The inimitable Patrick Depailler was born on this day in 1944. His final F1 win came in 1979 at the wheel of a Ligier JS11. The team's canny use of ground effect allowed it to get the jump on the establishment in that year, but only for the first few races. Mark Hughes explains the brief supremacy of Les Bleus in today's Great Read
Gerard Ducarouge, exhausted by months of off-season toil and the heat of an Argentinian afternoon, was only vaguely aware of the two Lotus engineers looking at his car as the Ligier team unpacked at Buenos Aires, 1979. "I could hear them; I was too tired to listen to exactly what they were saying, but I picked some of it up: 'Why have they done the suspension like that? It's a very odd-shaped car.' Then, just as they were leaving, one of them said: 'If a car like that ever wins a race, that's the time I stop motor racing'."
History does not record what the Lotus engineer did a few days later when Jacques Laffite, having qualified the car over a second faster than the best non-Ligier — the Lotus 79 — took it to a resounding victory in its first race...
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