Pironi

David Sedgwick

Description

Pironi: The Champion that Never Was relates the remarkable story of motor racing's forgotten man, ex-Ferrari F1 driver and offshore powerboat racer, Didier Pironi. The book charts an incredible journey which took the young Parisian to the heights of triumph and the depths of despair. Before he joined the legendary Ferrari stable, Pironi was already a Formula Renault, Le Mans and grand prix winner. By 1982, the time had surely come for the enigmatic Frenchman to become his country's first Formula 1 world champion. He was to come tantalisingly close to achieving that lifetime ambition, ahead in the world championship and in pole position for the German Grand Prix - before crashing so disastrously in practice. Over the next five years he fought a long and painful battle to return to the cockpit to reclaim the title that had eluded him that grim morning. It was not to be. Thereafter Didier turned his attention to offshore powerboating where his remarkable life would come to a shattering end in the icy waters of the English Channel.

Sujets

• Lettres et linguistique
• Auto racing
• Motor

Informations

• Publié par: Pitch Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 01 janvier 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781785313400
• Langue: English

Extrait

Pironi: The Champion That Never Was
David Sedgwick
First published by Pitch Publishing, 2017 Pitch Publishing A2 Yeoman Gate Yeoman Way Durrington BN13 3QZ
www.pitchpublishing.co.uk
David Sedgwick, 2017
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the Publisher.
A CIP catalogue record is available for this book from the British Library
Print ISBN 978-1-78531-349-3 eBook ISBN 978-1-78531-340-0
Front cover: Bernard Bakalian Back cover: Nicolas Cancelier
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Contents
Foreword
Acknowledgements
One - The castle at Boissy
Two - Wild thing
Three - The golden child
Four - Leader of the pack
Five - Enter the American
Six - Didi et Rene
Seven - Perfect harmony
Eight - A bigger pond: F2
Nine - Monte Carlo or bust
Ten - Stepping up
Eleven - Under uncle Ken s wing
Twelve - Hero of France
Thirteen - School of hard knocks
Fourteen - Royal hussar
Fifteen - The French lieutenant s Ferrari
Sixteen - Riviera days
Seventeen - In Villeneuve s shadow
Eighteen - President Pironi
Nineteen - Calm before the storm
Twenty - Much ado about nothing: Imola 82
Twenty-one - Summertime blues
Twenty-two - Hockenheim
Twenty-three - A love of infinite spaces
Twenty-four - The long road back
Twenty-five - Limbo
Twenty-six - The habit of perfection
Twenty-seven - Thus ends this strange, eventful history
Twenty-eight - Forever 28
Notes
Bibliography
Photographs
Foreword
The day I first came across the name Didier Pironi is still clear in my memory. A 12-year-old schoolboy, I had just blown my entire week s pocket money of 1 on a sticker album intriguingly entitled Formula 1 . Save for a sketchy idea that Formula 1 had something to do with car racing, I knew next to nothing about the sport. I did, however, know that I loved collecting stickers (5p per packet of 5) and above all else placing them carefully into the albums provided by the Italian company Figurine Panini. Usually such albums were dedicated to football. Everton and especially Liverpool football club stickers had particularly high currency at my Merseyside primary school. Breaktimes would invariably find a gaggle of schoolboys swapping and bartering stickers with as much fervour as if on the floor of the London Stock Exchange. But Formula 1? An unknown. I believe I was the only boy in our school to have this sticker album.
Villeneuve, Andretti, Reutemann just seeing those names - strange, foreign, exotic - was enough to hook me. However, there was one name above all others that intrigued me: Didier Pironi. What a great name for a racing driver, I thought. I would repeat those six syllables over to myself, Di-dee-ay Pe-ro-nee. I loved the sound of that name. To me it seemed to perfectly encapsulate this strange, faraway world and the dashing heroes who inhabited it.
Anxious to find out more about this new sport, in that same year of 1980 I broke open the piggy bank to purchase my first F1 book, Grand Prix , a huge, lavish publication, the illustrations of cars, drivers and circuits having left such an impression on my young mind that I can still see them today. Indeed, one particular line of text written by motorsport journalist Nigel Roebuck stood out: After a race has finished, wrote Roebuck in his portrait of Didier, one of 20 such driver profiles, you will find Pironi, showered and relaxed, watching the razzmatazz around him with a faintly mocking smile A faintly mocking smile! This Pironi character sounded my type of hero - detached, ironic, cool. I liked the sound of him. I wanted to find out more.
In swift order, my hitherto blue bedroom plastered with all things Everton - mainly its star players - went red - not the red of rivals Liverpool FC I hasten to add, but Ferrari red. I had found myself some new heroes. Thanks to a consignment of back issues of the legendary Grand Prix International magazine (sourced from a local second-hand bookstore), I was able to decorate my bedroom with all things Ferrari. Nightly I imagined myself sat in the cockpit of one of these incredible machines, imagined myself as Didier Pironi or team-mate Gilles Villeneuve flying around Monza in my very own Ferrari.
When Didier crashed so horrifically at Hockenheim in August 1982, it signalled the end of not only his career but also my ability to follow him. In the pre-internet age keeping up with news of Didier was all but impossible. Save for a few occasional lines in Autosport , British motorsport forgot all about the Ferrari daredevil who had come within touching distance of the world championship. How I ached for news. Even then as a 13-year-old, I felt a sense of injustice: if only he had not gone out on to the German circuit that treacherous morning. If only. I was, however, alone in my angst, football being the only topic of conversation among my school friends.
Instead, I cheered on Arnoux and Tambay - Ferrari s new drivers - during 1983 but it was not the same. Besides, I had started to become aware of another driver currently making waves in British Formula 3, another daredevil, of Brazilian extraction, Ayrton da Silva
And so, gradually, Didier faded away. I still thought about him from time to time, wondered what he was doing, but in the absence of any media interest I had no alternative but to abandon any hope of hearing about him again. Until, that is, in August 1987. I can still remember that Sunday morning, a grey overcast day in Merseyside as I rode my bike through town. I also remember the shock upon picking up the newspaper in a friend s house the following morning. Didier was on the front page of the British tabloid The Daily Express . Didier? But why? Hardly daring to look, I read the account of the Colibri accident with a trembling hand. Until that moment, I had not even known that Didier had been pursuing a career in powerboating, let alone racing in the south of England that fateful weekend. I was numb. I suppose it is how one feels under such circumstances, a realisation that somehow, however irrational, you have lost a little part of yourself. Didier was gone. It seemed unfair, cruel. Somewhere in my adolescent brain I guess I had been holding out some hope one day of cheering him on once more in Formula 1, perhaps of even meeting him face to face. I felt inexplicably sad.
The years passed by. New heroes came and went in Formula 1. I followed the career of that British Formula 3 driver now going by the name of Ayrton Senna. Didier would sometimes appear in the musings of Autosport s Nigel Roebuck such as his 1986 book Grand Prix Greats in which the journalist penned some illuminating portraits of his favourite Grand Prix drivers. I was intrigued when Mr Roebuck mentioned that he had often been asked to write a fictional novel with a Formula 1 setting, and that if he ever did embark on such a project more than likely he would model the hero of his book on none other than the life of Didier Pironi. Not Senna? Lauda? Clearly, there was more to Didier than met the eye.
Like Mr Roebuck, I too have been hibernating an idea of my own. What if I could write Didier s actual biography? I would then be able to fill in the gaps so to speak, to satisfy the curiosity that has always lingered and first took hold of a 12-year-old schoolboy 30-odd years ago. Would it even be possible? In summer 2014 I decided to test the water. Thus, I was very heartened when an article I wrote about Didier ( August is the Cruellest Month ) attracted a fair bit of interest when it was published by Motorsport.com. Feedback seemed to suggest that I was not the only one interested in this remarkable individual.
A few years on, hundreds of articles and almost as many interviews later (or so it seems) I have finally arrived at my destination: Pironi: The Champion That Never Was . It has been a long and arduous task, a detective story which as well as leading to some dead ends has, occasionally, led to some moments of pure serendipity. While far from exhaustive, my hope is that this current book manages to provide at least some insights into a man whose life was a rollercoaster ride of triumph and tragedy, a life lived on the very edge, a life always and forever lived at full throttle.
David Sedgwick
Liverpool
May 2017
Acknowledgements
My sincere thanks go to members of the Pironi-Dolhem and Weffort families, without whose help and blessing this project would not have been possible: Gilles and Didier, Catherine, Laurence, Thibault, Marie-Annick and Moreno.
For kindly sharing their memories of Didier and those golden years I would like to thank all of the following: Jean-Pierre Jarier, Jean-Louis Schlesser, Derek Daly, Jean-Pierre Jassaud, Jean-Rene Popot, Gianfranco Ricci, Eric Lucas, Gilles Klein, Piercarlo Ghinzani, Eleonora Vallone, Andrea de Adamich, Beppe Gabbiani, Ingo Hoffman, Jean-Louis Conr , Eric Bhat, Jean-Pierre and Phillipe Paoli, Francine - partner to the late Dr Letournel, Christian Courtel, Philippe Streiff, Jacques Laffite, Fran ois Mazet, Steve Leyshon, Brian Lisles, Allan de la Plante, Stephane Fruitier, Aldo Cichero, Just Jaeckin, Eric Lemuet, Mario Hytten, Dario Calzavari, Philippe Lecouffle, Gilles Gaignault, Fred Opert, Allen Brown of OldRacingCars.com
Special thanks to John Walker, one of the UK s leading authorities on offshore powerboating, and upon whose work much of the chapters on offshore racing are based.
For kindly loaning their images to the project, special tha