Johnny Servoz-Gavin: F1's hippie racer whose career was cruelly ended by a twig

But Monaco can be a cruel arena, and on lap three he brushed the Harbour Chicane barrier, damaging a driveshaft and ending his race. For Johnny, once again, brilliance and disappointment had been entwined. Even so, everyone who mattered had noticed. F1 people, however seasoned, are always excited by speed.

Servoz-Gavin’s next F1 grand prix appearance came at Monza later that same year, 1968. He qualified only 14th, but in the race he drove superbly to finish a brilliant second. More important, perhaps, in doing so he had battled wheel-to-wheel with two men who would in time become F1 legends: Jacky Ickx (Ferrari) and Jochen Rindt (Brabham). Johnny finished ahead of them both, and he was bested by only the reigning F1 world champion, Denny Hulme (McLaren). The motor sport world sat upright, for the 26-year-old Frenchman whom many senior F1 curmudgeons still stubbornly viewed as merely a talented roué had indisputably now shown himself to be a major prospect, and the phrase ‘future F1 world champion’ began fluttering around him.

In 1969, the year in which he became European F2 Champion, he contested four F1 grands prix for Matra, scoring a point for sixth place at Mosport, which was and still is one of the world’s most intimidating circuits. Better still, he achieved that feat driving the bizarre four-wheel-drive Matra MS84, a machine so overweight and cumbersome that Servoz-Gavin himself described it as “undriveable”. Nonetheless, over Mosport’s flat-out turns and blind crests, he wrestled that obese and truculent contraption home sixth, thereby becoming the first – and still the only – driver ever to score an F1 world championship point in a four-wheel-drive car. By now his reputation was soaring, for he had it all: speed, charisma, and movie-star looks. Hell, he could even coax decent results out of uncompetitive machinery.

The following year, 1968, he returned to Monaco in very different circumstances. Jackie Stewart had been injured, and Servoz-Gavin duly stepped into his F1 Matra. Suddenly – and astonishingly – he was sensationally fast. Around the narrow streets he hurled Stewart’s car with impossible confidence, qualifying it second on the grid. Better still, on race day, on lap one, he surged magnificently into the lead.

Then came the winter of 1969-1970, and with it one absurdly cruel moment. While he was messing around off-road in a Jeep, a thin, low branch flicked into his right eye, impairing its vision. For almost anyone else, prudence would have dictated immediate medical withdrawal from top-level motor sport. But we are talking about Johnny Servoz-Gavin, not anyone else; besides, he had just secured the opportunity of a lifetime, for F1 grandee Ken Tyrrell had signed him for 1970 to partner reigning F1 world champion Jackie Stewart in the team’s March 701s.

So Johnny kept quiet about his damaged eyesight – and, as the 1970 F1 season began, it became gradually then painfully obvious that something was wrong. The innate sharpness that had once made him so electrifyingly rapid appeared to have been blunted. Tiny hesitations emerged where previously there had been only instinctive commitment. And beside him, in the Tyrrell team’s other March, was Stewart, operating at the absolute summit of his considerable powers.

The comparison proved catastrophic. At Monaco, Stewart planted his Tyrrell-run March on the pole. Servoz-Gavin could not even qualify his identical car, his best lap 4.1sec slower than Stewart’s pole time. That very public failure was a devastatingly bitter pill for Johnny to swallow, especially given his previous heroics on the notoriously challenging streets of the Principality. The discrepancy between the two men’s performances was impossible to ignore, and, at 28, Johnny immediately announced his retirement.

Publicly, he treated his newly diminished life with typical levity, telling his mates that he was retiring “to spend more time with women”. One suspects that there was considerable truth in that line, yet beneath the humour lurked tragedy, for one freak accident had snuffed out what might well have become one of the most lustrous F1 careers of the 1970s, and instead Servoz-Gavin slowly drifted into the long afterparty of his misspent youth.

He dated French models and film stars. He lived on a houseboat. He cultivated an existence that seemed permanently suspended somewhere in a Serge Gainsbourg chanson. While his racing contemporaries prospered, winning grands prix and/or world championships, then becoming team managers or TV pundits, Johnny remained defiantly the eternal Swinging-Sixties exile. Time moved forward, for it waits for no man, but he declined to accompany it.

Motor sport history is littered with lost talents, but Servoz-Gavin’s story feels especially poignant because his limitations were never psychological. He did not lose his talent, nor even his nerve. Developing car technologies did not leave him behind. No, his abrupt downfall came through sheer rotten luck. In those days F1 careers were usually ended by gigantic accidents causing fearsome injuries or even, all too often, deaths. Johnny’s was ended by a twig.

Yet perhaps that strange fragility somehow suits our memory of him. He flitted into and out of F1 in an era when drivers smoked, drank, seduced actresses, lived recklessly, and, knowing the mortal danger inherent in their profession, raced with ballsy fatalism. Servoz-Gavin embodied that age almost too perfectly, which may explain why he still fascinates me, and others like me, despite his relatively modest F1 record.

His F1 career comprised only 12 grand prix starts, only one grand prix podium, and only nine world championship points. But if he is remembered at all, which he absolutely should be, it will be for the what-ifs and the if-onlys. What if the branch had never struck his eye? If only Tyrrell had then fielded Stewart and Servoz-Gavin together for many years? What if Johnny’s immense natural gifts had matured into race-winning and perhaps even world championship-winning consistency? They are tantalising questions, and answering them is as impossible as it is pointless.

As he grew older, still wooing femmes fatales on his houseboat despite his advancing years, he did not enjoy such hypothesising, but, when once he was pushed into offering a retrospective verdict on his what-might-have-been F1 career, his reply was as eloquent as it was forthright: “I was never a true professional; I was only ever a professional because I didn’t have enough money to be an amateur.” What an epitaph that is.