Dear Joe,

Yes, Gilles was a friend, and I think I’ll always believe him to be the fastest racing driver there has ever been, but your question is a good one, and I’ll do my best to be unbiased in answering it!

We know what happened in 1982: Pironi ‘stole’ the victory from Villeneuve at Imola, and two weeks later, at Zolder, Gilles was killed at the end of qualifying. There has never been the slightest doubt in my mind – after talking at length to Villeneuve on the phone a couple of days after Imola, and again on the Friday at Zolder – that Pironi’s duplicity was responsible for the all-or-nothing frame of mind in which he went to his last race.

Three months later, of course, Didier – leading the World Championship – had the accident in practice at Hockenheim which was to end his motor racing career. And five years after that, having taken up powerboat racing, he was killed in an accident in the Needles Trophy.

At the end of 1982 Enzo Ferrari had a trophy made for him, inscribed – in Italian, of course – ‘Didier Pironi, the true World Champion of 1982’. And, had he not been so grievously injured at Hockenheim, I’m sure he would have taken the title that year. Would he have done so, however, if Villeneuve had still been around?

It’s certainly not impossible. No, he wasn’t as quick as Gilles – no one was – but in 1979 that had also been true of Jody Scheckter, and although Gilles had been the Ferrari driver who supplied the blinding speed and the drama, Jody had been the one to concentrate on points, and thus came out of the season as World Champion.

It could have gone that way for Pironi, too. Let’s bear in mind that Didier had gone beyond being merely a good Grand Prix driver, and was becoming a great one. As Mauro Forghieri put it to me, “Because Gilles was on another level, it wasn’t until he had gone that we began to realise just how good Pironi was…”

So… I think it could have gone either way, as in 1979. In my heart, though, I’ll always believe that Villeneuve would have done it, and you wouldn’t really expect me to say anything else, would you?

Dear Rich,

Although Lewis Hamilton is a very different type from Gilles Villeneuve, I would agree with you that his driving style and never-say-die attitude are indeed reminiscent of Gilles. When I interviewed Lewis a couple of years ago, he spoke at length about his childhood worship of Ayrton Senna, and said that he based much of his attitude to the job of Grand Prix driver on Ayrton. But I have long thought there was more of Villeneuve than Senna in the way Hamilton goes racing – not least because I never saw Gilles do anything underhand on a race track, and neither have I ever seen Lewis do anything like that, either. I could not say that of Ayrton.

Keke Rosberg said this of Villeneuve: “Gilles was the hardest bastard I ever raced against, but always scrupulously fair – he was a giant of a driver.” In the same way, Hamilton takes no prisoners, but neither have I ever seen him do anything underhand.

Can’t agree with you, though, about Istanbul 2010 and Imola ’82. There is nothing whatever duplicitous about Jenson Button, and when he closed on Hamilton he didn’t know that Lewis had been told to turn his engine down, and thought it was game on. At Imola, though, the Ferraris, also running one-two in the late laps, were extremely marginal on fuel and Villeneuve, the team’s front-runner all day, was cruising to what he thought was victory, the team having given the ‘Hold’ sign to both drivers. At the very last overtaking point on the last lap, Didier Pironi suddenly sprinted by, and stole the win. Gilles vowed never to speak to him again, and only 13 days later died in qualifying at Zolder.

Dear Martin,

First of all, let me thank you for your compliments. I’m glad you became such an F1 fan – and sad that you no longer are.

I once wrote that Eoin Young, a well-established journalist when I started, and someone who became a close friend, one day said to me that I would make a make a friend of a racing driver, that he would then be killed, and that I would never thereafter look upon racing in quite the same way. It happened to everyone, Young said, and in his case the driver had been Bruce McLaren.

In mine, it was indeed Gilles Villeneuve, and probably it’s true that my attitude changed after that day at Zolder in 1982, in the sense that thereafter I took care not to become so close to another racing driver. It didn’t, of course, keep me from getting on well with drivers, and enjoying their company, but fundamentally I thought that close friendship was probably a bad idea. I was mighty glad, I must say, when such as Mario Andretti and Keke Rosberg, already long-time friends, retired intact. Racing, let’s remember, used to be a great deal more dangerous than it is today.

You ask, though, when did ‘the magic stop’ for me, and I have to tell you that it never did, and it never has. Yes, I was shattered when Gilles was killed, and, yes, although we were never close friends, I was greatly distressed when Ayrton died at Imola a dozen years later. But although I can’t say I like some of the changes which have come to F1 in recent times, I still fundamentally adore it, and I’m sure I always will.