This month, the tragic story of Gilles Villeneuve and Didier Pironi will be told in a new documentary film. 40 years on, it’s a wound that hasn’t healed for either family. F1 ✍️ thomasmaheronf1
This month, the tragic story of Gilles Villeneuve and Didier Pironi will be told in a new documentary film. 40 years on, it’s a wound that hasn’t healed for either family.
The San Marino Grand Prix at Imola had seen an intra-team battle for the win between Villeneuve and Pironi, an all-Ferrari affair at the front following problems for Renault and the tensions seen at the height of the FISA-FOCA war.
Building up through their early F1 careers and on into the bitterness of 1982, the documentary pieces together the story using previously unseen archive footage as well as home video that offers glimpses into the personalities that were Gilles and Didier. Made with the full co-operation of both the Villeneuve and Pironi families, there are plenty of emotional cutaways as Joann Villeneuve, as well as children Jacques and Melanie, remember Gilles.
It’s also clear that, 40 years on, the thick tension that existed between Villeneve and Pironi still lingers on between their respective partners, with Joann Villeneuve making her thoughts very clear that this is a story of “betrayal and dishonesty” – a stance that hasn’t softened despite the intervening years. It’s a stance that Goux understands, albeit disagrees with, as both sides agreed to speak with PlanetF1.com ahead of the film’s release.
“I accepted to do this movie also because when I met John McKenna , he really was very, very thoughtful. I knew where the story was going to go after doing plenty of early interviews with the team. After time, I was quite surprised that I could speak about it deeply. “I guess, after 40 years, it was time to do it. On top of everything, the people I worked with, Torquil [Jones] was just a really nice guy. He was just the kind of person that made it comfortable for me to do.
“If you see Formula 1 today, I see that today we see this all the time. Knowing Didier, he would never have betrayed anyone. But he said perfectly: he’s there to win the race. “That part of it was done a long time ago. It still remains difficult, and it still remains with feelings of betrayal and lack of honesty,” she explains.
I asked Joann about Imola 1982, the cataclysmic race that destroyed their friendship, and she spoke about how Gilles had struggled to come to terms with how he had felt betrayed by Pironi.“[Didier] just went against everything that had been spoken about. That had been team… not rules, but there were team agreements inside the team, and he just went against it. Whereas Gilles never did.
“He was very liked by everyone, he was very close to everyone at the table. But, when he was in the car, he was completely determined. “Drivers – they don’t like to lose, they don’t like to be second. For them, it’s awful, and maybe Gilles took this very, very badly. If Didier, afterward, had been reprimanded by Ferrari, this would have been completely different. Even Enzo Ferrari said they were big enough to deal with this themselves.”
Having initially felt disappointed by Ferrari’s lack of support for him, Villeneuve is sure that Gilles’ disappointment with his team would have also faded in time.“He was a very kind, gentle person so, eventually, I think the Ferrari part of it [would have faded] because he would have seen it through Mauro’s eyes. He was close to Mauro Forghieri and I think that he knew that, had Mauro been at the race, things might have been very, very different.
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