Blue Thunder arrived on the scene within 30 seconds. Various other rescue craft arrived minutes later to be greeted by the disheartening sight of an upturned boat and a lifeless body lying face down, blood oozing into the sea. The crew of Blue Thunder pulled the motionless body aboard. There was no sign of a pulse. Nevertheless, the crew initiated resuscitation protocols.
Meanwhile, the crew of Pinot de Pinot arrived on the scene: ‘After a short time the tops of three orange crash helmets appeared in the water,’ recalled the boat’s navigator and race director Tim Mellery-Pratt, ‘and I realised their crash helmets had been torn off.’58
In line with established procedure, safety officer Geoff Warde immediately triggered a chain of events that resulted in HM Coastguard, Marine Police and a Search and Rescue (SAR) helicopter diving team scrambling to the scene. Warde recorded the time of the incident as 1143. Within minutes, the SAR diver had recovered two more bodies from under the boat. ‘There was a smell of fuel, there was a lot of fuel in the area, which could have been a hazard,’ Sub-lieutenant Christian Crowther of the Royal Navy told local radio. He also noted the presence of several pleasure crafts in the vicinity.59
The bodies were subsequently airlifted to Freshwater and thence to St Mary’s Hospital, Newport, on the Isle of Wight. It fell to Pierre Harnois to identify the bodies of his friends and colleagues.
A stunned French photojournalist was following every twist from the press helicopter. ‘I asked the pilot to follow SAR to wherever they went – a hospital,’ recalls Gilles Klein, who happened to be a close friend of Giroux. Klein was anxious to gain further information. Instructing the pilot to hover in the hospital grounds, he jumped the remaining distance to the ground and proceeded to simply walk past the hastily arranged hospital security. ‘I walked into a building and there I saw lying on the ground three bodies. I touched Bernard’s neck. It was cold …’ Over on the mainland nobody was yet sure as to the extent of the men’s injuries. Initial reports suggested it had been a nasty, but not fatal accident. Klein knew. Stunned by the day’s events, the journalist made his way home with a reel of footage that would appear the next day in the international media.
It was time for official machinery to kick in. Various authorities were notified including the Isle of Wight coroner who then appointed a surveyor to carry out an inspection of Colibri, that had been impounded in a Lymington boatyard. The survey found the boat to have been technically sound. It also found that superficial damage might have been present before the accident. In other words, Colibri had come out of the accident virtually unscathed. Its electrically driven clock had stopped at precisely 1142 and 20 seconds.
In the magical forest of Rambouillet it was a warm, motionless afternoon when the telephone ominously rang somewhere in the house. Not even a leaf stirred. Only the incessant noise of the phone had broken the lassitude. When she heard the voice of her de facto sister-in-law on the other end of the line, Catherine Goux instinctively knew she was about to hear the worst possible kind of news. Such was her reaction to Didier’s death, friends feared not only for Catherine’s health, but also for that of her unborn twins.
Pathologist Dr Neil Greenwood would record Didier’s cause of death as drowning. The initial head injury had not in itself been fatal. Giroux, who had resolved to make the Needles trophy his final offshore race, died as a result of severe head and brain injuries. The two men found underneath the boat had been wearing safety harnesses and as such ignited a long-running debate in offshore racing in the face of accidents: to be thrown clear or remain strapped into the boat? Jean-Claude Guénard, Didier’s childhood friend and soul mate, died from a serious chest injury. While the former pair had been trapped under the hull, the impact had flung Guénard clear. All three men had also lost their helmets in the crash, despite being fitted with chinstraps, prompting Coroner Keith Chesterton to remark that he was ‘disturbed’ how two of the victims had suffered severe head injuries. He urged re-examination of helmet spec and design as a matter of priority.
Offshore went into a period of profound reflection. Renato Della Valle retired on the spot. One week later, several teams did not enter the Cowes–Torquay–Cowes race. In the wake of its worst tragedy, offshore took a long hard look at itself. Ever since that fateful day in the English Channel, offshore racing has never quite been the same sport.
Four days later, the remaining members of the family gathered in St Tropez for the funeral. Up at the villa nobody spoke. Imelda had lost a son, her only son, the boy she had proudly watched develop into a great sportsman, but more importantly a son who had remained devoted to his family. Words could not express her grief. Louis and José, father and brother-cousin were silent too, lost in their thoughts. Like everybody else, as well as feeling dazed, they were perplexed, angry, bitter, confounded – a cocktail of emotions. After everything Didier had been through these past years – fear, pain, doubt and latterly hope, the injustice seemed especially cruel, malicious almost.
Back in his early F1 days, Didier had witnessed the demise of several colleagues: ‘Death? It's hard not to think about it,’ he reflected in an interview of the time. ‘Recent accidents have forced me to face certain truths. My disappearance would be unfortunate for my loved ones but they at least would know that I would die happy.’
Catherine Goux had also broached the subject on one occasion. Didier’s view was emphatic: ‘Death for me is the end of life. No more, no less. It is irreversibly the conclusion of every human being, of all life, whether vegetable or animal ... I do not believe in fate. One can meet death immediately or if you want to live safely, you get there. The moments that we live are probably more difficult to pass than when we die. Death will not be, a priori, a problem for me.’60
Late on a warm St Tropezian afternoon, the cortège made its sombre way to the chapel of Notre Dame de la Queste, a serene location a little under two kilometres from the village of Grimaud. Hundreds if not thousands of people lined the way. Resting on the coffin, a single orchid, Didi’s flower. Within the chapel’s cool, baroque interior, mourners from the world of motorsport and beyond joined the family to bid farewell to the blonde hero whose life had been such an incredible rollercoaster of triumph and tragedy. Too fragile to walk, Catherine – his last and greatest love – attended the service in a wheelchair amid fears for a pregnancy that was now as delicate as it had once been improbable. Sat further back, with their cherished memories, some of the women who had loved him: the other Catherine, Veronique, Agnes.
‘Our wings are burned in the sun of glory,’ remarked Father Vinceleu in his homily. ‘Even when one lives with a star in the head, one meets his destiny one day.’ Didier had met his fate – a wave off the English Channel that had tossed his hummingbird high into the air rendering her wingless, helpless.
Didier Joseph Louis Pironi was laid to rest in the Cemetery of Grimaud. Though a Parisian through and through, this chimeric landscape of verdant hills, medieval villages and shaded villas had always had a special place in his heart. Not too far away from his final resting place, out beyond the harbours and the quays along which he used to haunt, a huge expanse of sea, the deep, dark Mediterranean, that infinite space which he loved so much.
‘You had that moment,’ Catherine would later write to her lost love, ‘through which you always said it would not be difficult to pass …’ 61
Twenty-eight
Forever 28
Our story is not quite over. There is time for one final chapter, and in a story rich in coincidence, what better number for that final chapter than 28, the number of his Ferrari, Didi’s number?
Shortly after the funeral, Catherine admitted herself into the Université de Paris Baudelocque clinic. Room 10 became her sanctuary. A history of gynaecological problems compounding her bereavement, she spent the next five months of her pregnancy confined within the pale pink walls of this one room. To hang on to her precious cargo, she faced the fight of her life.
Never was that fight so fragile than dur
ing the winter of 1987. Under the care of Professor Zorn, the progress of herself and the unborn twins was evaluated daily. In January, at the seven-and-a-half-month point in her pregnancy, temperature falling alarmingly, Catherine was rushed to theatre where surgeons performed an emergency caesarean. On 6 January she gave birth to twin boys who were immediately transferred to an incubation unit in intensive care. Here the twins’ body temperatures could be maintained and monitored and the risk of infection minimised.
Eventually the danger period passed. The French media descended on the hospital. Happiness tinged with sadness, for even as the proud mother posed with her newborn babies, she acutely felt the lack of her partner’s presence. Snuggled up in the warmth of their Souvigny bed Didier and Catherine had, as expectant parents do, often speculated about their babies; would the twins be boys or girls, or one of each sex? If boys, would they follow in their father’s footsteps, on the race circuits? For a career Didier preferred, he said, astronomy over racing. That last summer had been a time of great joy. Didier would joke about how he had struggled for so long to create one baby, and now had succeeded in creating two at once!
In a gesture of reconciliation, the exhausted, but proud new mother, christened her babies Didier and Gilles. Time finally to lay the ghosts of Imola ’82 to rest.
Cocooned in her hospital room, Catherine now realised she had another fight on her hands, weak as she felt. Pironi or Goux? Which name would the twins bear? Catherine had no doubts in her mind, but the law had different ideas. Didier had died before he could claim paternity, a necessary requirement in test tube conception where the right is not automatically recognised. As things stood, the twins would therefore bear their mother’s name. It would take recourse to the courts in order for in vitro fertilisation to be recognised as an act of paternity, thus allowing the twins to take the name of their father. Finally, after over six months of legal wrangling, the court of Nanterre granted the right to acknowledge Didier as father to the twins. Didier and Gilles would carry their father’s name. As the first case of its kind where babies conceived in vitro while the father was alive were born after his death, ‘the Pironi case’ set a legal precedent.
Catherine returned to Souvigny, the ‘little island’. As she coped with the demands of motherhood, she began to write Lettre a Didier, a long, tender epistle to her vanished partner conceived through an overwhelming need ‘to talk to him, tell him how I loved him, tell him how he made me happy’. Part lament, part eulogy, as well as a final adieu, it is also an opportunity to say all the things she wanted but never had the chance to express. An object lesson in lyrical intimacy, the letter is not only therapeutic, but is also a testament to grief and yearning.
Souvigny became a shrine to lost love. Sometimes Catherine would daydream the sound of helicopter blades or the revving of the tricycle and imagine them followed soon after by her lover’s familiar greeting and smile. Her ‘man-too-fast’ was there, an absent presence. Notwithstanding the company of her three sons, emptiness and solitude filled the days. Catherine vowed to carry on living in the once enchanted woods that had now lost all their lustre. Just a few years into the future however, the palace-turned-mausoleum would mysteriously burn to the ground. While the twins slumbered one evening, a fire started in the nursery that raged through the property’s thatched roof and its oak beams consuming everything, sparing nothing. Souvigny was reduced to ashes, a dream charred. ‘The Pironi curse,’ whispered the French media. End of one life, start of another. Catherine and the children left for Metz, the town of her childhood.
Tragedy did not end there. Since the death of his protégé, in addition to running Leader, José had started flying commercially for a private company. On 16 April, he was flying a party of five from Paris (Le Bourget) to Montpelier where they were due to attend an offshore event in company with Pierre Harnois. The party, which included sponsors and employees, stopped off at Roanne, a small town roughly equidistant between the two cities, and where they enjoyed a leisurely meal washed down with a good quantity of wine. At 1740, the Mitsubishi Marquise took off once more. Fifteen minutes later, it crashed in a ball of flames into a field near St Just, killing all six people on board. José had survived Didier by just eight months. Once again, the family gathered in Grimaud, this time to inter the older of the maverick brother-cousins. José was duly laid to rest next to his younger sibling in the family plot where his mother Ilva rested. The inscription upon the joint grave of the daredevil brother-cousins reads, ‘between the stars and the sea’.
Now in his seventies and suffering from dementia, Louis would often ask after his two sons. Any amount of reassurance would fail to allay his distress. Nursed by Imelda, the dejected old gentleman was living out his days in the comfort of the St Tropez villa, scene of so many joyous occasions. At the invitation of Catherine, Imelda would later join her grandsons in Metz. It was a supreme gesture of compassion. The old lady had lost everyone and everything she ever cared about; all she had left were the twins:
‘This unexpected gift from heaven is my only reason for living.’ They are my happiness, my pride,’ concludes her memoir. ‘I have the privilege to live with them and their mother. I watch them, trying to repress the pain that assails me when the implacable reality is clear: for them, their dad will be forever a beautiful memory.’
Today the twins live in Paris and Oxford respectively. Didier works in finance while Gilles works for the Mercedes F1 team. Unassuming, measured, softly spoken and scrupulously polite, these young men have inherited several of their father’s characteristics, though a career change to astronomy seems, for the present at least, unlikely. After convincing herself that no man could ever fill the place of her lost knight, Catherine did eventually find another partner. Nowadays she lives quietly in a London suburb. As for the castle at Boissy, along with the splendid St Tropez villa, the grand old house was eventually lost to creditors as the once great company floundered into bankruptcy.
And so, inevitably, we arrive back where we started, at the question that has tantalised so many people: Who was Didier Pironi? Have we then moved any closer in our quest to unravel the identity of this enigma, a blonde Icarus who flew too close to the sun on one occasion too many?
‘Your love of life was written on your face, apparent within the least of your actions,’ writes Catherine Goux in her letter. ‘Flames dancing in the intensity of your blue eyes that had me hooked the first time I saw you on a circuit.’62 Emmanuel Zurini remembers a man who ‘loved good food, nice girls, great cars, aeroplanes, helicopters. He loved spending good times with his friends. In fact, he was just a normal guy! I miss him a lot …’ Convivial, precocious, enigmatic, mysterious, elusive, he was all these things and more.
In his Boissy youth, the teenage Didier had admired a certain Henri de la Ferme, a local man who eked a living doing whatever he could do to make ends meet. Selling his vegetables and haunting the local cafes, his was an unpretentious existence, free of artifice and materialism. Though he lived in a splendid castle himself, the teenager found himself inexplicably drawn to this man and the modesty of his existence. Is that what he truly longed for: Simplicity? Obscurity? An ordinary life? More questions yet.
The last word goes to Philippe Paoli, family friend and fellow patient at Porte de la Choisy, who perhaps sums up the essence of Didier most eloquently of all:
‘He had a soft voice, looked shy, but had the inflexible will to reach his objectives. Nothing looked serious to him, but he took everything seriously! Nobody or nothing could have stopped him!’ The memory of the blonde hussar wooing the great and good of the Pilot-Elf jury that glorious day still clear in his mind, Paoli makes this final, perceptive analogy that might finally help solve the riddle of Didier Pironi:
‘Didier always made a strange impression on me. He was for me “the man who wasn’t there”. As with everyone, he was a simple passenger on earth, but he was “passing” faster than anyone, crossing life like a Knight Templar who has a mission to complete. T
his is who he was, the Templar on his horse who is dedicated to fight to his death for an ideal, no matter what he was doing, it was how he was doing it that mattered.
Notes
1 Using migrant Italian labour, in May 1924 construction of France’s first motor racing circuit had begun on Autodrome de Linas-Montlhéry, 30 kilometres south of Paris.
2 Since arriving in France, Imelda was also known as ‘Eliane’. Henceforth, we use her birth name Imelda.
3 Long after they had gone their separate ways, one member of the ‘gang of three’ would serve a lengthy prison sentence for his part in a robbery in which a part-time policeman was killed. Didier might have indeed had a close escape.
4 Didier would briefly allude to this curious incident in an interview in Automobile magazine, no. 12, 1978.
5 Winner in 1971, Tambay had triumphed with a combined time of 15’23.7.
6 About £290,000 in 2017.
7 Mange was another member of this drama to suffer an untimely end when, in 2009, he was attacked at the premises of his garage business by a disgruntled customer. Mange died of his injuries.
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