1976 March 76B

I have a confession to make. When I was but a pubescent young man, I used to lie in bed at night and fantasize…that I was Gilles Villeneuve. In an era before in-car cameras, I could close my eyes and visualize a complete lap of the U.S. Grand Prix course at Long Beach, with me behind the wheel of a Ferrari 312 T4—Villeneuve’s T4 to be precise. I’d like to think that we all have particular cars and drivers that, for some inexplicable reason, captured our imagination at a particularly impressionable time in our lives. Regardless of how odd or irrational it may be, these early impressions can stick with us for a lifetime.

For me, it was watching Villeneuve for the first time at Long Beach in 1978. Even to my young eyes, I could tell that he was driving at—and often over—the limit, lap after lap, around a completely unforgiving, concrete-lined, temporary street course. His driving seemed impassioned, sometimes reckless, and completely mesmerizing. As the years progressed, his on-track exploits became legendary. To this day, I would still contend that there has been no more exciting piece of driving, in any race series, than the multi-lap battle between Villeneuve’s Ferrari and Rene Arnoux’s Renault in the closing laps of the 1979 French Grand Prix. Look it up on YouTube, and if it doesn’t get your heart racing, nothing will.