Matt Bishop: How many F1 titles would Didier Pironi have won?

High summer, or more specifically late July and early August, is when the German Grand Prix traditionally used to take place – and, although no Formula 1 race has been run in Germany since July 28, 2019, when Max Verstappen won the 75th German Grand Prix for Red Bull, I often find myself thinking of Nürburgring and Hockenheim at this time of the year.

The race has been held at only one other venue – Avus, just once, in 1959 – and it is the old Nürburgring, Nürburgring Nordschleife, that devotees of German motor sport revere most ardently, perilous though it was and still is. It last hosted a German Grand Prix in 1976, when Niki Lauda nearly died in his burning Ferrari there, but since then a sanitised version of the (in)famous Rhineland-Palatinate circuit, Nürburgring Strecke, has staged four German Grands Prix, two Luxembourg Grands Prix, and 12 European Grands Prix.

Thirty-six German Grands Prix have been held at Hockenheim, and, if the shorter version of the Baden-Württemberg circuit — on which were run 12 German Grands Prix, on and off, from 2002 until 2019 — is better than Nürburgring Strecke, and it definitely is, it still pales by comparison to the original layout, whose two super-long straights ran out through dense forests to the Ostkurve and back. That circuit, Hockenheim proper, staged German Grands Prix in 1970, from 1977 to 1984, and from 1986 to 2001.

Many triumphs and several disasters occurred there, and chronicling them all would require the writing of a decent-sized book. I have neither the time nor the space to do that here, so I will focus on just one Hockenheim event, and its repercussions, and it is a disaster that might well have instead become a triumph.

On the afternoon of Saturday, August 7, 1982, Didier Pironi was riding high. He was leading the F1 drivers’ world championship standings comfortably, and he had just bagged his fourth F1 pole position, having lapped the formidable old Hockenheim in his powerful Ferrari 126C2 in 1min 47.947sec – a hefty 0.943sec faster than his nearest challenger, Renault’s Alain Prost, and a gargantuan 1.623sec quicker than his Ferrari team-mate Patrick Tambay.

“It felt crazy to be driving so fast, yet you didn’t dare lift off either”

Had he then sat back to bask in the splendour of his performance, he would surely have gone on to win that year’s F1 drivers’ world championship, but he did not, because, although it began to rain, which meant that improving on his already secure pole position would be impossible, he bolted on a set of new wet tyres and headed out onto the circuit. Again, he was super-quick, splashing his way through the puddles demonstrably faster than anyone else. Even then, had he decided that enough was now enough, he would have lived to race another day. But, despite the increasingly heavy downpour, which now lay all around the circuit in pools of standing water that the fat Goodyears, Michelins, Pirellis, and Avons of that era would churn up into a dense spray that hung low and reduced visibility to near zero, he continued to plug away lap after lap.

John Watson, then a McLaren driver, has described that day thus: “You just can’t believe how bad the visibility was. It was like driving in heavy fog. You became completely disoriented, and you’d lose sight of all your reference points. You could hear the other engines revving all around you, but you couldn’t see the other cars, so you couldn’t tell whether they were in front of you, behind you, or alongside you. You didn’t really want to keep your foot buried on the accelerator, because it felt crazy to be driving so fast, yet you didn’t dare lift off either. It was very, very spooky.”

So it was not surprising that, at high speed, Pironi ran his Ferrari into the back of Prost’s Renault. If Didier had been flying metaphorically on his previous laps, and he had been, now he was flying literally – “30 metres into the sky,” according to Prost – his aerobatics coming to a juddering halt when his car landed nose first on the asphalt and slewed into a crash barrier with such force that its entire front section was torn clean off. He could not be extricated from the wreckage for 30 agonising minutes – and, once he had finally been flown by helicopter to nearby University Hospital Heidelberg, it was found that he had multiple fractures to his right foot, right leg, left foot, and left arm, a broken nose, and head injuries. He survived, but he never raced an F1 car again.

Just how good was Didier Pironi? Many journalists and fans had turned against him after the 1982 San Marino Grand Prix, when his Ferrari team-mate Gilles Villeneuve and he had been running first and second in line astern towards the end of the race, the Ferrari pit crew had signalled that their drivers should slow and hold station, yet Pironi had surprised Villeneuve by nipping past on the final lap to steal the win. If that had not been bad enough, two weeks later, at Zolder, when Villeneuve had lost his life in a literally do-or-die effort to beat Pironi’s qualifying time, media and therefore public opinion had swung even more firmly against the Frenchman.

So, now, more than 40 years later, when we try to answer the question ‘Just how good was Didier Pironi?’, we should banish from our minds the betrayal of Imola and the calamity of Zolder. Injustice and tragedy they were and are, but distractions to accurate appraisal of a great driver’s ability they were and are also.

His graduation to F1 in 1978 had been typical of that of the many French drivers of the time. Having earned a scholarship from the Winfield Racing School at Paul Ricard, he became Formula Renault Eurocup champion in both 1974 and 1976, then he progressed to the European Formula 2 Championship in 1977, scoring a fine win at Estoril and finishing third in the series behind that year’s champion, René Arnoux, and second-placed Eddie Cheever.

In 1978, his rookie F1 season, he was outdriven by his experienced Tyrrell team-mate, the brilliant Patrick Depailler, who performed superbly that season, winning at Monaco and bagging four further podium finishes; but Didier raced with promise, scoring two fifth places and three sixths. He also won the Le Mans 24 Hours outright that year, sharing a Renault Alpine A442B with the veteran touring car and sports car ace Jean-Pierre Jaussaud – who, incidentally, and by his own admission, enjoyed the odd glass of vin rouge in the pits during some of Pironi’s driving stints.

In 1979 Depailler left Tyrrell for Ligier, and Pironi was joined in Uncle Ken’s venerable F1 team by Jean-Pierre Jarier, who was every bit as experienced as Depailler. That year’s Tyrrell 009 was an unashamedly faithful imitation of the previous season’s all-conquering Lotus 79, in which Mario Andretti had won the 1978 F1 drivers’ world championship at a canter, and Pironi and Jarier raced it to two podium finishes apiece, Pironi at Zolder and Watkins Glen and Jarier at Kyalami and Silverstone. For 1980 Pironi moved to Ligier, joining yet another experienced Frenchman, Jacques Laffite, and, in the beautiful and rapid Ligier JS11/15, we now saw just how superfast Didier could be. He won at Zolder, he was second at Paul Ricard, and he was third at Kyalami, Montreal, and Watkins Glen. More impressive still, his qualifying was sometimes breathtakingly good – in a fluent yet muscular way – his pole positions at Monaco and Brands Hatch particularly accomplished.

I was there, aged 17, to see him race at Brands that year. He led from the pole, confidently streaking away from all his pursuers, until a deflating front tyre sent him into the pits for a replacement on lap 19. His stop was a long one, and he emerged from it in 21st and last place. From there he attacked the UK’s greatest racetrack like a man possessed, palpably the fastest man on its then famously bumpy and undulating asphalt, his overtaking forceful yet deft, and we who were there will never forget watching him strong-arm that gorgeous blue and white Ligier back up to fifth place by lap 63, by which time he suffered another puncture, and that was the end of his run. He had repeatedly smashed the lap record that day, leaving it at 1min 12.368sec, which was almost a second faster than anyone else would manage all afternoon.

In 1981, now a Ferrari man, he was unable to conjure from the Scuderia’s powerful but evil-handling 126CK the stunning pace that Villeneuve was occasionally able to dredge from it, but in 1982, in the better-behaved 126C2, he was once again on top of his game. He won at Imola, in controversial circumstances as I have already described, then he won again at Zandvoort, he was second at Monaco and Brands Hatch, and he was third at Detroit and Paul Ricard. He missed the last five grands prix of a 16-race season yet he still finished second in the final F1 drivers’ world championship standings, only five points behind that year’s world champion, Keke Rosberg (Williams).

After Pironi’s dreadful Hockenheim accident he became more and more depressed, as gradually it dawned on him that he would probably never race in F1 again. John Hogan, then Philip Morris’s man in the F1 paddock, an engaging Australian unsurprisingly popular with the many drivers on whom he bestowed lucrative Marlboro endorsement deals, spent quite a bit of time with him, and in 2007 I commissioned him to write a Pironi profile for the magazine of which I was then the editor.

“Initially, Didier appeared at one or two grands prix, on crutches,” Hogan wrote, “but, after that, he stayed away. He hated the fuss – and not being involved. In fact, he didn’t do an awful lot with himself during the next five years after the accident. After umpteen operations he was left with one reasonable leg, but the other was still in a bad way, and in the ensuing years his character became rather dour. He realised that he was probably headed for an amputation. Sometimes we’d sit in a Parisian restaurant together and his leg would really reek.

“It was awful to behold. There he was in 1982, only 30, a good-looking guy, a brilliant racing driver, passionate, intelligent, deeply ambitious, a man who loved the outdoor life and had an eye for the ladies, then suddenly it was all taken away from him. He had a terrible limp, he put on a tremendous amount of weight, he was no longer athletic or attractive, he couldn’t enjoy the countryside pursuits that he’d loved before, he couldn’t play tennis, he couldn’t go skiing, he couldn’t do any of that. He sometimes talked about going into politics, but he also began to hate his life.

“Besides, he was itching to race again. The Ligier guys talked about rehiring him, and he tested their car at Dijon in 1986. He was quick-ish, but his leg just wasn’t up to it. So he decided to go powerboat racing instead. He really wasn’t up to that either, and, sure enough, on August 23, 1987, it happened. During a race off the Isle of Wight his boat flipped, and he and his passengers were killed. My view of that is that, while there is a difference between a deliberate act and plain irresponsibility, there was undoubtedly a devil-may-care fashion to the way he was driving that boat. He was depressed, and he really didn’t care any more. His attitude was: ‘If it happens, it happens.’”

Well, it happened. But, had the cookies crumbled differently, it might not have done. It is not clear that Hogan was right in claiming that an amputation was inevitable. Moreover, Pironi’s Ligier test had caught the attention of McLaren’s Ron Dennis, who had long admired him and now toyed with the notion of hiring him for 1987. But Prost, the McLaren incumbent, vetoed the idea, and instead Stefan Johansson was selected.

There is therefore an alternative version of the Pironi story that has Dennis telling Prost to mind his own business, which in turn would mean that Pironi, not Johansson, would have raced the highly competitive McLaren MP4/3 in 1987. Perhaps the methodical and determined Dennis might have sought and found top-class medical care that would have enabled Pironi to race on in F1 despite his gammy leg, and who knows what glories that might have led to?

Perhaps he might not only have won F1 world championships but, after he had hung up his helmet, he might also have served as President of France? As such, his life might have been a magnificently successful one. And if he were alive today, he would still be only 73. It is all rather sad, isn’t it?