At the celebration meal that night, as the Gallic chatter and laughter drowned out the songs of the cicadas around the chateaux, Jabouille still felt detached. “Now everyone was happy and relieved. I was pleased for myself and for them but I was not as lost in the moment as they seemed. I was already thinking about the next race and the future.” If he’d looked hard, really hard, into that future he might have made out a scene from the Kyalami pit garages in 1983. Four and a half years after his historic victory, almost all of that time with a significant performance advantage over its rivals, Renault had still to win a world title. Now, on the cusp of achieving it, its driver Alain Prost felt anything but invincible. He felt hunted down like a tired fox, as the lead hound, Nelson Piquet, devoured his points advantage with a relentless late-season run in his exotically-fuelled Brabham-BMW. As Alain looked into the eyes of his team around him, all he saw was confidence — but blind, unrealistic confidence. He knew he was going to lose.
Well, not quite every team member had that look in their eyes. If Prost had cared to look into those of team boss Gerard Larrousse he would have seen daggers. The relationship between them had irretrievably broken down earlier that season — and not for reasons that had much to do with motor racing. It was soap opera stuff and had a suitably climactic ending. Prost was sacked within days of losing the championship. Renault, the team, never won another race in two years of trying. Ever since Renault management and Elf had together posed the question of F1 and the Renault Sport offshoot had come back with the surprising answer of ‘turbo’, this project was fantastically audacious. It brought together a young, inexperienced bunch of people, threw them into a technical programme previously uncharted, of the highest profile, with attendant huge pressures and potential rewards and with tools completely untested. There were always going to be fireworks — and the odds were always going to be stacked against them.