Around his neck Damon Hill wears a precious good luck charm. It is a gold medallion, given first by his mother to his father, the motor-racing legend who died tragically young in a plane crash 24 years ago.
With the announcement of his retirement from the same daredevil occupation as Graham Hill snr at the end of this season, he may no longer have any use for a talisman. If he has been lucky, it has come from being in the right place at the right time.
The two most common re marks made about Hill are the references to his famous father - like most offspring of the successful, his most enduring epitaph will be that he was "somebody's son". The second is that his big win in 1996, to become the only second-generation Formula One champion in the history of the sport, had more to do with the Williams car he drove than with any blinding hereditary talent.
His decision to quit comes in the wake of two recent crashes. It has been reported that after last week's crash, which forced him out of the Montreal Grand Prix, he was furious with himself about the driving error. In terms of motor racing he is old, with the brightest sparks currently in their late 20s.
"It seemed as though the clock had been running on his retirement decision almost from the start of the season," wrote racing correspondent Alan Henry. "It was a case merely of when."
With his bushy eyebrows and dark brown eyes, Hill resembles Chris de Burgh's more handsome brother. He is often seen jogging up and down the roads of Dalkey, Co Dublin, close to his sprawling Edwardian mansion, where he lives with his wife, Georgie, and his four children.
The eldest has Down's syndrome. Hill is fiercely protective of his family, and his desire to spend more time with them was a big factor in his decision to retire.
Two years before he conquered the world in racing terms, popping the ultimate champagne cork was nothing but an inaccessible dream to Hill. "My goal isn't to be world champion," he said then. "That's too big a concept to get my mind round."
Damon Graham Devereux Hill was born in London in 1960. His mother, Bette Devereux, was a former England international rower. His father was Graham Hill, a two-time world champion and the greatest racing driver Britain had known. His enjoyed an idyllic childhood, growing up in a big house with a rambling tree-filled garden.
He was forced to grow up very quickly, with the news that the light aircraft piloted by his father (and carrying the rest of his Embassy-Hill team, who all died) had crashed into a golf course near London. He was 15 years old when he watched news of the tragedy unfold on television. The idyll was shattered. The family had to move from the mansion in the English countryside to a terraced house in London. Those who have observed the son of Graham Hill for years believe this period made him more philosophical and introverted.
His racing career began with motorcycles and at that stage he showed no real interest in following in his father's tyre tracks. On leaving school he dabbled in music as part of a punk band called Sex Hitler and the Hormones. More recently, he has played guitar on the new Def Leppard album.
Hill worked as a courier to finance his racing, but in 1983, when his mother bought him a six-day racing driver's course in France, he was bitten by the bug. Safety appears to have been her main motivation. It was a nouveau Orwellian case of four wheels good, two wheels bad.
"He was determinedly ignorant about motor racing," a director at the Magny-Cours track in France recalled. "He didn't even know the names of the current drivers. It wasn't an affectation. I suspect he was reluctant to follow a career that had taken his father away."
His first Formula One break came in 1991 when he called Frank Williams and asked to be taken on as a test-driver. In 1993 he replaced a disgruntled Nigel Mansell on the Williams team and began to show a promise which cynics had not thought possible.
His determination was put to the test the following year when the Brazilian driver Ayrton Senna was killed and Hill had to take his place at the head of the team. He lost the world championship title by a point to Michael Schumacher and was runner-up again in 1995.
But in 1996, winning the world championship like his father before him gained him a kind of sporting identity which he deserved in his own right. The euphoria was short-lived.
After the victory in Japan he was sacked by Williams and, in 1997, during what was a disastrous year for the Arrows team, he was described by one commentator as one of the most unsuccessful reigning world champions in the history of the tobacco-fuelled sport.
Last year he joined the Jordan team, becoming a team-mate of Michael Schumacher's younger brother Ralf, and now a team-mate of Heinz-Harald Frentzen. To date, he has won 22 Grands Prix.
It seems unlikely that Hill, who has amassed an estimated fortune of £25 million, will spend too much time bemoaning the fact that his champagne days are over. "All we do is drive cars around a track very quickly," he said shortly before his big win in 1996. "Sometimes, in creating heroes and heroines of people, we create icons. We think that because they are good at something they are necessarily good people. That's why image isn't important to me."
As he approaches the final pit stop of his career, perhaps it does not matter that his success had much to do with the car he drove to his biggest victory.
One British commentator, flushed with Hill's world championship success, summed up the admiration many have for his achievements: "He may not be the greatest racing driver in the world," he wrote, "but he is one heck of a man."