The sensational Zandvoort drive overshadowed by Villeneuve's two-wheeled lap

There are circuits that one remembers by the straights and above all the corners that delineate them; circuits that one remembers by the races they hosted; and circuits that one remembers by their geography, topography, sights, smells, vibe, and culture. For me, Zandvoort has always belonged to all three categories, but particularly to the third: I am thinking of the unmistakeable scent of Noordzee spume drifting over the nearby dunes; the different but related aroma of light dustings of sand blowing across rubber-smeared asphalt; the contrasting but no less distinctive fragrance of freshly baked stroopwafels; and the living, shifting canvas that is the diamond-bright brilliance of a chilly morning breaking over what was once one of Formula 1’s truly great racetracks.

Oh and I am also thinking of the fans, always the fans, nowadays decked out in orange and as keen on their hero, Max Verstappen, as any horde of motor sport devotees have ever been keen on their local heroes, whether that be Ayrton Senna fans at Autódromo José Carlos Pace, Carlos Reutemann fans at Autódromo Oscar y Juan Gálvez, Checo Pérez fans at Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez, Fernando Alonso fans at Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya, Ronnie Peterson fans at Anderstorp Raceway, Michael Schumacher fans at Hockenheimring, or Lewis Hamilton fans at Silverstone; take your pick.

F1 first went to Zandvoort in 1950, when the Dutch Grand Prix was a non-championship affair. The race became a round of the F1 world championship in 1952, when it was won for Ferrari by Alberto Ascari – and, save for the occasional interruption, it remained part of the F1 world championship until in 1985 Niki Lauda won for McLaren the last race of its first era. Then came a long hiatus, until Verstappen and his orange army brought the race back in 2021.

Now, in the aftermath of the 2026 Dutch Grand Prix weekend, during which the organisers made no secret of the fact that they were hosting the final F1 race at Zandvoort for the foreseeable future, I find that I am saddened to think about and indeed write about the circuit, for in 2027 and 2028 its place on the F1 calendar will be taken by Portimão, an excellent racetrack albeit not a historic one, and no-one can say with any confidence what will happen after that.

Maybe Zandvoort will return one day – after all, F1 usually fans old flames whenever commercial sparks fly, and Dutch enthusiasm for F1 will remain at fever pitch for as long as Verstappen continues to race in it, which will be until at least 2030. But the Dutch government has not supported it, so perhaps it will not, and it may consequently become one of those places whose absence from the F1 schedule grows more poignant with every passing year – like Brands Hatch, Nürburgring, Montjuïc, Clermont-Ferrand, Watkins Glen, Long Beach, Mosport, Kyalami, Adelaide, and so many more. I rather hope that that will not be the case, because there are circuits that are merely functional and circuits that possess a soul. Zandvoort, for all its modern alterations, definitely possesses a soul.

However, one of my favourite Zandvoort memories was formed nowhere near the place, so I hope that you will allow me to cast my mind back to one of those evenings that F1 used to grant me with gratifying regularity: a quartet of journalists, a small restaurant, too much wine, and a discussion that began in chummy innocence and rapidly acquired the ferocity of a constitutional crisis. I am referring to the Saturday before the 2001 San Marino Grand Prix, on which evening four of us had ended up at Trattoria da Giovanna in the small and beautiful town of Riolo Terme, a lovely family-run eatery where the atmosphere was convivial, the food was delicious, and the cheap but tasty Chianti delivered us all of an inexhaustible supply of persuasive power. Around the table were Nigel Roebuck, Alan Henry, Simon Arron, and I – all four of us Motor Sport writers at different times. Alan and Simon are no longer with us, which makes my recollection of the evening sad as well as funny.

At some point our conversation turned, as conversations often did in those days, to great drivers, brilliant drives, and the dangerous business of debating who was better than whom and which was better than which. Someone mentioned Zandvoort. Roebuck, who had attended the 1979 Dutch Grand Prix, announced that Gilles Villeneuve’s extraordinary two-wheeled lap was the most impressive thing that he had ever seen there. It was an entirely defensible point of view. Indeed, it was the sort of opinion that Nigel was particularly good at making sound not only logical but also judicially incontestable. For the record, Villeneuve had driven a lap at serious pace, touching 160mph (257km/h) on the straights by all accounts, despite the left-rear corner of his Ferrari having been destroyed, the car skating around with its left-rear wheel dragging raggedly behind it and its right-front wheel off the ground. It was magnificent, amazing, desperate, insane, and quintessentially Gilles.

Even so, I made so bold as to disagree – partly because I have always had a penchant for taking a perfectly reasonable statement and nudging it towards an amusing disputation, and partly because the Chianti had by then begun to make me feel that, although I had watched the race from a sofa in north London and Nigel had watched it from behind a desk in the Zandvoort press room, I was uniquely qualified to correct the historical record. I suggested that while Villeneuve’s antics were spectacular, they were not in my view even the highlight of the 1979 Dutch Grand Prix. The highlight of that race, I said, was the drive of his Ferrari team-mate Jody Scheckter. Let us just say that my peroration was not rewarded by universal endorsement.

However, 47 years after the race, and 25 years after Nigel’s and my powwow about it, its details are worth revisiting, because I still believe that Scheckter’s banzai charge has been unfairly buried under the mythology of Villeneuve’s madcap lap. Let me explain. Scheckter qualified fifth, one place and 0.547sec ahead of Villeneuve, but at the start Jody’s Ferrari was bogged down by a temporarily overheating clutch, and by the time the field had tackled Turn 1, the Tarzan hairpin, he was in 23rd place. Relieved to find that, once he had got going, his clutch “was kind of coming back” (as he described it after the race), but still angry and ready for a scrap therefore, he attacked straight away, and by the end of lap one he was 19th, having overtaken Emerson Fittipaldi’s Copersucar and having benefited from the lap-one retirements of René Arnoux (Renault), Clay Regazzoni (Williams), and Carlos Reutemann (Lotus).

Now Scheckter began to pick his way through the field with the determination of a man who held a slender lead in the F1 drivers’ world championship and knew that every grand prix mattered. On lap two he passed four drivers – Jan Lammers (Shadow), Hans-Joachim Stuck (ATS), Hector Rebaque (Lotus), and Riccardo Patrese (Arrows) – and two laps later he dispatched Jacky Ickx (Ligier) and Mario Andretti (Lotus). On lap six he passed Nelson Piquet (Brabham), and on lap seven he overtook Jochen Mass (Arrows), Jacques Laffite (Ligier), and Jean-Pierre Jarier (Tyrrell). By lap 10, with 65 still to go, he was up to sixth, having benefited from an attrition rate that was becoming almost comical: cars were disappearing into the pits, the gravel traps, and mechanical oblivion with a regularity alarming even by the parlous reliability standards of late-1970s F1.

At the front, another story was being told. Alan Jones (Williams) had led the first 10 laps, but on the 11th Villeneuve wrested the lead from him by dint of a typically ballsy move around the outside at Tarzan. Villeneuve then held the lead until lap 47, when he spun and Jones repassed him, and on lap 49 he suffered the left-rear puncture that led to the wondrous display of derring-do that had so excited Roebuck, and rightly so, for it remains one of the great images of the period: the bravest driver of his era, doggedly unwilling to concede that the laws of physics had ended his race, manhandling a bashed-up Ferrari back to the pits in the vain hope that his mechanics might somehow be able to find a way to make it right enough for him to hurl back into the fray.

I do not diminish it. How could I? Villeneuve’s lap is one of those moments that has passed into F1 folklore without the need for embellishment. It has everything: speed, danger, courage, ambition, absurdity, Ferrari, and Gilles himself. It is the kind of racing event that will never be forgotten, not least because you can describe it to someone who has never seen it or indeed knows nothing at all about motor sport and he, she, or they will nonetheless immediately understand that it was extraordinary.

Yet Scheckter’s performance was extraordinary in a different and, to my mind, more complete way. His drive offered no unforgettable photogenic moment, I grant you, but instead it consisted of a relentless accumulation of overtakes. He took a Ferrari that had been dumped at the back of the field as a result of a start botched by a mechanical glitch outside his control, and he monstered it back into contention. Then, as others fell by the wayside, he continued to push without let or pause. He did not drive a crippled Ferrari on two wheels for one lap. No, he drove an intact Ferrari for 75 laps with fantastically controlled aggression. Taking up the narrative from where I left it, on lap 17 he passed Didier Pironi’s Tyrrell (around the outside at Tarzan, in the same way as Villeneuve had overtaken Jones) and on lap 26 he dispatched Keke Rosberg’s Wolf (also at Tarzan, albeit on the inside this time). He was now in third place, which became second place when Villeneuve’s run ended 25 laps later.

In those days a second place was worth six F1 world championship points, and those six points mattered to Scheckter enormously, for they put him in a position from which he could clinch the F1 drivers’ world championship at Monza two weeks later. He duly did so, winning the Italian Grand Prix for Ferrari in front of the adoring tifosi, Villeneuve following him home in second place. Oh, and in case you have accepted at face value the received wisdom of the time – that Villeneuve would have won that day at Monza had he not meekly obeyed Ferrari’s team orders – well, it is not as simple as that. Indeed, it is not true. Just over a year ago I interviewed Jody for a big Motor Sport feature, and he described the 1979 Italian Grand Prix thus: “He [Villeneuve] didn’t let me win at Monza that year, which is a thing people often say. We were running one-two near the end of the race, and Ferrari’s policy was that you don’t fight each other when you’re running in line astern like that, so I started short-shifting to save the engine, changing up at 10,000rpm instead of 12,000rpm. Just behind me, he knew what I was doing, so he did the same. Neither of us was driving at ten-tenths at that point.”

Anyway, going back to Zandvoort 1979, then forward to Imola 2001, I remember that I suggested to Roebuck that Villeneuve had given us a gutsy snapshot whereas Scheckter had delivered an epic feat of sustained racing bravura. Gilles had provided the mythology, but Jody had wrought a brilliant recovery that had required both brawn and brain, because his overtaking had been fabulously pugnacious throughout the race and by the end of it he was having to nurse his worn-out Michelins with meticulous care. One drive was spectacular enough to be remembered for ever, but the other was significant enough to influence the outcome of an entire F1 season.

I do not remember precisely how our chinwag ended. Perhaps it did not, for Nigel was and still is perfectly capable of singing Gilles’ praises until breakfast, and I was and still am perfectly capable of continuing to wind him up until the Chianti runs out. Alan and Simon both chipped in, but I cannot recall exactly where they stood on the matter and now I will never be able to ask them. In retrospect the evening has therefore acquired the bitter-sweet taste of events that can never be repeated. For the record, Nigel and I are great mates to this day, and we socialise in London quite often.

As for Zandvoort itself, well, the marvellous old layout was modified, shortened, slowed, and made safer, and the new circuit has its dramatic banking, its huge grandstands, and its Verstappen-inspired carnival. Yet beneath the 21st-century razzmatazz there still remains a ribbon of asphalt that winds its way through the dunes, to the tune of the North Sea heaving somewhere beyond the barriers.