Newsgroup: it.sport.formula1.moderato
Titolo: [ENG] Gilles ricordato da Nigel

Il mercoledě escono i commenti di Nigel Roebuck su 
www.autosport.com
Se fossi in voi non li perderei
Dear Nigel,
It's now 20 years since Gilles Villeneuve lost his life at Zolder. You were
a good friend of his, what do you think of his career looking back now?
Keith West
Dear Keith,
I can't quite take in that it's 20 years since Gilles was killed, but there
it is. I'm writing this on Tuesday, May 8, the anniversary of that horrible
day at Zolder.
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, and software will take care of getting off the
grid - 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.

 Se fossi in voi non li perderei
qui ricorda Francois Cevert
http://www.autosport.com/asknigel.cfm?id=18882&letter=2&series=5