Burning Rubber: The Extraordinary Story of Formula One

by Charles Jennings

  Viewed rationally, of course, there was something not quite right about Gilles Villeneuve. This is true of many (if not all) top sportsmen, one way or another, but in Villeneuve’s case, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that he was a natural, both in the sense that he was fantastically gifted as a driver; and that bits of his personality were defective, or had simply gone missing.

  When he signed for Ferrari in 1977, after two years spent trouncing the opposition in Formula Atlantic (plus a quick spell in a McLaren third car) he was twenty-seven-year-old, very nearly twenty-eight. He was Québecois with a wife and two small children. He was disarmingly honest and unaffected in his dealings with the rest of the world. He was completely culturally incurious. He lived in a motorhome, where he never smoked, drank or ate anything more adventurous than a burger with fries. He was pathologically addicted to risk, but was deeply conservative and even repressive when it came to family matters. Many times, he gave the impression of being incapable of rational thought; occasionally, he even came across as a case of arrested development. And about the first thing anyone said of him when they saw him on the track was that he was fast, but also an idiot: ‘That boy’s in too much of a hurry’ (Carlos Reutemann); ‘The man is a public menace’ (Ronnie Peterson); ‘That bloody red shit-bucket was all over me!’ (Alan Jones).

  To be fair, Jones didn’t mind Villeneuve’s immoderate need for speed as much as many other drivers. When Villeneuve smashed into him at the 1981 British GP, instead of going round to the Ferrari pit to fill Villeneuve’s face in, Jones merely indulged him. ‘Oh, it’s just typical of old Gilles,’ he said. ‘You’ve got to give him credit because the guy never stops trying.’ But Jones could afford to be relaxed, not least because he was the reigning world champion, while Villeneuve showed almost no sign of acquiring the kind of mental self-discipline which would get him to the same point. He was a loose cannon, in short, and much of what he did, on and off the track, seemed to be the expression of nothing more than a kind of ungovernable, shapeless urgency, a need to try and get his heart rate above its normal absurdly placid level and into the red zone, a place where he might be able to experience fear.

  To this end, he sought out impassable mountain tracks to test his 4x4s to breaking point; he flew his helicopter around with marginal fuel levels or a defective electrical system; he routinely trashed road cars, whether they were Fiat 131s or Ferrari 400s, galvanising his passengers with a mixture of admiration and terror. ‘Driving back to the hotel,’ Peter Windsor (a passenger in Gille’s Fiat) once remarked, ‘Gilles would use handbrake turns as a matter of course.’ And on the track, it was the same, only more so. He was either stationary or flat out. In 1979, ‘The Prince of Destruction’ (as he became known at Ferrari) led nearly a third of all the racing laps in all the races, but Jody Scheckter, his team-mate at Ferrari, became world champion that year.

  Scheckter was the same age as Villeneuve and a hard driver too, but managed to keep his mind on the bigger picture. ‘Gilles,’ he said, ‘wanted to win laps. He didn’t really want to win races, he didn’t want to win the World Championship. He was a very intelligent guy, but in my opinion he wanted the wrong things out of racing.’

  The wrong things, but with the right degree of spectacle. Thus, at Zandvoort, August 1979, he famously went off with a puncture on the left rear tyre, reversed the car back onto the track, did – effectively – a whole lap at rather more than touring speed on two wheels, swerved back into the pits, where he yelled at the mechanics, ‘Put a fucking wheel on there! Let me go out again!’ And, like Alan Jones, everyone thought, ‘It’s just typical of old Gilles,’ and loved him for this protracted moment of madness.

  But why did he do it? If the suspension wasn’t crocked up when he went off into the dirt at Tarzan, it was certainly a mess by the time he got back to his team. He was reputed to have a keen mechanical sympathy and was a good tester – but what red mist had come down so that he simply ignored the sparks from the undertray, the crashing, flapping wheel, the ruined suspension? It was as if he’d forgotten that the car was a car and had instead become something with infinitely lower engineering standards – a packing crate, or a brick wall. It was not rational behaviour.

  Which was exactly what the crowd loved. Who, after all, wants to observe a careful conservation of the car with a view to a scrupulous amassing of points in order to calculatedly win a title, if instead you could watch someone who went bonkers and gave you a good time?

  In this way, Villeneuve’s 1979 season became a succession of dazzling, ultimately pointless, one-offs. At the French GP at Dijon, Villeneuve and René Arnoux, in a Renault, had a spectacular, mano-a-mano scrap in the closing stages, in which they fought like maniacs for second place, wheel-locking, running wide, bumping into each other, the essence of motor racing – at the end of which, Villeneuve came second (no one-two for Renault on their home patch), and Arnoux sportingly announced, ‘Gilles drove a fantastic race. I enjoyed it very much!’ To which Villeneuve replied, ‘We didn’t crash and it’s okay. I enjoyed myself amazingly!’

  Both drivers were gravely chastised by the Grand Prix Drivers’ Safety Committee (President, Jody Scheckter) at the next race, the British Grand Prix, but it was all so much background noise to Villeneuve, who went on to pull his two-wheel stunt at Zandvoort, before creating another precedent for himself by seizing control of the American GP at Watkins Glen, where it poured with rain in the first practice session and rained heavily through much of the actual race.

  It was the wet practice session which reduced iron man Denis Jenkinson to a state of girlish adoration. ‘Oh, he was fantastic! He was unbelievable,’ Jenkinson said, overcome. Little Villeneuve had to be physically carried by a large mechanic across the puddles and strapped into his car. Then, in the torrent, he set out almost alone, to set a time eleven seconds faster than the next car down, Scheckter in the other Ferrari. It was (of course) an exercise in futility (the weather cleared up the next day and Alan Jones took a confident pole for Williams) but so startling a demonstration of skill and bravery that Jacques Laffite could do nothing but shake his head and ask, ‘Why do we bother? He’s different from the rest of us. On a separate level.’ Scheckter thought him mad: 160 mph in a flood. But in the race the gods smiled again, Jones lost a wheel and retired, while Villeneuve (still glowing from his beau geste in practice) was rewarded with a win nearly a minute ahead of Arnoux, in spotty, rain-bothered conditions.

  It was wonderful; it was miraculous. In the space of a season, Villeneuve had established himself among the other drivers as someone with excessive talents, endless verve and complete fairness in the heat of competition. Among the spectators, he was a show in his own right, a driver who uniquely justified the price of admission. So beloved was he that, riding as passenger in the new world champion’s street car, he found himself more popular with Italian passers-by than Scheckter himself, the champ. Fans gathered round Gille’s window, shouting, ‘Hey! Villanova!’ while Scheckter (filling up with petrol) was ignored. His celebrity was prodigious and immediate.

  So, in 1979, Villeneuve took three wins, a pole position, four fastest laps, and came second in the Drivers’ Championship, only four points behind his team-mate. Ferrari won the Constructors’ title with their first attempt at a ground-effect car. Villeneuve’s identification with the team was deep, grateful and heartfelt. To prove his commitment to the greater forces which owned the Scuderia, he even did a bit of rallying for Lancia, another part of the Fiat combine. And he felt a nervous warmth towards the Commendatore, revealing, rather sweetly, that, although Ferrari came across as a hard-bitten user of men, ‘Maybe even a godfather,’ nonetheless, ‘He’s a kind man and sometimes I think he sees himself as a father to his drivers.’ Everything pointed to a harmonious and productive future together.

  The problem was that Ferrari was just about to enter one of its darkest phases. Scheckter’s title would be the last Drivers’ Championship the team would see for over twenty years. The Ferrari
312T had been one of the most successful cars ever seen in Formula One, with Niki Lauda using it to win Championships in 1975 and 1977; Scheckter picking up the baton of initiative two years later.

  But by 1980, the car – in its final version, the 312T5 – had become a turkey. It was the wrong shape to get the ground-effects to work really well (mainly due to its unhelpful flat-12 engine layout); and it stopped being deeply reliable, becoming, instead, as undependable as fairy dust. Villeneuve managed to rack up six retirements out of fourteen starts, with a total of six points for the whole season. The team as a whole failed to win a single Grand Prix. Villeneuve called the 312T5 a ‘Wheelbarrow’ and seethed at the way his fortunes had turned. ‘When I won a race easily last year, people would say, “What a fantastic driver.” Now they don’t even notice that I’m battling twice as hard.’ He also found himself having to grapple with the toxicity and paranoia generated by a Ferrari team in difficulty. According to Gaston Parent, his manager, ‘Gilles thought that Forghieri and Piccinini – [Marco Piccinini, the team manager] were afraid to blame the car. After the races they would phone the Old Man and tell him it was the driver or the tyres. It was never the Ferrari.’

  It got worse. Scheckter packed it all in and went off to become, ultimately, an organic farmer. Didier Pironi, a classy, bumptious Frenchman, took his place. ‘When one is praised and the other is forgotten,’ Pironi philosophised of life as a driver in an F1 team, ‘he feels wounded and resentful.’ This was more than mere Gallic de haut en bas. It showed that Pironi was the kind of person able to take a suitably cool, worldly view of the sport’s shifting dynamics. While Villeneuve was the new boy, he could only succeed. Now that Pironi – two years Villeneuve’s junior – was on the scene, it was Villeneuve whose authority was open to challenge.

  The year 1981 came along, and the car was still dreadful. The new Ferrari 126CK, had, on the one hand, a smart-as-paint V6 Turbo to keep up with the Renaults; on the other hand, it had the handling characteristics of, in Villeneuve’s words, ‘a fast red Cadillac’. The V6 suffered from routinely catastrophic turbo lag, which managed to combine with an ill-thought-through chassis to fill each corner with a kind of whiplash, and to transmit every bump and imperfection from the track surface directly up Villeneuve’s spine. The car shook so badly, he actually found it hard to see; and he ended up with a headache every time he drove.

  This left him with not much else to do except defy the odds and burnish his legend, rather than claim any Championships. He won by a margin of forty seconds at Monaco and followed that up with one of those defining drives (up there with Moss at Monaco, Fangio/Stewart at the Nürburgring), in the Spanish GP at Jarama, June 1981.

  Everything was against him. His car still had the power, and was still painfully unmanageable. He was stuck in seventh place on the grid. He had a Renault, a McLaren and two Williamses ahead of him, all infinitely nicer to drive, all eminently capable of winning. The pack formed up, Alan Jones and Carlos Reutemann took off in their Williams-Fords, and that should have been that.

  But Villeneuve was in one of his transcendent moods. Less than a fifth of the way into the race, Jones had gone off the track, and Villeneuve had struggled into a hair’s-breadth lead, where he sat, with Reutemann squirming around a few feet behind him. Reutemann was then joined by Jacques Lafitte (in a Ligier), John Watson (McLaren) and Elio de Angelis (Lotus), any or all of whom ought to have got the jump on Villeneuve in the second half of the race, leaving him somewhere around fifth place. But (with all that Ferrari power) he sprinted away from them in the straights and locked them in a train behind him on the rest of the circuit. This he managed to keep up, in intense heat, for over an hour – an exhibition of supreme cool-headedness, bravura and cunning; a display which only the greatest of drivers could have managed. The result was the squeakiest possible win for Villeneuve: the following four cars crossed the line within the next 1.24 seconds.

  The press at once claimed that ‘Villeneuve’s race was something of a masterpiece.’ Villeneuve himself, disarmingly modest, said that he had ‘big problems around all the twisty bits, and it was a really hard race.’ Mauro Forghieri, thinking, as ever, of purely mechanical advantage, started off by announcing that ‘The best part of our car is the turbo. It was fantastic today.’ Then he collected himself, and said, ‘No, correction. The best part of our car today was Villeneuve. He was super, fantastic. What a driver!’ Gordon Murray, his usual otherworldliness for once left in abeyance, was perhaps the most telling witness: ‘I honestly think it was the greatest drive I’ve ever seen by anybody. His chassis is awful, worse by far than that of any other driver. His driving was just unreal.’

  Oh, and Enzo Ferrari? ‘Gilles Villeneuve on Sunday,’ said the Commendatore, ‘made me live again the legend of Nuvolari.’

  Well, there it is. Ferrari himself said it; and it is impossible to imagine a statement more emotive, more resonant. Ferrari, the last link to the pre-war world, summons up the shade of the Flying Mantuan, his invisible presence creating the most powerful magic, the most numinous associations. Little Villeneuve, indomitable, fierce, brilliant and victorious: precisely a Nuvolari of modern times.

  Which was fine for sentimentalists and historians; less so for Villeneuve himself.

  The fact was that he was not taking the strain too well. It was fine and dandy being a folk hero, but Villeneuve was well over thirty by now; he was stuck with a car that might never come good; he was surrounded by go-ahead types like Prost and Lauda and Pironi; he loathed the new ground-effect tweaks which caused him (like everyone else) to rage that ‘It’s not driving, it’s just a matter of aiming for the corner, flooring it and hoping you’re on the right line. There’s no satisfaction in these bloody things.’ He started to dismiss other, less torridly committed racers, as ‘parade drivers’ or ‘wankers’ or ‘chauffeurs de ballet’. He also worried about his image. He shaved two years off the age he was prepared to admit to in public. He fretted over his diminutive height. He obsessed over his thinning hair, urgently smoothing it forward over his scalp the moment he took off his crash helmet. And he got meaner at home.

  This was a real change from the original, unaffected, unpretentious Villeneuve, the one who had scratched a living in his early days, who preferred life with his wife and kids in a blue-collar all-American motorhome to a deracinated existence in expensive hotels and service apartments, who treated the world with constant, endearing candour.

  Depressed, he went and boosted his self-esteem by buying an insanely fast and uncomfortable 36-foot powerboat, at the same time as he witheld spending money from his wife, Joann. He was painfully jealous and possessive when he was around her, but this didn’t prevent him from starting a covert affair of his own. Rows broke out, and the kids, according to Joann, ‘sensed there was a lot of tension and friction between us. It made them unhappy and unsettled them.’ And young Jacques Villeneuve, ten years old, couldn’t do anything right: ‘Gilles was very demanding with Jacques.’ Jacques ‘would get very nervous just trying so hard to please his father’. Or, as one of Jacques Villeneuve’s friends put it, ‘When Gilles was racing, Jacques became almost a basket case.’

  And there was still the problem with Pironi. When Villeneuve had gone full-time with Ferrari in 1978, there was everything to play for: his team-mate was Carlos Reutemann, quick but inconsistent, not an obvious threat to Villeneuve the brilliant new boy. With Scheckter in ’79, he could give the more experienced driver a real run for his money, while still establishing his Nuvolari-of-our-times credentials and waiting for his chance to take the title. 1980 was a fallow year; Scheckter left, Villeneuve assumed the nominal lead driver position. And then in 1981, Pironi arrived.

  Which was fine, at first. Villeneuve got on well enough with him. They could work to improve the car, rebuild the team’s prospects. But there was always a profound cultural distinction between them, almost a generational distinction. Villeneuve was a romantic, a man who loved to drive, and who – for all his juvenil
e stunting off-track, and his death-or-glory madness on-track – was scrupulously fair in a fight: as testified to by René Arnoux after the ’79 French GP performance. ‘You can only race like that, you know,’ said Arnoux, ‘with someone you trust completely, and you don’t meet many like him.’ Villeneuve was, in essence, old-fashioned.

  Pironi, on the other hand, was modern. He had worked his way up through the sport in a very French, dirigiste, semi-state-sponsored (ELF petrol) sort of way. He was ambitious, he was patriotic, he was a good politicker, he was determined to become the first French Formula One champion. He made it his business to handle the emotional complexities that permeated Ferrari. And his luck, his timing, were good. The powerful, nimble new Ferrari 126C2 was an altogether better car than the Red Cadillac that Villeneuve had struggled to tame. The 1982 season looked very promising for Monsieur Didier.

  But worse for Villeneuve. His first two races ended in retirement. For the third, he was disqualified, owing – of all things – to the size of his rear wing. Pironi managed to extract a single point in this same period. Then, at San Marino in April, there was a FOCA-led boycott of the race, leaving the field open to Renault and Ferrari, plus one or two FOCA refusniks such as Tyrrell and Toleman. Fourteen cars started, instead of the usual thirty-plus. Ferrari had the place to themselves once the Renaults’ engines had packed up, and Villeneuve led Pironi comfortably round the track for the closing stages of the race.

  At which point, the trouble began. The two Ferraris were so far ahead of third-placer Michele Alboreto, floundering along in a Tyrrell, that the team hung out a SLOW sign, to make sure that the pair neither broke their engines nor ran out of fuel. Villeneuve took SLOW to mean ‘hold your positions’, as well as ‘keep the speed down’. Pironi thought otherwise. A bit of dicing ensued. Villeneuve and Pironi swapped the lead, notionally in order to keep the crowd from dozing off; in actuality, as a portent of things to come. Villeneuve assumed that, whatever else happened, Pironi would stop overtaking shortly before the end and have the manners to cross the finishing line in a dutiful second place, younger driver yielding to the more senior, and so on.