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Grand Prix Greats - A personal appreciation of 25 famous Formula 1 drivers by Nigel Roebuck 1986

A friend of mine in America sent me a cassette a while ago. On it is the sound of a lone racing car, unmistakably a Ferrari flat-12, and it is clearly audible all the way round the lap. There is a lot of wheelspin - you can hear the revs abruptly scream out of every turn - and then the volume builds until the car swishes by in a welter of spray. He taped it during the first afternoon of practice at Watkins Glen in 1979, when conditions were as bad as I have ever seen at a race circuit. In places the track was flooded, and only eight drivers ventured out. One of those
who did was Scheckter, who was second fastest behind team mate Villeneuve. Eleven seconds behind... The tape, of course, is of Gilles, and it revived memories of a day when we forgot the wintry rain until he came in, the Ferrari breathless and steaming. In the pits other drivers, aghast, had giggled nervously every time the car skittered by at 160 mph. ‘He’s different from the rest of us’, Jacques Laffite said. ‘On a separate level.. ‘. ’I scared myself rigid that day’, Jody remembered.’I thought I had to be quickest. Then I saw Gilles’s time - and I still don’t really understand how it was possible. Eleven seconds! ’Motor racing was a romantic thing for him, you see’, Scheckter went on. ‘We were close friends, doing the same job for the same team, but we had completely opposite attitudes to it. My preoccupation was keeping myself alive, but Gilles had to be quickest on every lap - even in testing. He was the fastest racing driver the world has ever seen. If he could come back and live his life again, I think he would do exactly the same - and with the same love’

By lunchtime on that fateful Saturday at Zolder I thought nothing more could increase the disenchantment I then felt for Grand Prix racing. The atmosphere in the paddock was poisonous from end to end. A fortnight before there had been FOCA’s foot stamping boycott at lmola, and earlier in the year there had been the drivers’ strike at Kyalami. The sport was in ugly turmoil, split down the middle. Between the Saturday practice sessions a talk with Teddy Mayer led to his accusation that I, and other British joumalists, had been ‘bought’ by Renault. Only that, he said, could explain our aversion to what FOCA had done. I was still in a rage when the last session started. Three-quarters of an hour later, though, under that grey and morose sky, Gilles crashed, and this immediately reduced to trivia anything else which might have been wrong. A colleague and I went to the scene of the accident. There was no official word, but I think we knew at once we were in the presence of death. A chat with Gilles that morning had been the only cheery thing about the day. As we walked in silence back to the paddock now there seemed no good reason for ever going to another Grand Prix - save that any day at a race circuit had to be better than this. For me, and countless others, the problem was that Gilles had become the sport’s redeemer, the antidote to all the disillusionment we felt. The cars of the time made a parody of ‘Grand Prix racing’, and the cancer of vested interests had eaten through a hundred friendships. But while Gilles was around, there remained a focal point to a race weekend, a reminder that not all was rancid. The driver was the man, uninhibited and natural, positive in all ways, absolutely without guile. And the thought of Villeneuve on a qualifying lap made you leave the pits, seek out a ‘good’ corner, knowing you were going to be stirred. Some images stay with you for ever.

During practice at Dijon in 1981 Gilles crashed at the Courbe de Pouas, an undulating, flat-in-fourth, right-hander, with no run-off worth mentioning. During the lunch break I found him dabbing a cut on his jaw: ‘Bloody catch fence pole cracked my helmet and broke the visor.. , ’You overdid it?’ I asked. ‘Just ran out of road?’ ‘No, no,’ he grinned. ‘l ran out of lock! The car is really bad through there - an adventure every time. Go and have a look this afternoon, and you’ll see what I mean.’ I did. I watched the Cosworth-engined Williams and Brabhams drone through on their rails, and waited. At its clipping point, at the top of a rise, the Ferrari was already sideways, its driver winding on opposite lock. As it came past me, plunging downhill now, the tail stayed out of line, further and further, and still Gilles had his foot hard down. As it reached the bottom of the dip, I knew the position was hopeless, for now it was virtually broadside, full lock on, Villeneuves head pointing up the road - out of the side of the cockpit. Somehow, though, the Ferrari did not spin, finally snapping back into line as it grazed the catch fencing, then rocketing away up the hill. For more than a hundred yards, I swear it, the car was sideways at 130 mph. ‘That’s genius’, said David Hobbs, watching with me. ‘Are you seriously telling me he’s won two Grands Prix in that?’ At that time a couple of French doctors were engaged on research into the strains imposed on a man by driving a Formula 1 car, and throughout that particular day Gilles was ‘wired up’, his heartbeat monitored. Through the morning session, prior to his accident, his rate never exceeded 127, and when he hit the guardrail there was a flash reading of 168. These were unbelievably low figures, the report concluded - particularly when compared wiih those of Pironi, whose heart thumped away at 170-207 throughout the Monaco Grand Prix!

As I read it, I remembered a ‘phone call from Amon in the summer of 1977, during which Gilles drove Chris’s CanAm Wolf. ‘Have you seen this guy Villeneuve? Well, I tell you, in fifteen years of racing I’ve never seen anyone behave like he does after a shunt. He just doesn’t react at all... ’Is he quick?’ I asked. ‘Quick?’ Amon retorted. ‘He’s got more potential than anyone I’ve ever seen...’ Perhaps, if the doctors’ report were anything to go by, there were sound medical reasons for Villeneuve’s apparent fearlessness. ‘No doubt about it’, Keke Rosberg says, ’Gilles was abnormally brave. To race against, he was the hardest bastard I ever knew, but absolutely fair. He was an honourable man, and he raced the same way. Although he would always be the last man to lift off, if he considered you’d beaten him fair and square into a corner, he would never move over on you, never change his line to block you. For that reason, you always felt completely safe in a battle with him. He was a giant of a driver.’ Villeneuve himself never saw his courage as anything out of the ordinary. ‘But’, he said, in the next breath, ‘I don’t have any fear of a crash. No fear of that. Of course, on a fifth gear corner with a fence outside, I don’t want to crash. I’m not crazy. But if it’s near the end of practice, and you’re trying for pole position maybe, then I guess you can squeeze the fear.. ‘ He was always sure that this attitude came from his snowmobiling days. ‘Every winter, you would reckon on three or four big spills - and I’m talking about being thrown on to ice at 100 mph. Those things used to slide a lot, which taught me a great deal about control. And the visibility was terrible! Unless you were leading, you could see nothing, with all the snow blowing about. Good for the reactions - and it stopped me having any worries about racing in the rain.’ The first real interview we did, at Zolder in 1978, startled me. Everything about this fellow was fresh and different. As Scheckter says, his attitude to racing was unashamedly romantic. He was embarking on his Formula 1 career, and he saw it as a great adventure, the culmination of his dreams: ‘If someone had said to me “Villeneuve, you can have three wishes”, my first would have been to get into racing, my second, to be in Formula l, my third to drive for Ferrari...’