New Motorsport Week article: Forty years on – the brief rise of Ligier

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As we are often told with varying degrees of efficacy, things in the F1 past were very different.

And so it was if we jump back four decades almost to the day. Try to imagine a team known mainly as wayward midfield plodders turning up at round one and jumping clean over allcomers; starting the year with two easy victories. Then try to imagine that after that things about as quickly got difficult again, and the team sank from championship contention.

For Motorsport Week I look back to the 1979 season and the very brief rise and subsequent fall of Ligier, as well as analyse what explains the two sharp shifts.

You can have a read here: https://www.motorsportweek.com/news/id/21085

Retro F1: Gilles Villeneuve tribute - the 1981 Monaco Grand Prix

Hey y’all. The latest Retro F1 took place today. And given that this week marks the 30th anniversary of the passing of the legend that is Gilles Villeneuve, I decided this one should double as a tribute to the great man.

We therefore watched the 1981 Monaco Grand Prix, one of Villeneuve’s best ever drives, using the YouTube link below. The only drawback was that the commentary is in German, but we managed to work around that.



Retro F1 is when we watch a classic F1 race in full online, and chat about it on Twitter as we go, using the #RetroF1 hashtag. All are welcome!

Highlights of the Twitter chat are below.

Welcome all to the latest Retro F1, which is a Gilles Villeneuve tribute special, watching the 1981 Monaco GP. Here’s the link to the Monaco GP '81 race footage, I’m clicking play now :)

@CamillaKristel Should be interesting.
@kanemelegatti Ready guys?
@mario_eb Fuel in for Retro F1 :)
Hi Mario. Glad you could join us. Should be a good one :)
@mario_eb Hi Graham. Surely it'll be fun. Although my server's a little slow now I'll be following Retro F1 maybe I'll need my KERS ;)
Or your DRS.

@mario_eb Haha :D Ok, let me activate it :D

Looking back: F1 wizards' first visit to Oz

As you're no doubt aware by now the Bahrain Grand Prix has been postponed, possibly to be shoehorned back into the calendar later this year. The season's opening round will instead take place in Australia on 27 March, around the Albert Park circuit in Melbourne. Seems something much more appropriate about that.

The Australian race is one of the most eagerly anticipated rounds of the season, such is the atmosphere and local enthusiasm it always engenders (it's a pity therefore that it currently seems to be under threat). F1 was nevertheless fairly slow to discover the potential of an Australian race, with the first visit there as late as 1985. What's more, anticipation of the initial visit was accompanied by considerable scepticism from the F1 circus. But on arrival this gave way rapidly to huge enchantment, probably of an even greater intensity than the Melbourne round currently enjoys.

When the first Australian Grand Prix, to be held around a street circuit in Adelaide, was placed as the final round on the 1985 calendar misgivings were widespread. F1's recent record at the time on newfangled street tracks was far from good: the Dallas round of the previous year wherein the track had fallen apart over the weekend, and there were several other organisational difficulties, was fresh in the memory, as were similar problems at Detroit and Las Vegas. Indeed, the record of such rounds even going ahead was somewhat patchy, such as the Flushing Meadows street race in New York which had been on the calendar for three years in a row and had yet to become a reality (and it still hasn't).

Looking back: 1981 - F1's strangest season

The recently ended 2010 season is commonly accepted as a great one. When thinking of great F1 seasons some readily spring to mind, such as the dramatic championship finishes of 1964, 1986 and 2008, or the competitiveness of 1974, 1997 and 2003, or even the drama and controversy of 1976 and 1989. The season of 1982 however tends to rise above others in such debates. It after all can boast no fewer than 11 different winners (for seven different constructors) in 16 races, no individual winning more than two of them. This all was alongside multiple acts of drama on and off the track, conducted in an atmosphere of extreme acrimony. Such is the myth that surrounds 1982 that it even had a specialist book about it written and published a quarter of a century later, by the sadly recently-departed Christopher Hilton.

However I feel that the season which preceded 1982, 1981, is somewhat forgotten about, and has a strong claim as a memorable and dramatic season. It can certainly match 1982 for controversy and acidity. Indeed, much of the 1982 politics were simply a continuation of those in 1981! The 1981 championship battle was tighter and went to the wire to a much greater extent than 1982's did. Plus the on track racing action (easy to forget in all of this) was generally much more diverting in 1981. It seems to have been lost in time somewhat that most of the races in 1982, i.e. the hour and a half on a Sunday, were soporific spectacles. And 1981 isn't far off 1982 in terms of variation of winners, no driver won more more than three races, the world champion totalled but 50 points, and in the final drivers' table no fewer than five drivers were within seven points of the top of the table. Eat your heart out 2010.

Even if one maintains that 1981 was not among the sport's greatest seasons, it certainly has a claim to being one the sport's strangest. It started with a race that never was in South Africa, attended by only 19 cars, the races were participated in by a field of cars, for the most part, in flagrant breach of the rule makers' flagship regulations, and it ended in a car park in Las Vegas, wherein the three contenders stumbled disastrously over the line, and Nelson Piquet claimed his first World Championship by a point, almost in spite of himself.

Looking back: 1979 - not the march de triomphe for Ligier

OK, I'll admit it. I first had the idea to write something on Ligier's 1979 season sometime after the Brazilian Grand Prix this year, in which Red Bull had refused to 'nominate' one of their drivers for the championship or to impose team orders. It was to be a cautionary tale of a frontline team with two competitive drivers losing out on a championship by allowing them to race each other, to the point that they damaged each other's hopes.

The Red Bulls then inconsiderately won both the drivers' and the constructors' titles. But the story of Ligier in 1979 is sufficiently compelling to be worth recounting nevertheless, and the lack of team orders is but part of it.

To cut a long story short, the Ligiers ran away with the opening two races of 1979, before gradually fading to become also-rans by the season's end with, on the face of it, an unfathomable rate of decline. As is usually the case in F1, the reasons for this decline are not straightforward.