'An out-of-body experience' - Panis on his improbable Monaco GP win

Thirty years ago this week, Olivier Panis won the Monaco Grand Prix from 14th on the grid, nearly ran out of fuel doing it, after almost spinning out of the lead on a puddle of Damon Hill‘s engine oil.

That the Ligier driver won at all remains one of the most improbable stories Formula 1 has ever produced.

That he won the way he did, with nerve, intelligence and an almost supernatural composure, says a lot about the French driver himself who sat down with Matt Bishop for the latest issue of Motor Sport

“My engineers were upset — one of the Japanese guys was even crying,” Panis says of qualifying, in which an electrical gremlin had wrecked his runs and left him 14th.

“But I said, ‘Don’t worry. Tomorrow we’ll score points.’ To be honest I only said it to try to lift their spirits.”

The next morning he was quickest in the warm-up. He told his wife Anne he was going to get a podium.

“She laughed at me,” he says, “because no one gets a podium at Monaco from P14 on the grid.”

When the race began in the wet, Panis had asked his engineers to fill the car to the brim: a long first stint was his strategy, and they thought it was a bad idea, but he persuaded them.

By lap 30, as the track dried, he was watching Hill pit for slicks from fourth place and making the same call himself.

Back out in third, he overtook Eddie Irvine at Loews – “a risky move, because nine times out of 10 you end up in the barrier if you try to overtake there” — and then Hill’s engine blew.

“I did a 360-degree spin, I hit nothing, and I got going again,” he says of the moment he nearly threw it all away on the oil slick. Suddenly Panis was second. Twenty laps later, Jean Alesi‘s suspension failed, and Panis was leading the race.

Then the fuel light, metaphorically speaking, began to flicker.

“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!’”

Instead, he managed the consumption himself, lap by lap: changing up early, abandoning sixth gear entirely, lifting and coasting through the harbour chicane.

The two-hour limit brought the race distance down from 78 laps to 75. He had made it: the first of just three classified finishers.

“When, later, one of our mechanics tried to fire up the engine, he couldn’t do it, because the fuel tank was completely empty,” Panis adds.

On the parade lap, a Frenchman stepped onto the circuit near Casino Square and handed him a Tricolore through the window. Panis waved it all the way down to the pits.

He is reluctant to reach for grand comparisons, but allows himself one.

“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.”

The win changed everything, he says.

“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.”

Then, 13 months later, came Canada 1997, where a high-speed crash broke both his legs and ended conversations that had been quietly ongoing with McLaren and Ferrari about a 1998 race seat.

He came back to race at the Nürburgring that same season, braking with both feet because his right leg couldn’t generate enough force on the pedal alone.