"I told him so many times that he was driving beyond the limits of the car"
On Forghieri's bookcase there's a steering wheel used by Gilles Villeneuve, and the paperweight on his desk is a small bronze sculpture of his helmet.
Gilles. Where do we begin...?
He was a special case. I told him so many times that he was driving beyond the limits of the car; there are so many stories that are easy to tell but hard to appreciate.
Gilles became great friends with Jody Scheckter when Jody joined us for 1979, but you couldn't have found two people who were more different.
Jody was always on time or normally early for testing.
Gilles was always arriving at the last minute and you knew when he had got there because he used to pitch up and do donuts with his Ferrari road car. And of course we had to change the tyres on it every time before he left. It got to the point where the Commendatore said to me :
"Tell him that if he keeps on doing that, we won't change the tyres for him any more..."
I think the next time he arrived at Fiorano it was in his helicopter, in fog so thick you couldn't see in front of you. Young Jacques was with him, too. I said to him: "Gilles, are you completely mad? And he was his usual: "Mais, il n'y a pas de probleme...".
Anyway I told him that we wouldn't be testing because it was too foggy. So he just jumped into the helicopter and left again for the mountains.
That was Gilles.
How much did Gilles appreciate the technical intricacies of his car?
He wasn't a great test driver. Jody was better and even Jody wasn't one of best test drivers in the world, but he was very positive and disciplined.
Above all, Gilles was an innocent and that's why the Imola incident with Pironi in 1982 hit him so hard : he would never have believed that a friend and team-mate could betray him.
Villeneuve never spoke to Pironi again after the 1982 San Marino Grand Prix, which he believed he was destined to win from the Frenchman after Ferrari held out a "slow" sign, indicating that their drivers should hold station in one-two formation, which Forghieri confirms was indeed the intention. Pironi saw it differently and passed Villeneuve to win: think 'Multi 21", but 32 years ago. Two weeks later, Villeneuve died in Belgium.
