F1 designer & GP winner — but Jean-Pierre Jabouille could have achieved so much more

On Friday February 2, in other words in three days’ time, we should all raise a glass of fine French wine to Jean-Pierre Jabouille, for he died on February 2, 2023, aged 80. One of the very last of an always rare and now extinct breed, the Formula 1 driver-engineer, he was much better inside the cockpit than he is usually given credit for being. Perhaps his deep understanding of racing-car technology contributed to that reputational shortfall, blinding F1 insiders to the quality of his wheelmanship. Maybe also his Chris Amon-like bad luck, which rendered his F1 trophy cupboard far less well stocked than it could and should have been, also played its part in establishing the prevalent opinion that he was a tech-savvy journeyman, for, of the 49 F1 grands prix he started, he finished only 10, scoring points in just three. But of those three points finishes, two were wins.

Having studied engineering then, perhaps surprisingly, modern art, at the Sorbonne, in Paris, he started hillclimbing his own Alpine road car in his early twenties, then progressed to the then popular tin-top one-make Renault 8 Gordini series. A natural mechanic, he always worked on those cars himself. He made his single-seater debut in French Formula 3 in 1967, winning one race in a Matra-Ford that he also prepared and maintained himself. The next year, 1968, in the same car, again self-prepared and self-maintained, he finished a close second to the champion, François Cevert, winning five races. He then spent a few seasons racing sporadically in Formula 2 and sports cars with Alpine and Matra, in 1974 winning his first F2 race, at Hockenheim, in an Alpine-BMW, and finishing third in that season’s European F2 championship. For 1975 and 1976 he abandoned Alpine and Matra and, with the backing of Elf, he designed and raced his own F2 car. In 1975 he finished a commendable fifth in the points standings, winning one race, at Salzburgring, then in 1976 he did something that deserves to be lauded much more enthusiastically, and far more often, than it is. In a car of his own design, he won the European F2 championship, winning three races, at Vallelunga, Mugello, and Hockenheim again.

His engine supplier in that triumphant F2 season, 1976, had been Renault, and his bills had been paid by Elf. Given his unusual mechanical, technical and engineering ability, he was therefore the natural choice to drive Renault’s first ever F1 car, the Elf-sponsored RS01, all the more so since it was such a radical design that would require such extensive development. Ferrari’s, Matra’s and BRM’s bespoke 12-cylindered F1 cars apart, early and mid-1970s F1 cars tended to be designed, constructed and run by British garagistes who fashioned lightweight monocoque chassis around Cosworth engines and Hewland gearboxes – then went racing. By contrast Renault broke the mould. Where every other team used naturally aspirated 3.0-litre engines, Renault chose a 1.5-litre turbocharged unit. Where every other team used Goodyear cross-plies, Renault chose Michelin radials. No F1 car had used a turbocharged engine, or radial tyres, ever before. The whole operation was proudly – no, make that chauvinistically – French. Who were the car’s designers? Francois Castaing, Andre de Cortanze, Marcel Hubert and, yes, you guessed it, Jean-Pierre Jabouille.

The Renault RS01 made its F1 debut at Silverstone in 1977, its turbocharger exploding after 16 laps, and it failed to finish a single grand prix that season. In 1978 it was better, but only just: it finished just four of the 14 grands prix it started, one of them, at Watkins Glen, in a heady fourth place: for Jabouille it felt like a win.

The following year, 1979, in one of the most beautiful F1 cars ever made, the Renault RS10, he did indeed win, appropriately enough on home soil: Dijon. It was another stupendously impressive achievement for Jabouille, right up there with his home-grown F2 triumph in 1976, but it was overshadowed on the day and is therefore now less celebrated than it should be, because, as he crossed the finish line to score the first ever F1 grand prix win for a turbocharged car, all eyes were on the battle for second place a quarter of a minute behind him, which was and is still one of the most spectacular dices in F1 history. In the end, after a fierce and prolonged bout of wheel-banging, Ferrari’s Gilles Villeneuve crossed the line a quarter of a second ahead of Jabouille’s Renault team-mate, René Arnoux.

If you were to ask 100 F1 insiders, journalists or fans to tell you which of those two Renault stalwarts was the quicker, most of them would say Arnoux. Undoubtedly, Arnoux had a more successful F1 career, and certainly a longer one, and he won grands prix for Ferrari, which always sets a driver apart. He started 149 grands prix, exactly 100 more than Jabouille, and he won seven of them. But when they were Renault team-mates, in 1979 and 1980, Jabouille had much more than his fair share of bad luck in terms of car failures – he finished just three grands prix in 1979 and only two in 1980 – and in qualifying he was usually the quicker of the two, often markedly so. Their stats are unequivocal: of the 28 grands prix in which they competed head to head in identical Renaults, he was the faster qualifier 19 times, which is a bit of a rout.

In January 2008 I joined McLaren as its comms/PR chief. In one of my countless meetings with Ron Dennis over the next nine years, in his anthracite-hued lair at the McLaren Technology Centre, I asked him about the 1994 season, in which McLaren had struggled with its engine partner, Peugeot Sport, of which Jabouille was then the managing director and Philippe Alliot the French test driver whom he had insisted McLaren-Peugeot should employ. “Jabouille and Alliot really hacked me off,” Ron replied, staring out across the huge lake, the landscaping of whose every pristine litre he had personally overseen. “Anyway, let’s change the subject.”

And there you have it: two F1 grandees, each with a slightly jaundiced view of a fast, hard-working driver who accomplished some extraordinary things and with better luck could have achieved so many more. Now, therefore, writing these words, almost exactly a year after his passing, I find myself feeling rather sad. So here is my third anecdote, which I find charming and cheering in equal measure. In the 2004 Goodwood Festival Speed the man himself, Jean-Pierre Jabouille, demo-drove his old 1977 Renault RS01, the revolutionary turbocharged F1 car that he had co-designed and raced. As he climbed in, and when he then ran his eyes and hands around the cockpit, studying and caressing the patina’d controls that he alone had used to drive in F1 that tricky brute of a car, he smiled, looked up, and said, “Je suis chez moi.” And he was.

*”I’m home”