Damon Hill is a retired British racing driver and the 1996 Formula One World Champion. The son of the late, two time Formula One world champion Graham Hill, he is the only son of a world champion to win the title himself. Hill started his Formula One career with the Brabham team in 1992. He went on to take his first win at the 1993 Hungarian Grand Prix for the Williams team, the first of 22 victories, of which 21 were for Williams. In 1994 he won the British Grand Prix, a race his father had never won during his own career. In the mid 1990s, Hill was Michael Schumacher's main rival for the Formula One Driver's Championship, finishing runner-up in the German's 1994 and 1995 title seasons. The two had a series of controversial clashes on and off track, including the famous collision at Adelaide in 1994 that gave Schumacher his first title by a single point. Hill was dropped by Williams for 1997 despite taking eight victories and winning his world championship in 1996. He went on to record the Jordan team's first ever win at the 1998 Belgian Grand Prix, and came within a few miles of being the only driver to win a Grand Prix for the Arrows team and their Yamaha engine supplier at the 1997 Hungarian Grand Prix.
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_______________________________ Today's selected anniversaries:
435: Nestorius, the originator of Nestorianism, was exiled by Byzantine Emperor Theodosius II to a monastery in Egypt. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nestorius)
1916: Sir Roger Casement was hanged for his role in the Easter Rising in Ireland. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Casement)
1923: Calvin Coolidge (pictured) was inaugurated as the 30th President of the United States, succeeding Warren G. Harding. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calvin_Coolidge)
1940: World War II: Approximately 175,000 Italian troops invaded British Somaliland, beginning the East African Campaign. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_African_Campaign_%28World_War_II%29)
1948: Whittaker Chambers accused Alger Hiss of being a communist and a Soviet spy. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whittaker_Chambers)
_____________________ Wikiquote of the day:
"Somewhere, he thought, on the long backtrack of history, the human race had accepted an insanity for a principle and had persisted in it until today that insanity-turned-principle stood ready to wipe out, if not the race itself, at least all of those things, both material and immaterial, that had been fashioned as symbols of humanity through many hard-won centuries." -- Clifford D. Simak (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Clifford_D._Simak)