Happenings off the track were just as eventful as those on it. While Didier flew to Brazil for testing ahead of the upcoming Grand Prix, Catherine busied herself preparing for the couple’s wedding scheduled to take place on 14 April. Spring 1982, it was all happening: strikes, miraculous escapes, Grands Prix, marriage plans …
At this juncture the picture becomes somewhat cloudy. Keeping track of Didier during this period – any period – was no easy task. From his favourite Italian haunts of Lake Como, Modena and Milan, to Paris, Nice and St Tropez in France, Geneva in Switzerland, and not forgetting Grands Prix races in South Africa, Brazil and beyond, criss-crossing countries and continents was all part of the Didier experience. Journalists at the time described him with any number of adjectives: distant, aloof, enigmatic, secretive, mysterious. There was more than an element of truth in such charges. Attempting to unscramble his personal affairs around this time leads inevitably to speculation and conjecture. Never more so is this apparent than when charting his relationship with the beautiful Catherine.
It fell to Imelda to accompany her future daughter-in-law on all the usual pre-wedding errands that spring. With the bridegroom busily engaged some 5,000 miles away testing in Rio, it was left solely to the women to arrange the ceremony, banns, catering and the thousand and one other details weddings entail. ‘What a faculty for organisation has this little, young girl,’ notes Imelda in her diary, adding somewhat archly, ‘she clung to her wedding! For in no time at all she had everything settled.’ Catherine it seems was determined to have her wedding, and sooner rather than later.
Imelda was not the only one to notice Catherine’s sheer resolve. In order to arrange the civil ceremony, the two women met with the mayor of Neuilly, a certain Nicolas Sarkozy, who, bemused to note the absence of the would-be bridegroom, is alleged to have quipped: ‘You know Mademoiselle, in order to marry, in principle there must be two!’ The mayor’s joke must have gone down well, for according to Imelda, Catherine burst into her ‘crazy and irrepressible laugh’.
Was Didier just too busy to get involved in the wedding plans? Could he even have been a mite reluctant to tie the knot? If so, he would not have been the first bachelor to vacillate at the prospect of impending marital union. Yet those who encountered the golden couple could not doubt the extent of their devotion. ‘They radiate so much joy in one another’s company,’ notes Imelda.
Wedding arrangements concluded, Catherine, Imelda and Ilva flew to Brazil to attend the Grand Prix. In the fortnight after the race, in the period leading up to the United States race in early April, the group planned to take a vacation, which would coincide with Didier’s 30th birthday on 26 March. Holidaying with mothers and aunts might strike some as rather quaint, but family mattered, always had. Though he had spent his youth in cosmopolitan Paris, Didier had been raised, lest we forget, in a household of pure Friulian values where modesty and loyalty prevailed. It is also a culture where the bond between mother and son is especially strong. Besides, was he not riding the crest of a wave? An F1 driver – a Ferrari driver? It was only natural therefore to share his good fortune with the people who mattered most to him – his family. He and Catherine might have been living together in the white house with its long sloping garden sweeping all the way down to the edge of Lake Geneva, but somehow Didier contrived to spend more time away from the Swiss city than he did in it. When asked by L’Automobile magazine to describe his ideal woman in an interview in 1980, he had responded with, ‘A girl who respects my freedom.’ In Catherine, he had met that woman, seemingly.
On the evening before the Grand Prix, the party gladly accepted a dinner invitation from Ferrari’s sporting director, Marco Piccinini. Up in the young couple’s hotel room, mother and aunt enjoyed a pre-dinner whiskey and soda. While Catherine occupied the bathroom, Didier chatted away to the ladies. The sisters had certainly come a long way from their humble roots in Friuli. Sprawled out on the bed, Didier was, however, becoming ever more impatient. Time was getting on. What on earth was Catherine doing in there? Eventually, she came out of the bathroom dressed all in white, ‘a fairy-tale princess’, according to Imelda. Didier was not impressed.
‘You’d better spend more time in the kitchen and less in the bathroom!’ he snapped in reference to his fiancée’s supposed indifference to matters culinary. Cracks, hairline, but cracks all the same. Asked which human trait he disliked most in the same 1980 L’Automobile interview, he had replied with just a single word: pretension.
A tearful Catherine returned forthwith to the bathroom. Didier, his mother and aunt meanwhile went off to keep their appointment with Marco. Just as they had given up hope of the young woman’s company, having changed her apparel from white to black, Catherine took her place at the table. Dinner proceeded leisurely enough. Although the gentlemen avoided talking shop for much of the evening, Didier eventually raised the topic of safety. The Paul Ricard accident had been his second such shunt. Twice he had walked away from huge crashes, what chance a third time?
‘Marco, you must do something! You saw what happened at Paul Ricard. You know when the car takes off like that, there is nothing more we can do. I have survived thanks to a miracle!’
‘Didier, hold on. Wait a minute!’ As Ferrari’s right-hand man and good friend to the French driver, the man known affectionately as Monsignor found himself in a potentially awkward position.
‘No, Marco! Wait for what? Somebody to die?’
‘Didier! You exaggerate.’ Ever the diplomat, Marco steered the conversation into less controversial waters. Didier remained unconvinced.
With Gilles lining up second on the grid, Ferrari was cautiously optimistic of a good showing, perhaps even victory come race day. After a fraught qualifying session, Didier had only managed the eighth fastest time. Still, prospects for the race looked good. However, on a humid Brazilian afternoon, not for the first time, Ferrari’s hopes evaporated. It was difficult not to reach the conclusion that it was 1981 all over again: plenty of promise, but little in the way of end product. Until spinning off under pressure from Piquet’s Brabham and Rosberg’s Williams, Villeneuve had led from the start. Didier, meanwhile, had a race to forget. The hitherto dominant Renaults did not show. 1982 in a nutshell: unpredictable, topsy-turvy.
Race over, the French party headed up to the Caribbean. Sailing from island to island, Didier, Catherine, Imelda and Ilva observed with wonder the incredible diversity of the region’s warm, turquoise waters. Embarking at Fort de France on the magical French enclave of Martinique, the party dined on freshly caught lobster at the restaurant of a friend. From here, they sailed to a remote, private island as guests of John Caldwell. Days spent enjoying the golden beaches and crystalline waters, evenings spent dining on succulent delicacies hewn from the sea as the sun dipped under the horizon, retiring thereafter to the peace, tranquillity and not to mention sheer novelty of straw huts. Paradise.
Sailing northwards, the party next arrived at the exclusive island of Mustique where they stayed at the famous Cotton House complex. While preparing to board a flight for a short hop over to St Vincent one day, the pilot – an old friend – made a surprise offer to the quiet, unassuming Frenchman:
‘You want to do the piloting?’
‘Sure,’ replied Didier, unable to resist such an opportunity.
Not surprisingly, the other dozen or so passengers looked on in trepidation. They need not have worried. To a resounding round of applause, the temporary pilot executed a textbook landing upon arrival at their destination. This dreamlike interlude ended where it had started, back on Martinique. From the island capital, it was a three-and-a-half-hour flight to Miami, followed by a five-hour connecting flight to Long Beach, California, venue for the United States Grand Prix.
April of 1982 was certainly shaping up to be a busy month. A little over one week after the US race on the fourth of the month, Didier and Catherine would return to France to marry. Oddly, just a few days after the couple were scheduled to say their vows,
when the happy couple might naturally have expected to be enjoying their honeymoon, Didier had in fact agreed to race in an event at the Montlhéry circuit. No matter, the Caribbean trip had been an unforgettable experience, a honeymoon in advance.
Long Beach saw Ferrari off the pace, despite or perhaps because of their infamous double rear wings, a ploy calculated to draw attention to the vagaries of the F1 rulebook. Officials later disqualified Villeneuve from third position, the wing having been adjudged to contravene F1’s strict regulations. The previously anonymous Marlboro-sponsored Alfa Romeos and McLarens proved the cars to beat on the Californian streets. Returnee Niki Lauda won in grand style. Renault, Brabham, Williams and Ferrari had never looked better than candidates for minor placings. With any one of a dozen drivers having legitimate claims as race winners depending on circuit and conditions, predicting a winner in 1982 was proving to be an almost impossible task. Formula 1 has never been so competitive. It all added up to a most compelling world championship.
After three Grands Prix, Ferrari had amassed just a single point. In the wake of disqualifications to Piquet and Rosberg, winner and runner-up in the Brazilian race and whose cars had subsequently been declared illegal, Didier had been upgraded from eighth to sixth place, accounting for that solitary point. All very underwhelming. When would Ferrari’s season begin? The team needed finishes, points-scoring finishes, podiums, race wins. It was not happening, yet.
Before the team could muster in preparation for the San Marino Grand Prix later that April, Didier had another pressing matter to attend to on the 14th of the month: his marriage. For a venue, Catherine had chosen the small town of Eugenie-les-Bains, a long way from Paris, but base to celebrity chef Michel Guerard whom she had engaged to provide the catering. France’s gastronomic guru concocted a banquet fit for a king: lobster, truffles, caviar, pigeon wing, pomerol jelly, foie gras; mille-feullie and croque-en-bouche for dessert; 1973 Krug champagne or Château Beauregard 1970 to drink. No expense had been spared. Did such extravagance meet with Didier’s approval?
The honour of best man fell to Marco Piccinini, a move that surprised some onlookers who had assumed this important role would have fallen to José to perform. Soon enough the whispers started. Was this decision, as some observers insisted, a political move – a cynical one at that? Alternatively, was it simply one of those occasions when a difficult choice had to be made? Critics thought the former. According to this line of reasoning, Didier had purposely overlooked his brother-cousin in order to curry favour with his Ferrari boss, a move ultimately calculated to undermine Villeneuve’s position within the Scuderia. The fact that the French Canadian and his wife Joann did not attend the ceremony added further fuel to the conspiracy theorists’ fires. Pironi, they concluded, had snubbed Gilles on purpose. The Frenchman was a snake, they said, plotting the overthrow of his own team-mate.
‘Bullshit,’ says photographer and raconteur Allan de la Plante, Gilles’ friend and confidant throughout his racing career. ‘I saw the wedding invitation with my own eyes.’ A no-nonsense Canadian himself, the photographer had known the Villeneuves for many years. ‘Truth is Gilles and Joann were going through a rough period at the time,’ explains de la Plante. ‘Going to a wedding together, the happy couple, was the last thing they wanted. Gilles had a woman friend in Montreal … Let’s just say things were very rocky between them. Besides, Gilles detested formal affairs, suits, ties and all that crap. Not his scene at all.’
Added to which, since his arrival at Ferrari Didier had become good friends with Piccinini. Intelligent, discreet and humble, the two men had much in common. During the drivers’ strike, Marco had supported his driver fully, even though its aims at times ran counter to those of the team. Mutual trust, call it.
On a warm, sunny afternoon in the unassuming church of Saint Eugenie, Didier and Catherine exchanged vows. The golden couple dazzled the assembled guests, he in his pearl grey morning suit and she in her splendid bridal dress. No doubt, Madame Bleynie made for an extraordinarily beautiful bride. ‘She is, it’s true, irresistible.’ remarked Imelda, ‘Very sweet, always smiling, sleek, and radiant with beauty.’ In his regular column for Auto Hebdo, Didier spoke of his ‘pleasure’ upon marrying ‘an exquisite woman’. Indeed, pictures of the day present a young couple who appear to be deeply in love.31 After the ceremony, the couple exited the church hand-in-hand to discover a guard of honour made up of a dozen chefs who lined the path that led across the road to Guerard’s restaurant. The newlyweds then posed for pictures in the restaurant grounds as Imelda, Ilva, Louis and José looked proudly on. Meanwhile, Didier’s nieces and nephews played happily together. Perfect weather, perfect food: a perfect day. And yet … something lingering in the fresh spring air, distant clouds, imperceptible, thundery.
‘Strangely enough,’ recalls the bridegroom’s mother, ‘the wedding pictures, and God knows there were many, Didier never showed them to me. I do not have any!’ Strange is indeed the word. As Imelda correctly notes, plenty of photographs were indeed taken – none of which found their way into the family album …
The day after the wedding, Didier flew to Bologna for Imola pre-race testing. Ferrari arrived in the midst of persistent rumblings that the team might withdraw from F1 in protest over what it felt were the attempts of some of their competitors to cheat the sporting regulations. With the 126C2 finally hitting its stride, withdrawal would have come at a most importune time. Villeneuve (1’32.11) and Pironi (1’32.22) both dipped under Prost’s lap record set the previous week. Ferrari were coming to the boil.
Before joining the family in St Tropez where they had congregated post-nuptials, Didier first had a date at the Linas-Montlhéry circuit to drive a Ferrari P4 in an exhibition race. Catherine remained in Paris. As honeymoons go, unconventional is a word that springs immediately to mind. Curiouser and curiouser.
Didier enjoyed himself immensely at Montlhéry. Sprinting ahead of a field of privately owned Porsches, Ferraris and Lolas, he professed to have rediscovered his love for competitive driving. In order to preserve the mechanical integrity of his car, a vehicle owned by the collector David Piper, Didier pulled out of the race at the halfway point. ‘In F1, we no longer have any fun at all. The suspensions are so hard the car is shaken to the point sometimes where the driver misses the pedal or gear change during manoeuvres. This causes stupid mistakes. Moreover, because of ground effect the limit is less perceptible, as it depends on the contact of the skirts with the ground, which varies with the inequalities of it.’
After this all-too-brief thrill, it was back to business, back to F1. Ferrari were desperate for a good result on home soil at the San Marino Grand Prix, round four of the championship. With dissent once more in the air, however, a chain of events was just beginning that would ensure that the 1982 running would become one of the most controversial races not just of the season, but in the whole of Grand Prix history.
Twenty
Much ado about nothing: Imola ’82
Everybody it seems has an opinion on the 1982 San Marino Grand Prix. Much has been written about events that April afternoon and the part Didier played therein. As with other contentious issues, a standard version of events from that extraordinary weekend has emerged, a version largely the creation of a certain media faction with avowed biases and prejudices, of which more later.
Just what was it about that year? That weekend? That race? Even as the team transporters were arriving in the Imola paddock, controversy once more stalked the air. Formula 1 was bristling. In response to the Piquet and Rosberg disqualifications, Bernie Ecclestone’s FOCA resolved to boycott the race; retaliation pure and simple. In common with their fellow Cosworth-powered teams, come the end of the Brazilian Grand Prix Brabham and Williams had topped up their cars with various ‘coolants’ and ‘lubricants’ in order to meet the minimum weight of 580kg stipulated in the sporting regulations, a perfectly legal if not morally correct interpretation of FISA’s somewhat opaque rulebook. Desperate to gain parity
with the much more powerful turbo-powered teams, it was a ploy designed to level the F1 playing field. ‘Cheats!’ cried Ferrari and Renault. Subsequently, Piquet and Rosberg’s disqualifications were upheld.32
Hence, the FISA–FOCA war, dormant for a couple of years, had just re-ignited. The Williams transporter duly turned around and headed back for England. McLaren, waiting at the Mont Blanc tunnel, followed suit. Brabham did not even leave the UK. By Thursday morning only Renault, Alfa Romeo, Tyrrell, Toleman and Osella remained at the Dino Ferrari circuit, ten cars all told, that would soon become 12 upon Ferrari’s arrival from their Modena base. As it stood, the San Marino Grand Prix would not go ahead – it could not. Under the terms of the sport’s Concorde agreement a minimum of 14 cars were required in order to run a Grand Prix.
‘I have my helmet around here somewhere,’ joked Renault’s Gerard Larousse as the teams anxiously awaited the arrival of the ATS team, who as members of FOCA were expected to also boycott the event. When the Anglo-German squad eventually rolled up in a half-empty paddock, monsieur Larousse could put his helmet back in mothballs. We had a Grand Prix, just.
With Brabham, McLaren and Williams absent, the race would clearly boil down to a Renault v Ferrari battle. First and foremost a power circuit, even if they had turned up, it is doubtful whether the English teams would have troubled their turbocharged colleagues to any great extent on the Imola circuit. That was not the point. At stake was the sport’s reputation. Following hard on the heels of the South African strike, needless to say the worldwide perception of Formula 1 had never been so precarious.
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