I was lucky to start off my Formula One career with Williams, a team who know all about winning. They set a remarkable standard of achievement and if anybody questions that quality, all Frank and Patrick have to do is open the books and show off the role call of championships and victories. That kind of success does not come easily and it rubs off on the people around them. If you look at their mechanics' faces after they have had a bad weekend, you can see their disappointment.

Williams appreciate that every little bit matters, whether it is the car, the mechanics, the team management or the driver. Every part of the process needs to be in place before you can start a race weekend with the real ambition of ending it on top of the podium, and that is the lesson I took with me when I left the team. Whatever else may have happened, I will always be grateful to them for teaching me that.

In addition, I was team-mate to Alain Prost, Ayrton Senna and Nigel Mansell, fantastically successful drivers who each had their own way of going about things. Alain and Ayrton, in particular, were perfectionists who would go to any length to get what they wanted. My father, who was a stickler for getting things right, was another driver who fell into that category.

The lesson was clear - you cannot be satisfied if something has been left half done. If there is the smallest improvement that can be made, you have to go for it. If 100 per cent is achievable, you can't be happy with 99 per cent.

That sort of coaching becomes ingrained. You think about winning rather than finishing, of championships rather than near-misses, and you get a high from that confidence. It is a great feeling being in the lead in a Grand Prix and, after I had left Williams, leading in Hungary at the wheel of an Arrows was a fantastic experience. It reminded me how much I missed the high that only winners get. It also made me hungry to rediscover that feeling of pure delight that comes from victory.

One of the main reasons that Eddie had been so keen to sign me was for that experience of being at the front, of having won races and dealt with the pressure. Almost immediately I had signed, the team wanted me to tell them what they should do to help Benson and Hedges Jordan turn into winners, perhaps to let them into some of the secrets I had picked up from Williams. The trouble was that there was no panacea, no bit of magic that would get Jordan there. It was a question of doing the same tasks, but doing them better and doing them consistently. My contribution was to impress upon everyone what a big difference a lot of small things can make. Put them together, and they can be the difference between coming second and first.

Initially, I think they were disappointed that I was telling them things they already knew. When you have worked in Formula One for years, aspiring to win but never quite getting there, it is easy to imagine that there is another planet that the winners and champions inhabit, so when I moved to Jordan, there was a bit of curiosity about how I might do things. They wanted to know what was so different about a world champion and they wondered if I would be an instant fix, or if I could provide a list of do's and don'ts that would put us on the pace from day one.

Instead, all I could suggest was that they should continue to do the same job, but to do it better, and that probably came as something of a disappointment. I suppose it was the equivalent of someone saying to me: 'If you want to win again, why don't you just drive faster and try to beat the guy in front?' My answer would have been 'Don't you think I know that?' and maybe theirs was the same. As much as I needed to push them in one direction, I also needed to convince and encourage the team that it was the basics that counted.

The difficulty was that there was such an enormous gulf between where we were at the start of the year and where we needed to be to challenge for a win or two, so a lot of what I was saying was redundant. At the start of the season, we were not looking for the last per cent - we were looking for just about the whole thing, and it took time to find. The fact that we managed to do it at all is remarkable.

After the disaster of Monaco, our performances improved gradually, and Spa was our next destination. We had been starting to qualify well and were coming close to getting a place on the podium. Ralfand I both did well in the previous two races, in Hockenheim and Hungary, and finished in the points, so we came to Spa in pretty good spirits. A victory did not look likely, but a decent performance did.

Spa has always been a good race for Jordan. They nearly won it with Andrea de Cesaris, Michael Schumacher qualified seventh there in his first-ever race - before being poached by Benetton - and Rubens Barrichello gave Jordan their one and only pole position when he took advantage of a damp Belgian qualifying session. Everyone in the team was looking forward to Spa, including me.

I expected Spa to be a very competitive contest. Michael Schumacher and Mika Hakkinen were fighting hard for the world championship title, and Michael is a Spa specialist as he grew up not far from the circuit. It was going to be extremely tough to join their battle, but we all had a very good feeling about the race and were looking forward to the weekend.

The warm-up sessions went extremely well, and I managed to get the car set up nicely, so we went into qualifying with a strong degree of optimism. Drivers have a limit of twelve laps for the one hour of qualifying, which always starts on the dot of 1 p.m. This actually means we have a choice of the normal four runs of one complete timed lap (because we have to use up two laps on each run, going out and coming into the pits) or any other permutation, provided we do not exceed the limit of twelve laps. Around Spa, a long circuit with demanding corners and fast straights, the tyres were past their best after one timed lap, so the best tactic was to take four cracks at getting the perfect lap. That is a lot of concentrated effort.

For a long while I stood third on the timing screen behind the two McLarens, but then, not long after I had finished my third run, I was bumped back a place by Schumacher. I was temporarily frustrated by that, but more determined than ever to pull out something special for the final run. I could see that there was not a lot between us and I was certain that I would improve my time, but the question was whether he would do the same.

We all waited. This was the big crunch. Would Michael get pole position? Would I get my place back? I made my decision to leave the garage with two and a half minutes to go. You have to start your last lap before the one hour session is up, but if you manage to do that, then your time still counts. As long as you cross the line to start the timed lap before the red light comes on, then you're okay. In those circumstances, I wanted to leave it as late as possible to get as clear a run as I could.

I wasn't the only one who planned it that way. As I came out of my garage, I saw Hakkinen, Coulthard and then Schumacher emerging just ahead of me - a train of cars all fighting it out for the top four places. As we set off, Michael started to back off on the throttle, giving the McLarens time to get away so they didn't hold him up when he was on a quick lap. The trouble was that I didn't want to be held up by him either, nor did I want to overtake him, because my plan was to be the last guy setting his qualifying time. Instead, for half a lap, I stuck closely to the rear of Michael's car until it was clear that we would both get across the start line in time. After that, I backed off to give myself some space and concentrated on trying to do one perfect lap.

I could see Michael in front of me when we both started our quickest laps. There are a couple of points on the circuit where you can judge the distance between yourself and the car in front, and halfway around I could see that I had closed the gap. That meant one thing - my lap was going better than his, a piece of good news just when I needed it. For the last half of the lap I gave it everything and in the last section of the circuit I made up a lot of time. I knew it had been a good lap, certainly my best so far, but I didn't know how good Michael's had been. He might have improved over the second half, for instance, and there was no point in celebrating only to find that I was still behind the Ferrari.

In fact, I didn't have to wait long. As I started to coast home, Dino, my engineer, came on the radio and said, 'Well done, Damon. You're third.' That single moment was the best point of my season, and it sparked off one thought straight away - I was third on the grid and the car was quick. Could I win?

I went into a press conference afterwards and said that I wasn't thinking about the race and that I was just happy to be third on the grid. Of course, that wasn't really true, because the taste for victory had returned and I had no intention of frittering away the opportunity. The McLarens looked quick, but we didn't expect them to be so fast in race trim, and we had had the powerful fillip of beating Schumacher at his favourite circuit. Once I was back from the conference, I was quite happy to settle down to pondering our race strategy, calculating the possibilities and poring over the data. When you're stuck down the grid, it can be a laborious process, but this time I went to it with a lot of gusto. A sniff of victory gives everybody a burst of energy.

There is a difference between wanting to win and being a dreamer, a difference between doing whatever it takes to come home first and being unrealistic. If you qualified tenth because you were consistently 1.5 seconds off the pace, then it's unrealistic to come up with a race strategy intended to win the race. This time, though, we knew we had a chance of beating McLaren in a straight fight if the tyres gave us an advantage or if we came up with a better race strategy.

The expectation changed the complexion of our normal pre-race briefing and, for me, it was very much an old, familiar feeling. There would not have been too much difference between the atmosphere of preparation in the meeting room inside the B & H Jordan truck that Saturday night and the same room in the Williams truck during the years I raced for them. It is a mind game peppered with strategy, very much akin to a military campaign, where you all sit down to bash out the different permutations, prepare for the race and try to guess what the other teams are going to do.

It is a matter of educated guesswork where, like a spy trailing his opposite number, you try to put yourself in somebody else's position and work out what move they are going to make. 'What would I do in Hakkinen's shoes? What about Schumacher? What are they going to get Eddie Irvine to do this time?' Like chess, you are thinking and second guessing in the safe knowledge that everybody else is doing the same thing. The crucial question is often not what your team is going to do, but what people will expect you to do.

At Spa, there is one other factor that you cannot ignore -a climate that no weatherman can ever get to grips with. Our forecast on Saturday evening had predicted only a very slight chance of rain for the race, but sure enough the sky was slate grey when we woke up and it started to drizzle in the morning, prompting the usual comments that this would play into Michael's hands.

Despite the hype, I was quite happy to see the rain falling. Goodyear's wet weather tyre was very good, which was a possible advantage over the McLarens, and I don't mind driving in the wet. I have participated in enough races not to be out-psyched by pre-race predictions regarding the prowess of others, and I wasn't going to be handing this race to anybody without a fight, whatever the conditions.

As we got to the grid, it was clear that the rain was getting heavier and, having done my lap to the grid on intermediate tyres that are only suitable for a damp track, I knew I wouldn't be able to use them without losing places or aquaplaning off. There was no choice for me - it had to be wet weather tyres.

Nearly without exception, everyone started the race on full wet tyres. It was quite wet then, but, as suddenly as it had started, the rain stopped soon after. Looking back, the best option would have been to have started on intermediates - which was exactly what Schumacher had done. How did he know what the weather was going to do? At the second start, he was on a full downforce, wet weather set-up, even though it had stopped raining. So what happened? It began to rain again and he had his car in the right configuration once more. At Spa, he can be infuriatingly good at predicting the weather!

The first start was dreadful. I slipped the clutch too hard and then had to pull it in as it grabbed. By the time I had engaged it again, I had ruined my start and lost a lot of time. I think I was sixth in the first turn, and in a grandstand seat to see the early stages of the thirteen-car pile-up at the first corner. Coulthard and Irvine were being pushy and apparently made contact, then David escaped ahead of me. I found some traction and raced off towards the awesome rise through Eau Rouge, but David didn't make it. He seemed to hit a bump, which threw his car to the right and straight into the concrete wall. I was immediately behind him and knew what to expect next, but not what to do about it. It was one of those split-second decisions which make so much difference to one's day. Knowing that he would rebound, I could hit the brakes and run the risk of the rest of the pack piling into me, or I could just keep my foot down and hope for the best.

Thankfully, one of his detached wheels helped me make up my mind. It flew towards me and I realised that if I didn't brake I would catch it. As soon as that and the rest of David's wreckage had passed within inches of the front of my car, I jumped back on the gas and got out. I knew, however, that there would be a big shunt behind me.

I expected the safety car to come out, but I was a little surprised to see the red flags that meant the race was being stopped. Charlie Whiting, the race director, had a meeting with the drivers before the race and told us to expect the safety car to emerge if there was a first-lap accident because he didn't want to have to restart. His plan was obviously aimed at stopping any risky business at the first corner, because a driver who crashes out in the early stages doesn't get a second chance if the safety car is called into action, but he does if there is a red flag. Charlie's logic was quite sensible, but he could have had no idea that the first-lap accident he had predicted would turn out to be such an enormous smash, with wrecked cars everywhere. In those circumstances, he had no choice but to stop the race - if he hadn't, we might have had trouble racing our way around salvage trucks for an hour and a half.

At the time, I didn't know the sheer scale of the crash. I came round again and parked on the grid and from there, around the corner from the chaos, you couldn't see anything. I was expecting a five- or ten-minute delay at most, so, while other people were getting out of their cars and wandering off, I decided to sit tight. Dino told me there would be a big delay, but I stayed put and, fifty minutes later, I was still there. All the while, I was getting myself psyched up, running over the mistakes I had made at the first start and getting myself motivated so that I wouldn't make the same errors the next time. While everyone else was lining up, I was more concerned about staying calm than feeling motivated.

The weather, as usual, played its hand. While they were clearing away the crash, the sun emerged, so we had to make a new plan based on using intermediate tyres and a different set-up. I didn't want to be conservative, so I reduced the amount of wing we used, something that other people on the grid were not doing. As long as it continued to dry out, I knew I would be sitting pretty. At the time, it seemed to me that the weather had turned.

Reducing wing means changing the angle of the front and rear wings to cut the downforce holding the car to the track. In tricky conditions, you normally try to have as much downforce as you can to stop the car floating and then aquaplaning, but the problem is that the more down-force you use, the slower the car is on the straights. Taking off wing meant the car would be more difficult to handle as long as the track was wet, but when it dried I would have more speed than most. It was a gamble, a case of everything or nothing, and on another day it could have backfired miserably. Spa, though, turned out to be our race.

Your decision as to whether or not to take a risk like that is affected by a lot of things, including confidence, ambition, the state of the championship and your own fear of failure. Hakkinen, for instance, would have been unwise to have gambled in the way that I did because he had a championship lead to protect, while Schumacher could take risks because coming second was no use to him then.

For me, the second start was a reprieve, because I had screwed up the first one, and I was not intending to repeat that failure. Lo and behold, I didn't. I made an absolutely perfect start and outbraked Hakkinen into the first corner. After that, Mika tangled with Schumacher and put himself out of the race. That was one rival out of the way even before we'd done 400 yards and David Coulthard spun off the track not much later. David, of course, managed to keep going and, although he was out of contention for a win, his part in the drama was a long way from over.

On the opening laps, I was able to draw out a lead and things were looking good. The car felt comfortable, I was driving well and a drier racing line had begun to emerge, a fact that suited my car's set-up to a tee. Everything was beginning to play right into my hands - and that was when the rain started to fall again.

At Spa it customarily rains in some parts of the circuit and not in others, and this time it was raining by the pits and at Stavelot. First it was light, then it got much heavier and soon it was clear that the intermediates were not able to cope with the rain in those areas.

Schumacher caught up and started to harry me. He was running with more downforce than me, which is why I was prospering while it stayed dry and I could drive hard. Once the rain started, I had to tiptoe around and avoid aquaplaning off the track, but Michael could brake later and accelerate harder. Once he had caught me up, it was just a question of time before he passed, and if I had put up a strong fight, it would probably have ended with me spinning out. Much as I was sorry to lose the lead, I had to let Michael go.

I had raced at Spa before when the weather had brightened as quickly as it had rained, and if that happened, I knew I would be in a good position again. My optimistic side was telling me to hang on and get back at Michael when the weather changed. The pessimistic side of me, though, was thinking that the race was beginning to look like another Michael Schumacher Spa domination show.

In Belgium, he seems to have some kind of control over the weather, as if he has his hand clenched around the top of a mighty tap somewhere. Just when he needed rain, it appeared, tumbling from the sky more and more ferociously. The rain had stopped for fifty minutes before the restart and I had gambled on the basis of that. At the same time, sitting on the grid alongside me, with the sun beginning to appear and the track drying, Michael had chosen to set his car up for the sort of heavy rain showers that didn't seem possible, but, of course, that was exactly what appeared. If he ever gets bored of racing, I'm sure Michael would do a great job as a weather forecaster.

By now, my tyres were all but useless. Intermediates don't have the deep grooves you need to displace water. On a damp track they are fine, but with standing water they can't cope. When I came in for my first pit-stop, it was obvious that we had to change to wets, and that meant adjusting the front wing as well to alter the aerodynamic balance of the car. We had a bit of a problem, because the mechanic could not get the spanner out of the wing adjuster, but Jim Vale, the team manager, did the decent thing by pulling back sharply on the mechanic, which pulled the spanner out at the same time. In the midst of all the action, there was no time to see the funny side.

I got out of the pits, but Michael was 15 seconds in the lead and I was having to focus on the obvious objective of staying on the track, while trying to push as hard as I could. Ralf, like his brother, had gambled on having more wing than me, and he had fought his way up to third place, a terrific performance from a guy who had such a wild reputation at the start of the season. All of a sudden, Eddie was looking at a double-podium finish.

Any victory owes something to fortune and to the outcome of a few, crucial episodes. When the luck is with you, they go your way and you benefit accordingly. When your luck is out, you end up in a gravel trap or you trundle back to the pits with a mechanical failure, bemoaning your bad fortune. It's the same for every driver and every team and, on that wet day, two things happened within a few minutes of each other that put us on the road to victory.

First, I hit another car, but kept going. Then, Michael did the same thing, albeit with a great deal more force, and knocked himself out of the race. From those two acorns sprung my first win for two seasons, and Jordan's first victory ever.

The visibility during the race was terrible, but I had to keep pushing to stay ahead of Ralf and to try to catch Michael. I came up to lap Jarno Trulli's Prost and, as I went to pass, saw him moving across in my direction. Even when I was completely alongside, he still didn't see me because of the spray, and the first that he knew about it was when my left front wheel hit his right front.

It was a big moment. On a bad day, my wheel could have snapped off or I could have ridden over his tyre and gone airborne. Instead, we just bounced off each other and kept on going. It was a close call, but I thought I had got cleanly away and it was the last I saw of Trulli.

In fact, the collision had broken the rim on the left rear wheel. I wasn't aware that wheel had hit him, but somewhere along the line it must have done. I didn't realise what the problem was, but air was leaking from the tyre, dropping the pressure and slowing me down. The damage was only discovered when they changed the tyres at the next pit-stop, and gave the old wheels a once-over. By all accounts, the wheel wouldn't have lasted more than another two or three laps. Trulli, by the way, didn't know that it was me whom he had hit until I spoke to him about it at Monza the following week. He thought it had been a Tyrrell, which meant he never even saw the blinding yellow of our B & H livery!

Then came Michael's infamous collision with David Coulthard. I was still running second when, out of the blue, Dino told me over the radio that Schumacher was out of the race. Normally if someone has had a crash, you see their car by the side of the circuit as confirmation of the news, but there was no sign of his Ferrari. It is unusual to have a crash that puts you out of the race, but which still allows you to drive back to the pits, so I was mildly intrigued, but there wasn't time to ask any more. I knew only that Michael was out and I was leading the race.

The point at which you discover you are in the lead of a race is the moment that defines your ability to withstand pressure. Some people revel in it, others find it all too much and wilt under the burden. For me, it is a familiar, exciting feeling that I have grown used to in my career. It spurs me on to concentrate harder and nurture the car, to make the most of an opportunity.

Over the years I have had lots of experience being in front and, now that the chance had come again, I was enjoying it. All the while, the thought was going through my mind that this could be Jordan's first win, and I could imagine the combination of fear and excitement that Eddie must have been feeling. I had started the season wanting to be the first guy to win a race for his team; now I had the chance, I was not going to let it slip through my fingers.

There was still no time for complacency. Giancarlo Fisichella, the man who nearly won this race for Jordan last year, came to the fore again, but this time for all the wrong reasons. With visibility now virtually nil, he slammed into the back of Shinji Nakano's Minardi at the Bus Stop chicane, spraying pieces of bodywork all over the track and giving himself a nasty fright into the bargain by ripping apart a considerable amount of his Benetton. The safety car came out immediately, and that was the moment when it could have all gone wrong for me, because Ralf had already made his pit-stop and I hadn't. When the safety car comes out, the field bunches up behind it, reducing wide leads to almost nothing. The 15-second lead that I had enjoyed over Ralf was imminently going to be cut, so I had to make my stop there and then and hope I could still come out ahead of Ralf. I did.

Now Ralf was on my tail and, at the same time, my wife was on the phone to Michael Breen, my lawyer, asking him to plead with somebody to get the race stopped, because she had seen enough. She was on holiday in Spain and by this point she was a nervous wreck, not because I was winning, but because of all the accidents.

After a few laps behind the safety car, I thought they should stop it too. The race was nearly over and we were running out of both cars and time, but this being Formula One, I guess all the drama was simply adding to the show. Whatever the drivers might have thought, there was no way they would call an early halt to such an incident-packed race, so I started to think about what would happen when the safety car went in and, with Ralf directly behind me, there were some decisions to be made.

My fear was that Ralf, who was suing Jordan for the right to leave for Williams, would feel under no obligation to obey team orders. With only ten laps to go, he might see this as a chance to win, and if he tried to overtake me at the restart, we could both end up in the gravel.

It was a risk for the team and, of course, there was also the selfish aspect that I had already lost my 15-second lead because of the safety car, and I didn't want to lose out to Ralf in the race because of that. I got on the radio to my engineers and said, 'Tell Eddie that it's up to him. We can race for this, and there will be a chance that neither of us will finish, or he can tell Ralf to hold station and that way we stand a good chance of getting a 1-2. It's up to Eddie.'

I didn't want it to come across as something I was demanding or needed to have happen (I have my pride still!) so I emphasised that the decision was down to the team, and to Eddie in particular. It was obvious how much both of us wanted to win, and that we would fight for victory against anybody, including our own team-mate. When the decision came, it was to tell Ralf to backoff. I was relieved, but not completely convinced that he would accept it, so when the safety car went in and we started racing again, I legged it into the first corner.

It was just as well, because Ralf was pushing hard. He had to, because Alesi, in third place, was breathing down his neck, but I didn't want to give Ralf a tempting sight of the lead and then suffer the consequences. To the viewer, it might have looked like we were coming home in formation, but, believe me, we were racing the last ten laps and I feel confident that even if Ralf had tried to get past me, he would not have managed it.

As I crossed the line, I was elated - for Eddie, for the team and, a little, for myself. This was my first win in a car other than a Williams and there have been very few drivers who have gone from one team to another and continued to win. I felt proud that I had led a race in an Arrows, where I nearly won, and now I had won a race in a Jordan. When I was at Williams, I was always told that I was lucky to have the best car in the field, which cast a shadow over my ability. Winning at Spa proved that there has always been more to it than just driving the best car.

I knew I had driven well all weekend, and the reward came from the sea of smiling faces that beamed up at me when I was on the podium. As luck would have it, Eddie had organised a coachload of people from the factory to come out to the race, and there they all were, cheering and, in some cases, crying with the emotion of it. The luck had gone our way, and now we had half the workforce ready to celebrate - and, believe me, they did.

I went out to win that race. Rain is a great leveller, but we took full advantage of the conditions, which were the same for everybody, and made the most of our opportunity. For the B & H Jordan Mugen-Honda team, it had been a tremendous race weekend, one that elevated us into the racewinners' circle and demonstrated that victory is an attainable target. We were within touching distance of third place in the constructors' championship and, after the start to the year that we had had, the idea of beating both Williams and Benetton was almost too much to believe.