I’ve always liked street circuits — Monte Carlo until they put in the chicanes around the swimming pool, and Trois Rivieres in Canada but Pau was my favourite. It was very tricky, mainly first, second and third gear comers, and very narrow. In places there was room for only one car. You had to be very precise and accurate if you hit a kerb you were stuffed. And there were all kinds of other hard things to hit not just the Armco, but monuments and walls.
The fastest part was past the pits. You were pretty well flat out at 130mph, maybe 135mph, through the right-hander afterwards but then you had to get the car braked and down through the box for a right-hand hairpin. That sort of driving, keeping the car in control when it’s out of shape while braking and changing down, is what I think I used to be good at. Really tossing it into corners. You had to set the car up with a bit of oversteer so the front end would turn in easily and it was up to you to catch the tail on the way out. Any understeer and you were dead.
Gethin’s Chevron B20 was perfect for twisty Pau until the unthinkable struck
I was driving the Chevron B20, which was the first F2 car which they had taken seriously. It was a crude looking thing, but it worked very well on medium and slow corners. You could always set it up for this neutral-to-oversteer handling and it was a lovely little car to drive. It wasn’t so good on fast circuits though, and it was fragile. I had wheels come off and suspension breakages at other places that year.
At Pau, though, it was just terrific. I won my heat from start to finish, and in the final I went straight into the lead. It was so easy it just wasn’t true. There I was, cruising around, about 20 seconds ahead of Patrick Depailler, waving to people I knew in the crowd, when suddenly I had a problem. The fuel metering unit had gone kaput and I was getting the wrong mixture. The power was either full on or full off, there was nothing in between.
The whole place had a magic atmosphere.
It’s hard to describe how difficult it made that car to drive. I couldn’t blip the throttle to help me change down so I just had to whack it into first and then put my foot down. At first nothing would happen and then all the power would come in with a rush. You need good throttle control to be able to feed the power in when you’ve got an oversteering car through slow and medium speed corners. But this was flat out or nothing. The car was very unstable and every lap I thought I was going to lose it. I really had to drive my balls off.