22 replies to this topic

[JacnGille]

https://www.espn.com...er-2003-dies-56

 

Somebody make it stop!

[SB]

https://www.espn.com...er-2003-dies-56

 

Somebody make it stop!

 

Sad. RIP.

[LittleChris]

Terrible news 🙁

[68targa]

Terrible news. Only 56.  Life is so fragile.  RIP

[10kDA]

RIP Gil de Ferran. 56 is too young.

[Vitesse2]

Spookily, these are very similar circumstances to the death of Denny Hulme. Denny was 56 too.

[Derwent Motorsport]

and of course Gerry Marshall and John Gott. 

[E1pix]

Very sad. As good as anyone over his short time in the sport.

He exemplified everything Penske looks for: Fast with grace, even-keeled, great setup skills, loved by fans, great on camera, dignified, consistent, corporate look, and not a crasher.

I hope his son can get through this — especially if he’s the one that suggested they go play in cars yesterday. Horrible.

[2F-001]

How terribly sad.

It seemed odd to me that he didn't make it into Grand Prix racing. Maybe he didn't want to?

Although, from the good things I've read of the man, some may think Formula One didn't deserve to have him.

[E1pix]

Hi, Tony:

It seems at some point he was rumored to go over. Can’t remember details, could be wrong… someone will remember.

[Vitesse2]

He did test for Footwork, alongside Jos Verstappen, who did rather better on the day. It was also later rumoured he'd be part of the initial line-up for Stewart Grand Prix, having driven in F3000 for Paul Stewart Racing, but by that time he was becoming established in IndyCar. So presumably contracts with Walker and then Penske seemed more likely to bring success?

[E1pix]

Footwork, Yes, that rings a bell now, Thanks.

It’d be tough to leave Penske for any unknown waters. Seemed he loved Florida, too.

[Lee Nicolle]

RIP Gil. I used to watch quite a lot of Indy car when he was a star and he was very good And as has been pointed out an asset to the sport in his ways with the media.

[FastReader]

Sad news, especially at such a young age. I shall always remember seeing him win the inaugural CART race at Rockingham with a last lap pass on Kenny Brack, just after losing the lead. Fantastic, gladiatorial stuff.

[FastReader]

Anybody who wants to see Gil's superb, thrilling win at Rockingham can watch it here. Go to 1:40.00 for the last 8 laps:

 

https://youtu.be/0_k...uBKi6wTxy4WkXLU

[Nigel Beresford]

It still hasn't sunk in, has it? We feel like "our" guys are safe once they give up driving on Superspeedays and yet Fate can capriciously deprive us of them just like that, when we are least expecting it, just to keep us on our toes.

De Ferran was special. Classy and urbane like Emerson, fiercely deep-thinking like Senna, extraordinarily articulate in English-as-a-second-language like Mario, imbued with enormous common sense, approachability and humility like Mears.

He was fast - really fast. It irked him that people somehow perceived Helio to be a bit quicker, but that was because Helio was flashier and more flamboyant and therefore just more in-your-face. When it really came down to it, Gil could wheel a lap, as he did with his still breathtaking lap of 241.428 mph average in qualifying at Fontana in 2000. Beyond brave.

He was a phenomenal racer too, as the example of the last lap pass on Kenny Brack at Rockingham in 2001 shows. This was made all the sweeter because it was done in front of the entire staff of Penske Cars, who had travelled up to Rockingham from Poole to take advantage of a once-in-a-lifetime chance to see our cars raced in England. Gil delivered.

Whip smart too. As I have mentioned before on TNF, I remember standing with RP in the pits at Toronto during qualifying in 1999. All the fancied runners chased around early in the session, using up their tyres. de Ferran pootled around, gently bringing in the (markedly inferior and frankly terrible) Goodyear tyres, letting the track rubber in and finding a gap in the traffic until the dying moments when he finally gave it everything and took pole by a quarter of a second over Dario (in a 57 sec lap). The next Goodyear runner on the grid was his Walker Racing teammate in 15th. You could tell RP was massively impressed with what we had just seen.

And then soon after RP signed him and Greg Moore for 2000. We in the team were both stunned and exhilarated. Nobody had had any inkling, but RP had once again managed to pull off a massive surprise with nobody having a clue about what he had on the go to revive and restore the team.

It was still mid season, but between races Roger brought over Gil and Greg on his Gulfstream to England. Nick Goozee, John Travis and I went up from Dorset to meet them off the plane and we spent two days touring Ilmor, Lola and Reynard. In a way this was RP's standard operating procedure - to show important new hires the very significant resources at Penske Racing's disposal. The visits to Lola and Reynard were interesting and ostensibly to help make a decision on what car we would run - it was becoming clear that Penske Cars was not going to be making a car. Gil's long standing relationship with Reynard made it pretty clear the direction we were going to take, and to their credit Reynard gave us everything they had over the next two seasons to enable us to get the job done, even when we were developing our own stuff and using their new developments as benchmarks to make sure we remained one step ahead.

Then there was the relationship with Honda. Again, they afforded Gil a Senna-like respect - his ability to feed back to them as engine developments were tried was deeply impressive, and he was clearly their favoured driver - the engine he ran at Fontana in qualifying was definitely a "special" direct from Japan, not California. But then he did the same with everything. He understood the nuances of the weight jacking front suspension we developed - he understood that a loss of self aligning torque due to the geometry was not an indication of loss of grip, and so he could drive through it, thus delighting Chris Kirk, the designer.

de Ferran's intellect demanded an equally strong minded race engineer to manage and support him. He worked with Tom German, who in my opinion is one of the very finest Race Engineers I ever worked with.Tom is gruff, fiercely intelligent, single minded, zero BS and flat out brilliant. In other words he was the perfect foil to Gil, and together they delivered the two CART championships and the Indy 500 win. Gil knew German was his match but he wouldn't have wanted it any other way. "German you bastard!" was Gil's normal (well meant) first-thing-in-the-morning greeting to Tom. Tom would grunt something back and then they'd be straight in to talking about what setup fixes they'd each been thinking about overnight.

It's still impossible to process that he has gone.

Edited by Nigel Beresford, 31 December 2023 - 21:54.

[E1pix]

Heartbreakingly beautiful.

Thank You.

[MarkBisset]

Wonderful insights Nigel,

 

thankyou.

 

m

[Doug Nye]

That tribute is very, very special Nigel.  There's absolutely no adequate substitute for a first hand account from a respected witness...

 

DCN

[10kDA]

Thanks for the memories, Nigel.

[Michael Ferner]

Excellent tribute, thanks for that Nigel!

 

 

Sad to hear of GdF's passing, he was one of my favourite drivers outside of F1. 

[wheadon1985]

Absolutely stunned by the news when I heard, this one has hit hard. Despite using the old cliché when it comes to times like these, he really was one of the nicest people I've have ever met inside racing, a complete gentleman. 

 

When he was at FOS 2023, he had not renewed his race licence and therefore had to come and see me to help him obtain a basic MSUK licence so that he could drive up the hill. 

 

When I was asking him the usual questions for his licence application and much to our surprise, it turned out that we both share November 11th as our respective birthdays! From that moment on we were the "Birthday Brothers" and he made the effort for the remainder of the event to come over to our desk multiple times each day to chew the cud about what was happening and make sure were all enjoying ourselves.

 

A genuine man and proper racer, RIP Birthday Brother. 

[Doug Nye]

From the BRDC today - I regret never having got to know GdF.

 

The British Racing Drivers’ Club joins the motor racing world in mourning the unexpected passing on 29 December of Gil de Ferran, at the age of only 56, from heart failure while participating in a private race meeting at the Opa-Llocka circuit in Florida. Tributes have been pouring in across social media from the many friends and colleagues whose lives were enriched by knowing the Paris-born Brazilian driver whether in his earliest days racing karts in Brazil or when he rose to the heights of IndyCar/CART racing.

 

In the 1991 Autosport Yearbook & Directory covering the 1990 racing season, in which Gil had competed in the major Formula Opel/Vauxhall Lotus Championships, he was described as ‘one of the nicest guys in motorsport, Gil uses his head to stay out of trouble, his smooth style should see him at the front in F3’. By all accounts he never really changed as he ascended the ladder of single-seater success, only falling short at the final financial hurdle for Formula 1.

 

While studying engineering at university, Gil decided to concentrate on a career as a racing driver after winning the 1987 Brazilian Formula Ford Championship. He moved to the UK where he was put in touch by fellow countryman Ayrton Senna with Ralph Firman at Van Diemen. After a frustrating first season in 1988 running with a poor team and engine, Gil finished third in both the RAC and Esso FF1600 Championships the following year. In those days, the natural progression for aspiring F1 drivers was to follow FF1600 with Formula Opel/Vauxhall Lotus and so it was that Gil joined Paul Stewart Racing alongside a young Scottish driver, David Coulthard. By the end of the 1990 season Gil was second in the British Championship (to Vincenzo Sospiri) and third in the GM Lotus Euroseries to Rubens Barrichello and Sospiri.

 

Next came two years in the British Formula 3 Championship, the first with Peter Briggs’s Edenbridge team which produced third in the final standings behind Rubens Barrichello and David Coulthard while Gil, back with Paul Stewart Racing, ended 1992 with six race wins and the title with nearly twice as many points as runner up Philippe Adams. Continuing the conventional upwards progression, Gil stayed with PSR for two years in Formula 3000, winning once (at Silverstone) in 1993, second twice and fifth in the final points while there were two wins – Pau and Enna-Pergusa – in 1994, a second (at Silverstone) and a couple of third places but also a couple of accidents which left a disappointed Gil only third in the final reckoning.

 

For someone with less than a full Formula 1 budget within his reach, Gil decided to abandon his ambitions in that direction and instead opted for Champ Cars (CART) initially with Jim Hall’s team which brought him three victories, followed by Derrick Walker Racing for whom Gil placed second in the1997 standings behind Alex Zanardi. Midway through 1997 Gil featured in one of the closest ever finishes in front line single seater racing when he lost out by 0.027 sec to Mark Blundell at Portland. Raul Boesel was 0.055 sec further back in third place. 

 

After mixed fortunes with Derrick Walker, for 2000 Gil switched to Team Penske to drive the Honda-powered Reynard 2KI. There may only have been two victories in both 2000 and 2001 but Gil’s cerebral, analytical approach ensured that he finished in a podium position on numerous other occasions and in both years, he won the championship. One of his two wins in 2001 came at Rockingham which was particularly appropriate given that Gil’s racing career had been largely centred around British teams.

 

The speed was very much there as Gil showed by setting an all-time record for the fastest lap ever recorded at an official race meeting when he lapped in qualifying at 241.426 mph at the Fontana Speedway in California. A couple of years later Gil, still suffering from the effects of a crash a few weeks earlier, achieved his ambition of winning the Indianapolis 500 although he had to cede the championship title to Scott Dixon by 507 points to Gil’s 489. At which point Gil retired from race driving having finished in the best possible way by winning his last race ahead of Scott Dixon by 0.2 sec.

 

After a short spell with the Honda (formerly BAR) Formula 1 team as sporting director, which included Jenson Button’s groundbreaking victory in the 2006 Hungarian Grand Prix, Gil set up his own team to run in the 2008 American Le Mans Series, with Honda support. Initially in LMP2 with Simon Pagenaud as team mate, Gil returned to the cockpit and finished in third place at Utah in their first race which was followed by another third place in Detroit and ninth in the final standings. For the following year Gil and Simon moved up to LMP1 and won five of the 10 races, taking second in two others but no points from the first two races meant that they were pipped for the championship by the Honda Acura of David Brabham and Scott Sharp.

 

Unable to raise a sufficient budget to continue with the ALMS team, now known as De Ferran Dragon Racing, in the way that he wished he stepped aside, leaving Roger Penske’s son Jay to take over the reins. Gil went on to serve as an ambassador for Formula E. In 2018 he became sporting director for McLaren in succession to Eric Bouillier but left in early 2021 only to return in an advisory role in May 2023.

 

Gil was elected as an Honorary Member of the BRDC in 2003. Those words in the 1991 Autosport Yearbook were indeed prescient. Gil may not have made it to the top F1 rung of the ladder but his successes at the highest level in track racing in the USA will ensure that he will never be forgotten and always highly respected. He will be much missed. To his wife Angela and children Anna and Luke, the BRDC offers its most sincere condolences.

 

DCN