Traction control se ma se p@#s.
All in all it was a great day for Frenchy. They must have spilled their Pernod and flicked their Gitanes Filters defiantly at passersby as Jean-Pierre Jabouille (a driver as French as shrugging at Americans) won the French Grand Prix at Dijon-Prenois in a French car (a Renault) on French tyres (Michelin) and powered by a French fuel manufacturer. Unfortunately due to archaic alcohol laws in France, ironically it’s the only race where you aren’t allowed to spray Champagne.
Video, more pictures and full explanation after the jump:
But toss in a bikini clad Catherine de Neuve doing a duet of The Marsellais with Serge Gainsbourg while holding a baguette and French civilization could’ve quite happily ended there. Sadly that wasn’t the case but it was just about a perfect day for the French and heralded the first turbo-powered victory in F1, and soon everyone would be driving mental 1.5l turbocharged cars producing a reputed 1500bhp. Yes. 1500bhp. It was an era where smoking was considered healthy compared to taking a corner.
But like all things great that’s French it was overshadowed by something else almost immediately. As Jabouille crossed the line, hardly anyone noticed as an epic battle raged between two of my favourite drivers of all time. One was Rene Arnoux. Undoubtedly quick but was seen as a little ‘provincial’ should we say by most of his compatriots.
Later in his career, while still at Renault, he notoriously fell out in a huge way with the urbane, calculating Alain Prost. Famously, the canny Frenchman Arnoux, years later never forgot his treatment at the hands of Prost while a back marker in a Ligier in the twilight of a journeyman career. Sour grapes don’t make for good wine, but they make for a very funny 27 laps at Monaco where Arnoux -- a back marker remember -- refused to let Prost by on the twisty streets of the Principality. But that is another story, and shall be told another time.
Gilles and his digital watch.
The other driver in the battle (and the focus of our Driving God Spotlight) is probably the greatest to never fully realize his stratospheric talent, due to an untimely death, was Gilles Villenueve. Now almost anyone who’s ever met me late at night will attest, I have a great story or two about Villeneuve. Again, these will be told another time. He unfortunately died in qualifying for the Belgian Grand Prix at Zolder while I was only 4 so I never saw him race.
But just take a look at Arnoux and Villeneuve’s dice for 2nd place. Arnoux in the nimble, turbo-tweaked Renault and Villeneuve in the Flat 12 Ferrari, which according to him ‘handled like a barn door’. The Renaults would often qualify first because no one could touch them once they got going but off the line but out of slower corners, due to huge turbo lag, they were hopeless. Watching them pull off the line was like watching an asthmatic fat child getting off the couch to change a DVD.
They swapped positions countless times during those final few laps, banging wheels like a couple of Parisian cab drivers and sliding around like camembert melting down the bonnet of a Citroen DS19. Villeneuve narrowly won, and the French Canadian thus prevented the French from getting completely arrogant and to that we owe him a debt of gratitude. But I think the most un-French Frenchman of them all; Rene Arnoux said it best when after the race he told the press: “I wasn’t sad to lose. It was great, fair fight. I knew I’d been beaten by the best driver in the world”.
Tags: arnoux, battle, dijon, driving, epic, french, gilles, god, grand, prenois, prix, rene, villeneuve
unbeliavable, i surely hope that this years GP will be back to be as exciting as it was then.
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