Dear Gavin,
Like you, I was a great admirer of Alain Prost, both as a driver and a man. As I always say to people, throughout all his years in F1 he never told me anything that subsequently proved to be an untruth – in other words, he never lied to me, and there are not many in the F1 paddock of whom I can say that. A superstar he may have been, but from the first time I met him, when he was in F3 in 1979, his behaviour never changed – and there are not many of whom I can say that, either!

Why was he as good as he was? I remember watching qualifying with Denis Jenkinson at Monaco in 1983: others were flying round, some looking quite lurid, and in the middle of all this Prost came out, apparently doing two or three ‘bedding in’ laps. Then the times were announced – and Alain was on pole. Jenks was nonplussed: “Amazing little bloke… how does he do it?”

No one ever made the job of Grand Prix driver seem easier than Prost, and that surely is close to a definition of artistry: you could watch him, and believe you could do it yourself. He personified smoothness in a racing car.

“Being in a team with Alain was like walking into a food-processor every day,” Eddie Cheever affectionately says of his 1983 Renault team-mate. “If you had a good race, the next weekend it would be hell, because he’d have made sure that he took a further step forward, and it was hard to keep pace with him. He never did anything in an underhand way, I must say. I never in my life came across anyone as detail-orientated as Prost was. He just went about his job – he was like a little general.

“Fast corners are one thing – what I never understood about Alain was that he was so quick in slow corners. At Monte Carlo I would lose three-tenths of a second to him just in the Loews hairpin! How he did it I have no idea – and of course there was no telemetry in those days.

“Alain had a very soft way of driving, whereas I would hold my breath and take as much pressure as I could, and then back off. I mean, Prost never used his front tyres! Now, how is that possible? When I drove the car the way it was set up for him, I was very uncomfortable – I couldn’t get it to turn in.

“Alain was a genius when it came to set-up, and I only started really to appreciate that when I drove at Indy the first two or three times. If the car wasn’t handling well, you just had to hold on, and then start working towards a set-up goal at the end of the stint. That was when I started to learn a little bit about how Prost did it – he was just phenomenal.

“The problem was that it was difficult not to become demoralised. I had complete admiration for him – I was confounded by how he could do certain things with the race car. Without a shadow of doubt, Alain was the best driver I ever worked with, or was in a team with – and as well as that, of course, I thought he was a great guy…”