes were, but I was in a car that couldn't offer me the same opportunities. The golden rule is to get yourself in a competitive team and, in 1997, it looked as if I had broken that rule.

The Arrows gave me no chance of retaining my title, so I had to find a new challenge to keep me fired up for the season. Searching for motivation can be a problem, but in my circumstances I didn't have to look far. In fact, all I had to do was listen to my critics.

One of the biggest accusations that was thrown my way after winning the title was the tired old cliche that I only won races because I was in the best car. I knew in my heart that was not the case, but I felt it would be nice to turn things around to prove finally that I was a driver who had more ability than I had been given credit for. I was given that chance by Arrows. If I could push their car nearer to the front than anybody else had done, then I could prove to the world that, beyond everything else, I was a driver who deserved to be called world champion - someone who really could race. And that is what I set out to do.

There were some very high moments, such as taking the lead in Hungary and almost taking pole position for the last race of the year in Jerez, but there were some low times as well. The car was not good, and that created problems for everybody, including me. If you are being paid as a sportsman and things are not going well, then you are going to get flak from all directions. Nobody likes to see someone being paid a lot of money and then apparently not delivering, but, then again, nobody was more disappointed than me about the car's shortcomings. I am in Formula One because I get a buzz out of racing and improving a car. Going backwards is not one of my ambitions. During my season with Arrows, Tom Walkinshaw took the opportunity of the British Grand Prix, with its high profile in the media, to claim that I had not been pulling my weight in the team. He said I had lost some of my motivation and that I was not trying hard enough. When I heard that, I was furious.

An accusation like that does nothing to motivate me to perform better. It's the sort of soundbite that flies around and then, before you know it, there is a chorus of people dutifully following the theme. It was hardly my fault if I was being paid a lot of money to drive a car that was not very good. Having a good tactical brain doesn't come into play very much when you are eighth and going backwards, after all. Instead, what tends to come out is the frustration felt by everybody seeing their investment in time and money being wasted.

Criticism like Tom's tells you one thing above all else - the boss is fed up about his team's lack of success. When I went out later that weekend and scored a point in front of the Silverstone crowd, the suggestion was that my drive was inspired by criticism. That couldn't be further from the truth. Just because there is an upturn in performance after a driver is slated publicly, it doesn't mean the two things go together, and in this case it didn't follow at all. It is in my nature to want to succeed and put everything I have into my driving. I wouldn't have made it to Formula One if that were not the case and that was why I scored a point that day for Arrows and for Tom. It had nothing to do with the comments he had thrown in my direction, and everything to do with putting a hell of a lot of effort into a race and getting a bit lucky with a few non-finishers in front.

Racing hard is something that must be instinctive to me. From the very first seconds that I rode a motorbike as a child, I knew it was the best thing I had ever done and I have never lost that sense of excitement and determination. There is a common link between that childhood experience and my racing since - exhilaration through acceleration. That simple formula has served me for more than three decades.

I skied for the first time when I was five or six and loved it, and I rode that bike when I was ten. Even then, I didn't want to pootle round on it. I wanted to go fast.

I don't think my love of speed came from being in the Hill household, because I had no ambition at all to be a racing driver. Cars did not appeal to me at all, whereas bikes were my fascination.

On a motorbike, you became a part of the machine. There is a spiritual dimension to a bike. The angle of lean makes the experience closer to flying than driving a car, which works in a flat plane. On a bike, every movement of your body has an effect - the bike moves with you, so in some ways you feel as if the machinery is an extension of yourself. It is a very harmonious experience.

I started to race regularly when I was nineteen years old. I worked as a builder during the week and that provided enough money for me to buy my first bike and get on a track. I owned an old van and, first thing on Saturday morning, I would put the bike into the back of the van and go off racing. It meant everything to me.

I had a vision of myself winning, but there was one major problem: I simply did not know how to do it. All that kept me going was a bloody-minded determination that I was not going to accept defeat, and I took that attitude into everything I did. Whether it was not having the money I needed or the van breaking down on the way to the circuit, I saw every problem as a personal challenge that I had to overcome.

I refused help because I wanted to succeed for myself, but I had entered national races where the standard of racing was too high for a solitary rookie. All I had was my obsession, not just with racing, but with the idea of shaping my own destiny and discovering things for myself.

In my first race, I turned up on an out-of-date road bike, a second-hand Honda CB500 bought from Elite Motors in Tooting that was not suitable for racing in any way. I didn't tune it or change the tyres, but simply taped up the lights and charged out on to the track as fast as I could.

In my mind, I was instantly about to become a Barry Sheene. I thought my talent would surpass everything and imagined, terribly naively, that the machinery was not important. I thought that if I was good enough, I would win on any bike I cared to use and, lumbered with that attitude, I spent three years struggling along at the back of the field. I couldn't even start my bike properly, so at every race I was still trying to get going while the rest of the field were streaming around the first corner. I was hardly going to win this way, but I stupidly thought that determination would be enough.

However brave a face I put on the situation, it was a desperate disappointment and I nearly made the decision to stop racing. My career up until then had been a dismal, frustrating failure, but I did not want to give up. Things had to change, though, so I made the decision to move down a level or two and take a long look at what I was doing. It was the first good move I made, because finally I was waking up to the fact that you do not turn up and become world champion the next day. You have to learn your craft and channel your efforts in the right direction. That's as good a lesson for a racer to learn today as it was sixteen years ago.

I changed the carburettors and concentrated on getting the bike to start with the first push. I also began to race at Brands Hatch every weekend, which made me a master of both that circuit and the South Circular Road. I thought a lot more about the skills involved, and I even began talking to some of the other people in the sport after years of keeping to myself. All of a sudden, I became a winner.

To this day, the first win I had remains one of the most satisfying experiences of my career. It was in 1983, three years after my first race, and it felt wonderful.

I won the race by a long way. Exactly how far, I will never know, because I didn't dare to look back from the moment I got into the lead until I saw the chequered flag, fearful that somebody was about to overtake me. When I crossed the finishing line, the overwhelming feeling was of disbelief, because I had tried so hard to win for all those years and suddenly I had cracked it. I just didn't really know why.

After that first victory, I started to win all the time. Suddenly I felt unbeatable. I had Brands Hatch sussed and, whatever the level of competition, I always seemed to win there.

Just as they were to do after my Formula One title many years later, the sceptics suggested that I was winning because I had better machinery. Then, at one race, the gearbox broke on my bike and I couldn't use it. John Webb, then the circuit owner, lent me some money from the cash till and told me to go out into the paddock, find somebody with a similar bike to mine, and hire it. So I did, and even though the tyres were different from the ones I was used to, which worried me a little, I won the race. There was no let-up in my performance, so everybody could see that my success was down to me, not the bike. More importantly, / could see that maybe it was me and not the bike.

Buoyed up by my new-found success, I started to consider the long-term prospects of being a motorbike racer, and realised they were not good. Not many British riders made much money, and very few had long careers. The thought hit me that if I wanted to race for a living, then I probably shouldn't do it on bikes. For the first time in my life, I started thinking about trying out cars instead.

Because of my father, I knew people in the motor racing world and I was aware that there were drivers, some of them in their fifties, who made good money from their racing. The idea of having a steady income and racing fast cars to boot began to look better and better. The more I considered it, the more cars began to take on a whole new attraction. If you want your racing to be serious, it has to be a full-time profession and motor racing seemed to offer that. It was a pragmatic career change.

No matter that the vehicle was now different, my desire to succeed was simply transposed to my career as a racing driver and my motivation was to win and get paid for it. I did not expect to get rich, but I did not want to have to race part-time and earn an income on the side. Quite soon I became as single-minded and obsessive about car racing as I had been about bikes.

The racing was competitive and it was motorsport so, in that sense, there was not a lot of difference between cars and bikes. The trouble was that, until then, I had not taken the slightest bit of interest in motor racing. I was working as a despatch rider and racing bikes in my spare time, and that didn't leave me any time to spend watching cars. I knew about the history of the sport, of course, but I was not a regular viewer of Grands Prix. That had to change. From the moment I decided to switch to cars, I started to watch Formula One all the time. I regarded that as one of the duties of my new job.

When you have raced a racing bike, though, you cannot love a Formula Ford car, and that was my entry level. The first time I ever drove a car that had anything like the power-to-weight ratio and grip of a 350 Yamaha racing bike was in Formula 3000, the rung below Formula One. Up until then, the cars were all underpowered and over-gripped. They were still exciting, and the competition was good, but that feeling of exhilaration that you get from a bike was not there.

The only thing that comes close to the feeling of a racing bike is a Formula One car. There is nothing superfluous about a racing bike, nothing that does not add to the performance. Other car formulae are designed to be restrictive, which makes them a little crude, but Formula One cars use high-tech materials that take the sport to the nth degree. It is nearly as good as we can achieve.

Whatever the machinery, though, you clearly have to try your best, whether that is in a struggling Grand Prix car, as a Formula Ford backmarker or as the best bike rider on the grid. The point of any kind of racing is to push yourself as hard as possible, and that is what I did from the moment I got into my first racing car. The motivation for any racing driver worth his salt is the same - we all want to get the best from ourselves and our cars, and we all want to win.

It doesn't always work out as you would like. You can always try your best, but if the machinery is so bad that you are going backwards in races, then your ability to compete is badly affected. You can't fight and that means you cannot do what you are being paid to do, because you are handicapped by the equipment.

It would be no good for England to play Michael Owen in goal because he is the guy who can score goals, and he isn't going to do it from there. He would get pretty fed up if he had to play a few games in there, but his motivation would not change. He would still want to score goals, and his character would be no different, but his ability to do his job would be greatly reduced.

You can't expect to win every race you enter, or every championship that you challenge for, and putting up with the setbacks is part of a driver's skill as well. The disappointments will always outweigh the triumphs - even Jim dark lost more races than he won. If you win all the time, you are probably doing something that is too easy, something that is not pushing you sufficiently.