A YEAR ago, when he was going for the world championship, there were crowds everywhere. So many people that he could hardly hear himself think. The same urgent questions, over and over again; the hundreds of voracious notebooks and cameras recording every word, noting every blink.

But when he emerged from the back of the pits after last Saturday's qualifying session at Imola, nobody was waiting to talk to Damon Hill. Nobody at all.

If he had been wondering how long the move from Williams to Arrows would take to affect his treatment within Formula One, now he knew. Four races into his reign as world champion, he was no longer a priority.

He turned to Ann Bradshaw, who kept the media at bay during his hectic years at Williams, and went with him to Arrows.

"So, Annie," he said. "It's just you and me, then."

Half an hour later, three journalists turned up at the Arrows base: a radio reporter, a news agency man, and me. We sat down and waited for Hill to emerge from a debrief session with his engineers.

Eventually the door opened and he came down the steps. He saw us, said hello, and walked past. He thought we'd just stopped by for a cup of tea. He assumed his opinions were no longer required.

No, we told him, we'd like to talk. So he sat down. What we wanted to know, of course, was how he felt about qualifying in 15th place for a race that he had won in the previous two years.

"It's considerably different," he said. "The experience of driving is the same - your focus is still on getting the best out of the car and doing a good lap. But the rest of it, the peripheral stuff he gestured towards us - ". . . is very different indeed.

"When you get out of the car, there's not much celebrating going on. Just a sense of relief that it's over.

Was it also a relief no longer to be the centre of such unremitting attention?

"Obviously I like getting recognition for what I'm doing. And I've already had a lot of recognition, so in some ways I'm quite happy to be left alone to get on with doing my job now."

In such a different environment, could he sustain the intensity, mental and physical, that had propelled him to the title?

"That's an important part of the equation. I could do a decent job without really pushing the car hard, but I wouldn't get any satisfaction out of it. Of course, when you can see that a good lap will only take you from 15th to 12th on the grid, it's a slightly different emphasis from when you're trying to find another hundredth of a second to get pole position.

"The danger is that you can slip into a casual approach. I keep reminding myself that I must avoid that at all costs, because it's a step on the slippery road to being an also ran. But it does take a conscious effort."

All those thoughts were crowding his mind 24 hours later, when he slammed into the car of Shinji Nakano on the 11th lap of the San Marino Grand Prix, earning himself a suspended one race ban and reawakening old doubts about his judgment of overtaking manoeovres.

He was going for 17th place at the time, having started from the pit lane in his spare machine after his race car failed on the grid.

"You have to plan ahead," he said. "I became a victim of not looking ahead last season, so I'm making sore that's not the case again. I want to concentrate on the job in hand, but I'm constantly inquiring of Tom how things are progressing and what the future for his team is."

By the time they get to the British Grand Prix at Silverstone in mid July, he said, his thoughts will have clarified. "I don't think any decisions will have been made, but if we can reverse a bit of a downward trend and head back up the grid, that will bode well for the long term."

If no improvement has been made and Yamaha's new engine is not a significant improvement on the present one, then the winter's euphoria will have turned into a summer of torment for a proud and, just now, an unhappy man.