The late, great Gilles Villeneuve was killed on this day in 1982. The Ferrari legend staggered the grand prix world before he'd even sat in an F1 car. John Zimmermann describes an astounding season of dominance and the Formula Atlantic car a future legend made his name in
The competition aligned against him was the toughest our hero had yet faced, but he gave a performance to crystallise his outstanding season and enable his legendary step into Formula 1. The occasion was the 11th Grand Prix Molson Trois-Rivières, run for Formula Atlantic cars through the streets of a small Quebec town about 60 miles down the St Lawrence River from Montreal, and the young man in question was, of course, Gilles Villeneuve.
The race around the local fairgrounds was a special event, a non-championship thrash for which the organisers annually brought in a handful of distinguished European racers to embellish the standard entry list. Thus did Villeneuve arrive in Trois-Rivières to find not only his regular Atlantic rivals, but also James Hunt, headed for that year's world championship, future F1 champion Alan Jones and Vittorio Brambilla. He beat them all.
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