Obituary: Jabouille was a trailblazer with an unusual F1 story

The first driver to win a Formula 1 race with a turbocharged engine, Jean-Pierre Jabouille, has died at the age of 80.

The Parisian took only two F1 wins but it was his first at Dijon-Prenois in July 1979 that made his name and ensured he became the toast of France two and a half years after he put the first laps on the Renault RS01 at Silverstone.

Jabouille was a late starter to racing and didn’t make his international single-seater debut until he was 27 years old, when he took part in occasional F2 races in 1969.

Having become a test and development driver with the Société des Automobiles Alpine manufacturer, Jabouille had entered his first Le Mans 24 Hours in 1968, starting a run of 14 appearances at La Sarthe that spanned a quarter of a century.

He was also hired directly by Steve McQueen to be one of the drivers in the classic 1971 Le Mans movie.

He never quite got the victory he personally craved at the ultimate endurance test and finished third on three occasions – in 1973 and 1974 with Matra, and then in 1992 and 1993 with the factory Peugeot squad.

That he was still competing at a high level well into his fifties said much of Jabouille’s passion for racing, which he undertook with a technical and artistic eye rather than anything totally spontaneous.

Perhaps that wasn’t a surprise as he had studied at the Sorbonne art school in the early 1960s before getting the racing bug via trips to the Autodrome de Linas-Montlhéry close to Paris that hosted several international races.

He caught the eye of Matra in Formula 3 which gave him the springboard into F1 by 1974, although he failed to qualify a Frank Williams-entered Iso-Marlboro at Dijon and then a Surtees at the Osterreichring.

A year later he made his grand prix debut at Paul Ricard when he was entered, at the behest of sponsor Elf, in a third Tyrrell 007 alongside Patrick Depailler and Jody Scheckter. He finished 12th.

Jabouille’s career finally blossomed at the age of 34, when he became 1976 European F2 champion for Renault in an Equipe Elf Switzerland run Renault 2J chassis. He took three wins at Vallelunga, Hockenheim and Mugello, beating younger French prospects Rene Arnoux and Patrick Tambay.

By this stage Jabouille knew that he would be part of Renault’s ambitious turbo F1 plans for 1977 and development was already in full swing by the end of 1976.

Jabouille was the perfect driver for such a challenge. Enormously mechanically sympathetic, he had an engineer’s nose for every detail of a car, and his already enormous experience at Le Mans with the Matra Simca MS670B and the Renault Alpine A442 gave him skills and knowledge far beyond the newer generation of French racers.

Getting in at the start of the Renault F1 programme was a masterstroke, albeit for Jabouille an initially frustrating time, as the early races for the Renault RS01 were punctuated by poor reliability which in turn caused the project to be derided by many. The car was commonly known…