Newsgroup: it.sport.formula1.moderato
Titolo: [ENG] Rubato: Gilles

Dear Nigel,
I am only in my 30's so am too young to remember the great Gilles 
Villeneuve. I would love to know just how you think he would have faired 
against the Piquet, Prosts & Sennas of this world had that tragic day in 
1982 never happened. I think Gilles was the fastest and possibly the 
greatest driver the world has ever known and I'm sure he would have been a 
multiple world champion. One of the many things F1 needs right now is a 
driver with, passion, a will to win like no other, courage, immense natural 
talent and a love of motor racing. I would love to know your thoughts, as I 
know you have a real warmth for the memory of Gilles Villeneuve.
Mark Turner
Dear ,
How would Gilles have fared with such as Piquet, Prost and Senna? In fact, 
he raced a good deal against Nelson and quite a bit against Alain, but 
Ayrton didn't arrive in F1 until 1984, a couple of years after the fatal 
accident at Zolder.
It's difficult to know how Villeneuve's career might have gone, had he 
survived. I suspect he would have joined McLaren in 1983, as team mate to 
Niki Lauda, and who knows what he might have achieved in John Barnard's 
miraculous Porsche-engined MP4-2 in '84, '85 and '86? Under the influence of 
Ron Dennis, he might have begun to take more rational approach to racing - 
but without, one hopes, losing that fantastic 'rage to win', which Ferrari's 
Mauro Forghieri so much admired. To this day, I remain convinced he was the 
fastest driver I ever saw.
Genuine friendships between drivers and journalists are a rarity in the F1 
of today, but at one time were not unusual. Age, of course, has something to 
do with it - you're almost bound to get on more easily with people who are 
your contemporaries, and Gilles and I were about the same age. I value very 
highly my friendships with such as Mario Andretti and Keke Rosberg, and once 
in a while it strikes me what fun it would be if we still had Gilles around 
today.
Quite often, when some change is introduced to the F1 rules, I smile at the 
thought of what his reaction to them would have been: "Now, Gilles, in 
future you don't have to change gear any more, and you don't have to worry 
about throttle control - oh, and, by the way, if someone's trying to pass 
you, it's now quite OK to swerve at them. The only thing we actively 
discourage is speaking your mind..."
Not quite his cup of tea, I think. And as for Max Mosley's suggestion that 
we should think of a Grand Prix 'in terms of a chess match'...
If we rate drivers in terms of 'what they did with what they had', then 
Gilles was as good as anyone I have ever seen, and if anyone defined driving 
'at the edge', it was he. Suffice it to say that I have never seen anyone 
more exciting at the wheel of a Grand Prix car.
If you ask me for one single memory of him, however, I would think not of 
anything on the track, but of a quiet, very sober, conversation we had at 
Rio in 1982, a couple of months before his death.
It was after qualifying, in which Villeneuve had qualified second, his team 
mate Didier Pironi a full second and a half slower. Gilles asked if he could 
have a word. "It's about Didier," he said. "He's off the pace, and he's not 
driving well - but, please, I'm asking you, speak to your colleagues, and 
ask them to go easy on him."
Not long before, while testing at Paul Ricard, Pironi had had an enormous 
end-over-end accident, in which his car finished up in a spectator area, 
mercifully unoccupied at the time. "It was huge," said Gilles, "and he's 
still very shaken up. But he'll be fine by the next race. I just wanted to 
ask the press not to be hard on him this weekend..."
In F1, the normal way of it is for a driver to 'score' against his team mate 
in any way he can, and in all my years of reporting on this business I have 
never known anyone else behave as Gilles did on this occasion. As great a 
driver as he was, I believe he was even more exceptional as a man.
A few weeks later, of course, Pironi paid back Villeneuve's generosity by 
'stealing' victory from him on the last lap at Imola, after which Gilles, 
his trust shattered, declared his intention never to speak to him again. In 
a highly agitated frame of mind, he then went to Zolder, and crashed to his 
death in the closing minutes of qualifying.
© Autosport.com 2005
(non ce l'ho fatta a non riportarlo, anche se AS è a pagamento)
-- 
Fluoredshift
"I miei valori sono più forti di chi cerca di influenzarli". A. Senna
www.studiofranciacorta.com
 

raccomando a chi non li avesse (ancora) letti:
Gilles Villeneuve: The Life of the Legendary Racing Driver
by Gerald Donaldson
James Hunt: The Biography
by Gerald Donaldson
-- 
Posted via Mailgate.ORG Server - 
http://www.Mailgate.ORG

Dear Nigel,
Roebuck, vero?
Grazie in anticipo,
-- 
SNAFU
NOTA: per scrivermi in privato, sostituisci "snaphoo" con "snafu"
NOTE: if you want to send me e-mail, replace "snaphoo" with "snafu"

 Roebuck, vero?
si si
-- 
Fluoredshift
"I miei valori sono piů forti di chi cerca di influenzarli". A. Senna
www.studiofranciacorta.com
 

 
ocio, potrebbero romperti le balle per questo (anche se non penso che 
monitorizzino i NG italiani), la prossima volta traduci!