"Salut Gilles"

Phil: ....as it says at the start/finish line of the circuit which bears his name, in his native Montreal.

I regret being ever so slightly too young to have watched the elder Villeneuve race. Jeremy Clarkson (who whatever you may think of him does genuinely know his stuff when it comes to F1) rates him as the greatest driver ever. I haven't yet watched any of my co-blogger's clips (the roar of a Ferrari V12 isn't really appropriate for work) but if they don't include the titanic scrap between Villeneuve and Rene Arnoux over second place at the 1979 French grand prix then I would urge him to seek it out. Suffice to say today they would both have been hauled in front of the stewards.

When Alain Prost began racing in 1980 his two best mates were his fellow French-speakers Villeneuve and Pironi. Prost's approach to racing was definitely the complete opposite to Villeneuve's - cool, measured, happy to play the percentage game and collect a single point if a single point was all that was needed or could be achieved (an attitude more than likely informed by Villeneuve's death and Pironi's career-ending injuries, both within months of each other in 1982). Prost tells a story that while testing at Paul Ricard, the three of them entertained themselves by taking their hire cars out onto the track, and then deliberately crashing them into a vineyard next to the track.

There's another story that when the Grand Prix Drivers' Association went on strike at some point in the early 1980s and the drivers locked themselves into a hotel near the track until the FIA relented, due to the shortage of rooms Prost and Villeneuve, who everyone knew were the best drivers of the day, shared a double bed. Paddock comedians speculated what sort of super-talented infant driver would emerge from such an unnatural union.