GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN

Had he lived, this French racing hero and wartime SOE agent would have launched a mid-engined sports car

French racing hero Jean-Pierre Wimille

HE’S JUSTLY VENERATED by the French as a sporting and national hero, but JeanPierre Wimille’s achievements as a driver deserve to be held in greater esteem by the rest of the world. If he had not crashed to his death in 1949 he would almost certainly have been the first Formula 1 world champion, and his shortlived but prescient mid-engined sports coupé could have made his name as well-known as Porsche’s.

Born in Paris in 1908 to one of France’s first motoring and aviation journalists, Jean-Pierre initially seemed little inclined to become a racing driver. Instead he joined the navy at 18 ‘to see the world’. The world turned out to extend no further than Morocco, where France was aiding Spain in the Rif War. Serving as a driver, he spent his time tearing around the desert tracks as fast as he could – and the speed bug bit.

On his return to France he acquired a Bugatti T37A and entered it in the ’30 French Grand Prix, only for its supercharger to fail on the second lap. With a friend, Wimille then bought a secondhand Lorraine-Dietrich B13 Coupé and entered the 1931 Monte Carlo Rally. Ironically, given his high-speed desert driving experience, he was pipped at the post in the final trial along the Monaco sands.

The young tyro soon gained a reputation as a fast, reckless competitor, but a spectacular crash in an Alfa Romeo Monza, while leading on the last lap of the rain-soaked 1932 Grand Prix de Comminges, was the wake-up call that curbed his impetuosity. The crash left him with a scarred lip; this, he claimed, made him look like Humphrey Bogart and more attractive to women.

In 1934 Wimille’s motor-racing hero Robert Benoist, then working for Bugatti, offered him a place in the Grand Prix team. But with Benz and Auto Union on the rise, Bugatti decided instead to concentrate on sports cars and the Le Mans 24 Hours. Wimille and Benoist won the 1937 race in record time, driving the streamlined Type 57G ‘Tank’, and Wimille won again in 1939 partnered by Bugatti engineer Pierre Veyron. (In 2013 the names of Wimille and Veyron were again linked, in the Bugatti Veyron Grand Sport Vitesse ‘Wimille Edition’.)

Soon after Le Mans, Wimille made a ‘guest’ appearance with the 59B monoposto at the Bugatti Owners’ Club’s Prescott hillclimb near Cheltenham, accompanied by Ettore’s son Jean. Weeks later Jean Bugatti was killed in a testing accident, and Europe was at war.

Wimille immediately enlisted in the Armeé de l’Air. French capitulation put paid to any action in the skies but action of a different kind was about to be engaged on the ground. Or, rather, the underground: Churchill, promising to ‘set Europe ablaze’, had initiated the Special Operations Executive to organise resistance in occupied France. Benoist, an SOE operative, recruited his Le Mans co-pilot to the cause.

Under constant threat of discovery by the Nazi secret police, Wimille and his wife Christiane (‘Cric’) were key players in the ‘Clergyman’ network, flitting from safe house to safe house until their luck finally ran out shortly after the D-Day landings. Cric was captured in a raid but Wimille, dodging bullets, managed to evade capture by hiding submerged in a stream. Cric later made a daring escape but Benoist, captured separately, was eventually executed.

Wimille survived the war by the skin of his teeth. Then, in September 1945 and starting from the back of the grid in the Bugatti 59B he had driven at Prescott, he won the main event at Europe’s very first post-war race meeting, the ‘Coupe des Prisonniers’ held to honour Benoist and returning prisoners of war. It was Bugatti’s last victory. Wimille was at his peak and moved to the all-conquering Alfa Romeo team as its star driver.

Having tested the GP Auto Union before the war, Wimille was convinced that the midengined layout was the future of sporting cars. So in 1942, with friend Pierre Leygonie and Bugatti engineer Louis Viel, he designed a radical, centre-seated, panoramic-screened, streamlined sports coupé. The prototype was shown in 1946 to great interest, followed by several more refined versions, but it was not to be. Between Alfa drives, Wimille also raced a Simca-Gordini. In January 1949, practising for the Buenos Aires Grand Prix, he inexplicably, and fatally, crashed. Without Wimille’s driving force the project also died.

Among the mourners at Wimille’s funeral were the Duke and Duchess of Windsor and fellow Gordini driver, and soon-to-be Grand Prix legend, Juan Manuel Fangio. However, Wimille’s 20-year-old pregnant mistress, bohemian Rive Gauche chanteuse Juliette Greco, was not invited.

‘HIS WIFE WAS CAPTURED IN A RAID BUT WIMILLE, DODGING BULLETS, MANAGED TO EVADE CAPTURE BY HIDING SUBMERGED IN A STREAM’