Then fate intervened again. “Twenty laps later Alesi stopped with suspension damage, and I was in the lead. But [David] Coulthard [McLaren] wasn’t far behind me, so I had to keep my speed up.” Fuel anxiety added one last twist. “A few laps from the end, my engineer told me I was running low on fuel, and that I would need to make a splash-and-dash pitstop. I said, ‘No way!’ We had a discussion, and I said, ‘No, I’m leading the Monaco Grand Prix. Maybe I can win it. If I splash and dash, I definitely won’t win it. Tell me how much fuel I have to use per lap, and I’ll drive to make it work.’ And, lap by lap, I began to work out how to make it work – changing gears early, not using sixth gear at all, lifting and coasting, all that – and I also knew that the two-hour-limit rule would apply. The race was scheduled for 78 laps, but the two hours came after 75 laps. That helped us, and we won.”

Even the victory lap was touched by theatre. “On the parade lap, as I drove down towards Mirabeau from Casino, a French guy stepped onto the track and gave me a French flag – Le Tricolore – and I waved it as I drove around the rest of the lap, then I stopped in the pits. When, later, one of our mechanics tried to fire up the engine, he couldn’t do it, because the fuel tank was completely empty. So I was a lucky boy in many ways – I nearly spun off, I nearly ran out of fuel – but I’d won the Monaco Grand Prix, and it was a special day. It was a special day in many ways in fact.”

“There was a lot of potential at Toyota. We had good resources, good facilities and good people”

How special? “Very special. Look, I don’t want to compare myself to Senna – never – but that day I think I felt a little bit like what he described when he drove that amazing pole lap at Monaco in 1988. You know: an out-of-body experience almost.”

His win changed everything. “Oh yes, totally. Everything was different for me after that. Everyone in F1, and outside F1 too, suddenly saw me in a new light. It changed my life completely, honestly.”

The following year began brightly with Prost Grand Prix, which was Ligier renamed. “Yes, that 1997 Prost was a really good car – well, let’s be honest, it was basically a Benetton copy – and that 1997 Bridgestone was a really good tyre. So that could have been a very good season for me.

“Actually, I could have won in Barcelona that year. I was in second place, 10sec behind [Jacques] Villeneuve’s Williams with 15 laps to go, and catching him fast, when I came up to lap Irvine’s Ferrari. Even though the marshals waved blue flags at him, he didn’t let me pass him for seven laps, and by that time he’d delayed me, and Villeneuve was now 16sec ahead. I drove like crazy after that – flat-out – taking 1.5sec per lap off Jacques, but by the end I was still just over 5sec behind him. That should have been a win. I went to see Eddie afterwards, and I said, ‘That was ridiculous.’ He laughed, then he said, ‘I’m sorry.’ But, you know, that was Eddie.”

At that stage the F1 drivers’ standings looked improbably promising. “I was lying third in the world championship as we arrived in Canada. Could I have been champion that year? No, I don’t think so, but I would have done well, a few podiums, perhaps a couple of wins. Maybe I could have finished in the top three.” Instead came a crash in the 1997 Canadian Grand Prix, violent enough to fracture both his legs and threaten his entire career.

“I always knew this sport was dangerous. Where I crashed was a high-speed section of the Montreal circuit, and both my legs were broken. My first thought was: can I move? I wanted to know whether or not I’d been paralysed. So I started to try to get out of the car, then the marshals helped me onto the grass beside the track, then an ambulance arrived, then a helicopter, and off I went.”

He was remarkably calm. “I could see that my right leg was in trouble – worse than my left – but I knew that I wasn’t paralysed because I could feel and move my body. So it was bad, yes, but I wasn’t panicking. And when I got to the hospital I asked the surgeon, ‘Will I be able to race again?’ And he said, ‘Your left leg isn’t too bad, but we’ll have to be careful with how we treat your right leg over the next 24 hours, but, yes, I don’t see why you shouldn’t recover well enough to race again one day.’ After that I felt almost OK. I felt pain, yes, and I realised that healing would take some time, but my focus was already on racing again, and I’d been told that it might be possible. So, yes, I felt OK.”

It was here that Panis’s character revealed its iron core. I ask him whether he is a hard man, and he chuckles then shrugs. “I think I am. I’m a nice person, an easy person, but I can be tough when I need to be. If you try to fight me, you’re dead.”

His comeback later that 1997 season was almost absurdly brave. “Before Nürburgring I did a test in an F3 car at Paul Ricard, then another test in my Prost F1 car at Magny-Cours. The F3 test was fine but painful. I did 50 laps, no problem. And at Magny-Cours, in my Prost F1 car, I said to myself, ‘If I can’t take the left-hander after the pits flat-out on my second flying lap, I won’t return to F1.’ Alain [Prost] told me not to be a hero, to take things easy, but, no, I was determined to set myself that challenge. Well, I did it: I was flat through that corner on my second flying lap, and eventually I’d matched the lap record.”

Even then the pain lingered. “After a while the discomfort was so bad in my right foot that I knew it would be difficult for me to press the brake pedal with enough power to be quick over a whole race distance, so my engineer made a wide brake pedal for me, so that I could brake with both feet. I used that wide brake pedal at Nürburgring and Suzuka, and I braked with two feet in both those races. I’ve never revealed that publicly before. It was weird, but it worked, and I finished sixth at Nürburgring, which was a good comeback.” I think we can regard that as something of an understatement. It had been an astonishingly plucky return.

Prior to his Montreal shunt there had been conversations, he reveals quietly, “with both McLaren and Ferrari about a race drive in 1998”. The accident scuppered all that, so he remained at Prost. The 1998 Prost was “a very shit car, the most shit car I ever drove in F1. But I was happy to have [Jarno] Trulli as a team-mate, because he’s a lovely guy and one of the quickest qualifiers I’ve seen. In Barcelona that year, 1998, he whispered to me, ‘Olive [a nickname used by all Olivier’s mates to this day], I’m scared of this car.’ I replied, ‘Don’t worry, so am I.’ It was awful.”

Unsurprisingly, relations within the team grew strained. “Things became difficult with Alain, because he was a fantastic world champion, but being a team principal is a totally different thing. We didn’t always agree about what would be the best way to cope with this difficult situation, and in Montreal I walked out of a briefing because he and I had an argument and I was so angry. Anyway, enough already. It was a terrible year.”

Then, amid the usual whirl of Monaco week in 1999, life dealt him a very different blow. “I didn’t have a manager at the time, but I had a lawyer, Peter Poeliejoe-Vewald. He mostly worked in the movie business, not in racing, but I knew him and I liked him. He, my wife Anne, and I had dinner together in Monaco on the Tuesday evening, he was fine, and we had a good time. We said goodbye after the meal and he said, ‘See you tomorrow.’ I didn’t see him the next day, which was a bit odd, but the Cannes Film Festival was happening that week, so I thought maybe he’d changed his mind and gone to Cannes instead of to Monaco. But when I didn’t see him on Thursday, or even Friday, I began to get worried. So Anne called Peter’s wife and asked her where Peter was. ‘Peter’s dead,’ she replied. ‘He had a heart attack on Wednesday.’ It was a big, big shock.”

Management thereafter came from two formidable figures – Keke Rosberg and Didier Coton – although Rosberg had initially declined the job. “Basically, Keke said no to me in 1999 because I’d said no to him in 1993, when he’d asked me if I wanted to be managed by him before. But that’s Keke, and in the end I had a great time with him. He’s my kind of driver, and my kind of guy. Didier was great, too.”

In 2000 Panis made a move that was radical at the time: stepping back from racing to become test driver for McLaren. “It was my idea,” he remembers. “I’d had an offer for IndyCar from Pat Patrick Racing, but, on reflection, I wanted to stay in F1. So I said to Didier, ‘You and Keke are well in with Ron [Dennis, the McLaren team principal], and I want to have the experience of driving a top F1 car, which I’ve never done before, so why don’t you suggest me to him as third driver, reserve driver and test driver?’”

The plan worked. “When I got to McLaren, I absolutely loved it. It was brilliant. Ron was great, Adrian [Newey, technical director] was great, Mansour [Ojjeh, senior shareholder] was great, Martin [Whitmarsh, chief operating officer] was great, and Mika [Häkkinen], David [Coulthard], and it was like a little family. It was amazing, and driving the car – wow! – it was fantastic. I tested it over 28,000km [17,400 miles] that year –wonderful! Also that was the year that we developed McLaren’s simulator, which was state-of-the-art. I remember this young boy had a go in it. Lewis Hamilton was his name.”

The testing renaissance earned him a return to F1 racing with BAR in 2001. “Well, yes, in late 2000 I went to see Bernie [Ecclestone] in the FOM [Formula One Management] offices in London. I told him my situation – that I wanted to race in F1 again – and he said, ‘F1 needs a French driver, give me a week.’ And exactly a week later [Craig] Pollock [the BAR boss] called me.”

I suggest that those BAR seasons were unspectacular, not least because Panis’s team-mate Villeneuve always had preferential treatment. “Well, yes, but I still enjoyed my two years there,” he replies, unwilling to dish any dirt, “and I scored a few points even though our cars weren’t great. OK, the team was built around Jacques, you’re right, and he was obviously therefore the number one and I was obviously therefore the number two, but we pushed together in a difficult situation and he never did me any harm.”

Panis’s final F1 chapter unfolded with Toyota. “There was a lot of potential there, because we had good resources, good facilities and good people. Also, by that time I’d been with Japanese people so many times – with Mugen-Honda at Ligier, with Honda at BAR and now with Toyota – that I’d learned how to work well with them. I had a few good results with Toyota – points finishes in Montreal, Magny-Cours and Hockenheim in 2003, then more points finishes at Monaco and Indy in 2004. Then at the end of 2004 I asked the Toyota bosses, ‘Do you think we’re going to have a car good enough to win the world championship in 2005?’ They said, ‘No, probably not.’ So I thought to myself, ‘Well, I’ve probably done enough.’ So I decided to stop racing. I was the Toyota test driver in 2005 and 2006, though, which was good money, and I still enjoyed driving F1 cars, so I was happy to do it.”

Retirement did not suit him. “In 2007, my first year of pure relaxing, I became depressed. OK, I enjoyed being with my family at home in Grenoble, but I missed being busy. I missed excitement, too. Anne noticed – and, at the end of 2007, she said, ‘I think you need to get involved with racing again.’”

Soon he was competing in the Trophée Andros alongside his old sparring partner, Prost. “He asked me if I wanted to join him, and I said, ‘Yes, for sure.’ So I was his team-mate at first, then I did it for many years, and I really enjoyed it, but it wasn’t enough because it was a winter-only series.

“Then one day I bumped into [Hugues] de Chaunac [the ORECA chief executive], we got chatting, and that’s how I ended up doing four Le Mans 24 Hours [2008-2011] and some other endurance races. I really enjoyed them, but by the end, 2011, I was 45, and after that I stepped back a bit, and I did only the French GT championship from 2012 to 2015.”

After that, Olivier finally hung up his distinctive red, white and blue helmet, and instead he embraced team management. “I started Panis Racing. But I delegated the running of the team to others and it worked, and 10 years later it’s still working. OK, I still attend every race and every test and I’m fully engaged, but I don’t run the team from a hands-on point of view. It’s great.”

What else floats his boat? “Anne and I recently celebrated 30 years of marriage –and we’d been together for 10 years before that, so that’s 40 years,” he says. “My kids [Aurélien, Caroline and Laurène] are grown up and successful, and I’m a grandfather, too. I’m fit and well. I run every day. I do a few speaking engagements. I’m busy. I’m a lucky man. I sometimes go to F1 races still – not often though – and when I do I always think to myself: ‘I was in F1 at the best time.’”

Perhaps that is the essence of Olivier Panis: lucky, yes, but also brave, stubborn, quick and generous of spirit. F1 has always been fondest of its heroes who win often. Yet sometimes it produces another kind: the man who wins rarely but memorably, perhaps even whose single triumph echoes for decades because it was seized with nerve, intelligence and heart.

When the Monaco harbour glitters in the spring sunshine and the ghosts of past races drift in off the Med, one can still picture a bleu de France Ligier barrelling its way through a chaotic grand prix, an excited Panis in the cockpit, a driver who learned that day, and would never forget, that opportunities in F1 make hens’ teeth seem common. When his moment arrived, he did what a true racer always does. He took it.