Gilles Villeneuve tribute

[Crackie]

Love the quote about Bernie and Balestre https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDfRD9QnU34

[Coatesy351]

I wish he had survived I'm sure he would have been world champion.

[anonymous-user]

I doubt he would, thrilling to watch but he had little mechanical sympathy and in an era when cars were particularly unreliable, he just wouldn't have finished enough races to accumulate the points required to beat the likes of Lauda, Piquet et al

[FourWheelDrift]

Villeneuve could have passed Scheckter at Monza in 1979 but team orders that he followed kept him behind, he would have won the championship that year if he had and if the following 2 race results had then been no different, it would have been Scheckter 48, Villenveuve 50. All due to the silly way they counted only the best 4 race results of the first 7 races in the season and the best 4 race results of the next 8. If Villeneuve had won Monza and they counted all the races it would have been Scheckter 57, Villeneuve 56.

[Coatesy351]

Remember that apart from the 79 season (& probably 82) the Ferraris he drove were rubbish. He drove a well judged race at Watkins glen in 79 with fading oil pressure to win so he wasn't always fire and brimstone. Still he drove for wins so if he wasn't leading the car would be thrashed till it broke or he was in the lead. I don't think he was worried about the wdc.

[Rude-boy]

He was a great talent and was for many years a 'hero' of mine.

As i have got older i have started to side more with the opinion that things ended up the way that they were always going to, it was more of a question of when than if it would all go wrong.

[Carstudio]

He's been my hero since I was a kid and that won't change. Apart from the T4 the cars he drove were dogs. It was only loyalty and bad luck that got in the way of him being champion in '79.
When Harvey Postlethwaite joined Ferrari to design the C2 for '82, he commented that the previous years 126c had around a third of the downforce of the top cars. He won two GP's in that and one of those was Monaco, in a turbo. He qualified on the front row beaten only by a suspected underweight Brabham. He out qualified his teammate Pironi by 2.5 seconds and lapped him in the race.
Worthy of hero status in my eyes anyway!.

[skeggysteve]

He still is my favorite driver but like Rude Boy I also think that the crash that he died in was sadly inevitable.

Some of the things that make him my favorite driver:

At a US GP in wet qualifying he was quickest by eleven seconds, yes eleven seconds! Can't remember who but another driver was quoted at the time saying something like 'he's on another level'.

Keke Rosberg said something like 'he was the hardest bd to race against but totally fair'.

But my favorite is when he'd crashed he was asked if he'd run out of road and Gilles replied 'No, I ran out of lock'!

[Carstudio]

At a US GP in wet qualifying he was quickest by eleven seconds, yes eleven seconds! Can't remember who but another driver was quoted at the time saying something like 'he's on another level'.

That was Jacques Laffite who said that. Yeah, he was pretty special.