Dear Rich,

Although Lewis Hamilton is a very different type from Gilles Villeneuve, I would agree with you that his driving style and never-say-die attitude are indeed reminiscent of Gilles. When I interviewed Lewis a couple of years ago, he spoke at length about his childhood worship of Ayrton Senna, and said that he based much of his attitude to the job of Grand Prix driver on Ayrton. But I have long thought there was more of Villeneuve than Senna in the way Hamilton goes racing – not least because I never saw Gilles do anything underhand on a race track, and neither have I ever seen Lewis do anything like that, either. I could not say that of Ayrton.

Keke Rosberg said this of Villeneuve: “Gilles was the hardest bastard I ever raced against, but always scrupulously fair – he was a giant of a driver.” In the same way, Hamilton takes no prisoners, but neither have I ever seen him do anything underhand.

Can’t agree with you, though, about Istanbul 2010 and Imola ’82. There is nothing whatever duplicitous about Jenson Button, and when he closed on Hamilton he didn’t know that Lewis had been told to turn his engine down, and thought it was game on. At Imola, though, the Ferraris, also running one-two in the late laps, were extremely marginal on fuel and Villeneuve, the team’s front-runner all day, was cruising to what he thought was victory, the team having given the ‘Hold’ sign to both drivers. At the very last overtaking point on the last lap, Didier Pironi suddenly sprinted by, and stole the win. Gilles vowed never to speak to him again, and only 13 days later died in qualifying at Zolder.

Dear Gavin,
Like you, I was a great admirer of Alain Prost, both as a driver and a man. As I always say to people, throughout all his years in F1 he never told me anything that subsequently proved to be an untruth – in other words, he never lied to me, and there are not many in the F1 paddock of whom I can say that. A superstar he may have been, but from the first time I met him, when he was in F3 in 1979, his behaviour never changed – and there are not many of whom I can say that, either!

Why was he as good as he was? I remember watching qualifying with Denis Jenkinson at Monaco in 1983: others were flying round, some looking quite lurid, and in the middle of all this Prost came out, apparently doing two or three ‘bedding in’ laps. Then the times were announced – and Alain was on pole. Jenks was nonplussed: “Amazing little bloke… how does he do it?”

No one ever made the job of Grand Prix driver seem easier than Prost, and that surely is close to a definition of artistry: you could watch him, and believe you could do it yourself. He personified smoothness in a racing car.

“Being in a team with Alain was like walking into a food-processor every day,” Eddie Cheever affectionately says of his 1983 Renault team-mate. “If you had a good race, the next weekend it would be hell, because he’d have made sure that he took a further step forward, and it was hard to keep pace with him. He never did anything in an underhand way, I must say. I never in my life came across anyone as detail-orientated as Prost was. He just went about his job – he was like a little general.

“Fast corners are one thing – what I never understood about Alain was that he was so quick in slow corners. At Monte Carlo I would lose three-tenths of a second to him just in the Loews hairpin! How he did it I have no idea – and of course there was no telemetry in those days.

“Alain had a very soft way of driving, whereas I would hold my breath and take as much pressure as I could, and then back off. I mean, Prost never used his front tyres! Now, how is that possible? When I drove the car the way it was set up for him, I was very uncomfortable – I couldn’t get it to turn in.

“Alain was a genius when it came to set-up, and I only started really to appreciate that when I drove at Indy the first two or three times. If the car wasn’t handling well, you just had to hold on, and then start working towards a set-up goal at the end of the stint. That was when I started to learn a little bit about how Prost did it – he was just phenomenal.

“The problem was that it was difficult not to become demoralised. I had complete admiration for him – I was confounded by how he could do certain things with the race car. Without a shadow of doubt, Alain was the best driver I ever worked with, or was in a team with – and as well as that, of course, I thought he was a great guy…”

Dear Sas,
Sandro Nannini was, I think, the last of the ‘classic’ Italian racing drivers, very much in the mould of Clay Regazzoni (technically Swiss, I know, but only by a few kilometres), rather than someone like Giancarlo Fisichella.

At Suzuka, in 1989, when Alain Prost and Ayrton Senna had the first of their tangles, there was considerable acrimony afterwards, and for me, and many others, the only saving grace of the day was that Nannini won the race.

Although the family business was – and is – one of the largest bakeries in Siena, Sandro appeared to live on cigarettes and coffee, and having myself, I’m afraid to say, followed a similar diet since I can remember, it was particularly pleasing to find a driver – the first since Rosberg – who found there was more to life than health food. If Nannini ever had a stamina problem, I never saw it, and the same was emphatically true of Keke.

Ultimately, Sandro elected to give up not just one of his bad habits, but both – and, what’s more, at the same time! This I thought positively heroic, for his devotion to tobacco and fearsomely strong espresso was profound. “Are you any quicker for it?” I asked him one day. “I don’t know,” he replied. “I’m certainly not so ’appy…”

Later, after his enforced retirement from F1, he raced for the Alfa Romeo ITC team, and, even with very restricted use of his right hand, was very quick indeed. I went to Magny-Cours for one of the races, and found him in the Alfa pit, ciggie in one hand, tiny coffee cup in the other. “What happened?” I said, and he laughed. “Pffff! For Formula 1, it was one thing, but this – this is just saloon cars…”

Sandro may have been very much a throwback, in terms of his attitude to life, but it certainly didn’t compromise his performances on the track. He became a very considerable racing driver, with tremendous flair, and it was an awful thing that his F1 career should have ended the way it did.

The helicopter accident occurred in October 1990, shortly after Nannini’s Benetton finished third, behind Prost and Mansell, at Estoril. Three weeks earlier, at Monza, it had been announced that he would be driving for Ferrari in ’91, and we were all much surprised – there had not been so much of a whisper of it before that weekend.

In fact, Ferrari had been hoping to sign Alesi, but Jean had got himself into a contractual wrangle with Tyrrell (for whom he was then driving) and Williams (for whom he had also signed!), and when a move to Ferrari began to look impossible, the team negotiated with Benetton to have Nannini.

The deal was made public on race morning at Monza, but when Sandro went to Maranello to sign the contract a few days later, he found the terms not quite what had been originally proposed. That being the case, he said that he would prefer to stay with Benetton.

In point of fact, it later became clear that Ferrari had negotiated Alesi out of his Tyrrell contract – and that Williams had decided not to stand in Jean’s way. By way of thanks for Frank’s helpful attitude, a Ferrari 641 was promised, and duly delivered a year later. For many years it resided in the Williams museum.

As for Nannini, his last racing contract was with Mercedes in 1997. He was one of those who really loved to drive racing cars, and I’m sure he misses it to this day. I haven’t seen him for a few years now, but Italian friends tell me he is never short of things to do, one of which – apparently – is consuming the products of the family business. As for the coffee and cigarettes, we can probably take them as read…

Dear Martin,

First of all, let me thank you for your compliments. I’m glad you became such an F1 fan – and sad that you no longer are.

I once wrote that Eoin Young, a well-established journalist when I started, and someone who became a close friend, one day said to me that I would make a make a friend of a racing driver, that he would then be killed, and that I would never thereafter look upon racing in quite the same way. It happened to everyone, Young said, and in his case the driver had been Bruce McLaren.

In mine, it was indeed Gilles Villeneuve, and probably it’s true that my attitude changed after that day at Zolder in 1982, in the sense that thereafter I took care not to become so close to another racing driver. It didn’t, of course, keep me from getting on well with drivers, and enjoying their company, but fundamentally I thought that close friendship was probably a bad idea. I was mighty glad, I must say, when such as Mario Andretti and Keke Rosberg, already long-time friends, retired intact. Racing, let’s remember, used to be a great deal more dangerous than it is today.

You ask, though, when did ‘the magic stop’ for me, and I have to tell you that it never did, and it never has. Yes, I was shattered when Gilles was killed, and, yes, although we were never close friends, I was greatly distressed when Ayrton died at Imola a dozen years later. But although I can’t say I like some of the changes which have come to F1 in recent times, I still fundamentally adore it, and I’m sure I always will.