'Fantastic! Unbelieveable!" Villeneuve In The Rain

"Although I don't particularly agree with his daredevil style, Gilles Villeneuve has done more for Grand Prix racing this season than all the other drivers combined." - Frank Williams


"Gilles Villeneuve was someone I took a great liking to. I liked everything about him. He was the craziest devil I ever came across in Formula 1." - Niki Lauda


Gilles contributed even more to the sport and to his own growing legend during the 1979 United States Grand Prix weekend at Watkins Glen. The patented Villeneuve display began on Friday when the track was soaked and few cars even ventured out of the pits. In fact, most drivers thought the flooded tarmac was simply undriveable.

Gilles did not share their opinion and Denis Jenkinson was there. "When we saw him going out in the rain, we said, This we've got to see!' Some members of the press, who think they know it all, don't bother to go out when it rains. But I was out on a corner in the rain watching him and all the hardball members of the press were with me. We had to see this. It was something special. Oh, he was fantastic! He was unbelievable!"

Another hardballer on hand was Nigel Roebuck. "Gilles was the one bloke who made you go and look for a good corner in a practice session because you knew that where everybody else would go through as if on rails Gilles would be worth watching. That day in the rain at Watkins Glen was almost beyond belief! It truly was. You would think he had 300 horsepower more than anybody else. It just didn't seem possible. The speed he was travelling didn't bear any relation to anybody else. ”He was 11 seconds faster!• Jody was next fastest and couldn't believe it, saying that he scared himself rigid! I remember Laffite in the pits just Ü giggling when Gilles went past and saying, 'Why do we bother? He's different from the rest of us. On a separate level.'"”

Jeff Hutchinson, another British journalist, was also a greatly impressed witness. "The spectacle of him pushing that Ferrari to the limit, with great roostertails of water cascading off its rear wheels, just for the sheer fun and thrill of it, made the wet feet and miserable wait worthwhile. He lapped at an average speed of just over 100 mph!"

"That was fun!" said Gilles, grinning widely as was his custom after such feats. But he was of the opinion that he might have been quicker. "I was flat in fifth on the straight, about 160 mhp. It should have been faster but the engine had a misfire and was down about 600 revs. But for that I could have gone quite a bit faster, but then maybe I would have crashed."

However, his Ferrari was less manageable on dry Michelins and on Saturday Gilles best efforts produced only third on the grid behind Alan Jones and Nelson Piquet. With a grin he said, "I will just have to make one of my usual good starts." And he did that, with the help of more rain that fell half an hour before the start, forcing most people to start on wet tires.


Gilles splashed past Piquet in a flash and alongside Jones under braking for the first corner. "I was trying really hard to get up beside Jones and then I thought I was going to spin as we went into the corner." He put two wheels off the circuit but managed to straighten it all out and lead Jones for the next 31 laps. Villeneuve was in the best possible position because everyone else had heavy spray to contend with, their only navigational aids being the tiny red tail lights on preceding cars.

Before the race was half over the number of Grand Prix cars put out of action by the wet conditions exceeded the total destroyed overnight in The Bog. And the flames from those hijacked and torched vehicles © nine of them © were snuffed out in the dampness of race day but the distasteful odour from The Glen's ghetto of madness lingered in the air. While the visiting press were again dismayed by this strange aspect of life in the New World, one native from north of the U.S. border was doing his best to distract them.

Gilles continued to sail around in the wet at a high rate of knots with Jones rather far astern. While Gilles held his own at the front, Jody did better than that following an early spin that relegated him to the back of the field. He passed everyone in sight bar the two leaders and was up with them, in third behind Jones, on the 13th lap. The track was drying now and Jody stopped for slick tires as did many others. By lap 30 Gilles and Jones had lapped the entire field but the changing conditions favoured the Goodyear-tired Williams and two laps later it went by the Ferrari.

Gilles pitted for dry tires, losing half a lap to Jones in the process. But that was erased once and for all when Jones made his stop. He was delayed when a wheel nut gave trouble to the Williams crew. Then, in their anxiety to get Jones out of the pits ahead of Gilles, the team sent him away before the nut was properly tightened. He only made it 500 meters before the offending wheel dropped off. There were no three-wheel heroics from Jones as the Williams slid off the circuit to a permanent halt. Nor were there from Jody Scheckter, whose Ferrari shed a tire exactly as Gilles's had done at Zandvoort. Jody parked it and walked back to the pits the first time he had done so all season.

Thus Gilles won his third race of 1979, the fourth of his Formula 1 career, and he finished just four points short of Jody's world championship total of 51 points.


- excerpt from Gilles Villeneuve, The Life Of The Legendary Driver by Gerald Donaldson...available in print and eBooks