Pironi: The Champion that Never Was Paperback – January 1, 2018

as the only book (in english at least) which puts history right and gives Pironi credits where they are due, it is a must read. it is such a tragic story, not only his accident and his unfulfilled f1 career, but the whole family who seems to have disintegrated and disappeared from the face of earth; the aunt, his beloved half brother (or rather the full brother as their mothers were sisters) all the untimely deaths inevitably make one feel that the family was cursed. when i closed the book at the end, i was in tears. one does get a good feeling and impression who Didier Pironi was, as a racing driver who won the 24 hours of le man and became a national hero at a young age, as well as a person who grew up with complicated family situation and had to fight a lot to fulfill his life time dream and affinity for speed. my disappointment in the book was lack of photos. compared to all the books i read on ayrton senna, this book almost feels like a struggle to gather enough materials to paint a full portrait. and my wish (rather than disappointment) for the book is that the author had been able to track down people especially family members and lovely ones so he could use direct verbatim and actual artifacts from his life as opposed to a lot of copying and pasting from apparent old articles of years past. i have a feeling that when his career ended and during the last 5 years of his life and his recovery, there must have been a lot of articles and interviews done. alas, most of them were probably in french. also, 30 years ago, a lot of people were still around and might be willing to talk. now? almost everyone who really knew him has died including enzo ferrari. i only wish i had been born earlier or at least was able read french! (there are other books on him written in french) anyway, this book tells a compelling story that is almost forgotten by the motor racing world, but it does leave me wanting more. nevertheless, if you cannot read french, get this book!

An interesting read for a Formula 1 fan about a driver with little know about him. I saw Pironi race in 1982 at the Grand Prix in Detroit, I was 12 at the time and wondered why there was only one Ferrari racing that weekend. I found out the unfortunate reason many years later.

An interesting book about a driver not many remember. Interesting if you remember Didier and some new slant on Gilles Villeneuve's attitude after Imola, if you can believe what one friend said. It was interesting to learn about life after the Hockenheim accident.

Shed'd new light on the Villeneuve/Pironi incident at San Marino in 1982 and the subsequent tragic results. Nice to see that there is another side to the whole saga which doesn't paint Pironi as the only villain and villeneuve as the hard done by hero.

The book is thorough and a bit rose coloured glasses like. It treats a proportedly quite aloof and arrogant man gently. Nothing appears left out but it reads a bit flat. A well done journalistic exercise but lacking in passion or drama.

Good

Looks good!

David Sedgwick hit the bull's eye with this book. I don't know if this is his first book (or at least his first book about auto-racing).All I know is that you can't miss this book if you are a Formula One fan of the seventies and eighties period. The writer chosen almost forgotten driver, whcih was vice champion in the 1982 Formula One Season, a season where ELEVEN drivers won at least one race each, in a fifteen-races season!! Cars were at their most dangerous downforce configuration ever, speeds were increasing dramatically, the popularity of the sport was growing, FISA and FOC battled like swore enemies... a mess...One should not forget that PIroni is a 24 Hours of Le Mans winner (1978, along with Jean-Pierre Jassaud), and two time s European Formula Renault champion.The book is very well written, without boring you to death with mentioning every single result. He was an incredibly rich kid, but a very good driver that had ample technical knowledge of racing cars set-up and business. simple as that.Photos are not so good, but I did not buy the book for photos.

This is a good book, one that seeks to fight a lot of the misconceptions about Pironi, and the author does a reasonably good job in doing so. I enjoyed it and it does go a welcomed way towards lifting the curtain on what did happen at Imola '82It shows some admirable research into his early life, the FRenault campaigns and Le Mans - and is good on what made him 'tick', and the kind of person he was. One thing I would have liked more on was the powerboat scene, as that's a fascinating sport on it's own.Where it falls over, noticeably, is the lack of quotes/direct input from leading F1 figures. No interview with media-friendly Rene Arnoux....a big surprise, considering he features all the way through the book. Or (perhaps less surprisingly) with Alain Prost....a friend of both Pironi and Villeneuve, who receives a surprising kicking in the book (yet I can find no evidence elsewhere to back up the particular claim about him that the book makes). Equally no interviews with Ferrari insiders who would know the 'in's' and 'outs' of the Imola circus.Is it because the author did a 'cut and paste' job, or that the F1 world wouldn't speak in detail to someone they didn't know? I suspect it's the latter, but regardless, this lack of 'primary source' material lets it down.It's intriguing that the author singles out certain UK motoring journos very early on, but the expected attack on them fails to take place. It's certainly correct that the ones he mentions are a long way from being impartial, and one continues to this day to act as Villeneuve's un-official PR apologist. Their views, to a large extent, remain unchallenged after this book....when they should have rigorously been.Had this book had a more forceful editor, or agent - someone to drive the project, to focus the author, make him ask tougher questions, speak to the right people etc, it would have been a whole lot better. Because of this it's a bit of a missed opportunity, given the author's enthusiasm for his subject, but still well worth reading and owning.

I don't understand the reviews that have criticised the "flowery" narrative of this book, I found it very informative and hard to put down. It gave me a much better insight into one my childhood heroes and laid waste to the claims of the idiots who in the past blamed Pironi for Villenueve's death. Finding out what a risk taker Didier was, he was unlikely to ever grow old, however he lived his short life to the full. As I live on the Isle of Wight, not far from where Didier eventually died, made this an all the more poignant read.As for the author, he obviously did a great deal of research to enable him to write this book. How I wish he would be able to write books on the other drivers of that era, some who survived Formula 1 and some who didn't, as for me they were true heroes and I would have liked to know more about the likes of Reutemann, Depailler, Laffite, Arnoux, Piquet, Jones, Jabouille, Nillson, Scheckter, Andretti etc. - what a book collection that would be...I thoroughly recommend this book to any fan of motorsport, particularly F1 of the 70's and 80's.

Having just finished reading this book and having read the other reviews, I feel that I must add my twopennuth. In his defence, the author does make it clear that he is/was a Pironi fan and that is fine. However, he then describes acts of the most appalling arrogance and duplicitousness and dresses it up as the behaviour of a charming rogue, nothing to get upset about. Pironi was a fine driver, of that there is no doubt, but to rhapsodise him in a Mills & Boon way, is quite ridiculous. The book contains many facts about the family which I found interesting, but the flowery language, I found quite wearing. In short, if you are a Didi fan you will find nothing to upset you. If you aren't, you'll dislike him even more. (There, and I never even mentioned Imola)!

This is an interesting story extremely well told - you easily feel the passion of the author (who, strangely, provides no information as to who he is other than his name - he writes extremely well if a little extravagantly so maybe he's a journalist?). It's a standard-sized paperback with a few photos in a central section. What it really needs is the full format treatment with photos of his cars (no sign of the Renault Le Mans winner or the drive down the Champs Elysees, nothing on Tyrrell) , his mother, his team, wife and girlfriends, the sponsors and team managers, the "castle" looks like a pretty standard suburban house in the photo. See Tony Southgate's autobiography for a good example. As it is, read the book and get onto Google if you don't remember it personally.Otherwise, it really needed a read through by someone involved in racing. There are lots of small errors: Estoril is in Portugal which has no Adriatic coast, Candy makes white goods (maybe that could be said to be "engineering"), Nevers is not a village - it's a substantial town (37,000 people according to wikipedia), Derek Daly is Irish not British, Alfa Romeo cars didn't have Cosworth engines, skirts were never referred to as "miniskirts" etc, Who people are is sometimes never explained and I lost rack of those who were not already known to me. I'm guessing this was produced and published on a shoestring. That's a shame as it is very good.There's lots of interesting stuff in here about his non-car racing life - it's unusual to find this sort of personal stuff in racing biographies - a benefit of this having been created by someone who is not obviously an insider. He's obviously done his research. I wanted to keep following the story as if it was a novel.Highly recommended despite my suggestions for improvements for the second edition!

Pironi: The Champion That Never was is an interesting book in a lot of ways. Didier hasn't had nearly the same level of biographies or eulogies as the man he is unavoidably linked to - Gilles Villeneuve - and hence David Sedgewick's work here is an important chance to take a look back on the man through a more balanced pair of eyes. I'll freely admit that, since the age of six, I have been a huge admirer of Villeneuve. As such, I initially treated Pironi with somewhat of an air of disdain and bitterness. This book allowed me to finally put that to rest.Didier's complex family situation and reticence to be the centre of attention at times, alongside the less invasive nature of the press back in the day, means forming a proper, cohesive chronicle of the man is a tricky proposition. I feel that David has done a super job of that in the book; you really begin to form a true picture of the human underneath the white and blue racing helmet. You also come to understand the circumstances that made him such a complicated man, and quite possibly explains certain aspects of his later life.I think the real success of this book is that it weaves this all throughout a well-written, absorbing chronicle of international motor racing in the mid-late 70's and early 80's. It really draws you into Didier's journey - so much so that the shock of Hockenheim '82 or the Colibri accident of '87 actually resonated with me once I reached them in the book. I'd become so involved in the story of Didier's life that I'd almost forgotten the tragic way in which it was derailed and then finally ended.As for whether this will change your opinion on the man himself... well, that's down to you. If anything is going to do so, though, then this is probably the book to do it. I found it a rather cathartic experience and feel like I can now appreciate the man for what he was and what he did without the shadow of number 27 hanging over his memory. Rest well, Didier.