Gilles Villeneuve - 25 years

It has been 25 years since Gilles Villeneuve died, during qualifying for Belgian GP at Zolder on May 8, 1982.
Here is an extremely well written article by Steve Turnbull, editor of Update-F1. An excerpt :

But the final word, the explanation as to why this man was a cut above, and why his like will never be seen in the modern mind-set of Formula One, goes to Gilles himself, when talking to his great friend, Roebuck:
“How the hell can you drive a race car, fight with people, and think all the time about points for a bloody championship? How can you settle for a safe third or something, because it’s four points? Jesus, people like that should be accountants, not racing drivers.”

Norris McDonald wrote a very nice piece on wheels.ca here. It has detailed account of Gilles' early racing years, his drive for racing, his desire to push to the limits, and his much-loved simplicity. I quote from the article :

He was adored for one reason above all: he was a racer. He wanted to win races and championships, yes, but more than anything he wanted to win every lap he was out on the track, whether it was a practice lap, a qualifying lap or the 35th lap of a 72-lap Grand Prix.

When Motorsport magazine put Gilles on their 75th anniversary cover in April 1999, editor Andrew Frankel explained :

No single shot can sum up 75 years of motorsport so we looked for one which made us feel good about racing. And Gilles in a 12-cylinder Ferrari said it all ... in the firmament of great racing drivers, his star shines more brightly than that of multiple world champions.

Before joining Ferrari, Gilles had a meeting with Enzo Ferrari, and Enzo is said to have compared Gilles to the great Nuvolari !

However, the last word must go to arguably the most heart-rending obituary ever written - Nigel Roebuck, a close friend of Gilles wrote this in Autosport on May 13, 1982.

Polite, honest, and straightforward, he had a tremendous sense of humour and a simple love of life. His attitude to motor racing was unfashionably romantic. In a bland, commercial, world, he loved it for its sake. The jet set made him cringe, and he had an instinctive abhorrence of anything bogus. For me, and, I suspect, many thousands of others, the light has gone out in motor racing.

A fitting image.. Gilles pushing to the limit and beyond.


More pictures in my last year's post.