AUTOMOBILSPORT: You grew up in Paris, which is the exact opposite of where you live now.
Pescarolo: I was born in Paris. After the Second World War, my father worked as a surgeon in Paris. But he wanted to live in the countryside, so he bought a beautiful estate 25 kilometres east of the city. The building looked like a small castle. Not exactly like the building here, but similar. So we lived some distance away from the big city. I wanted to live like that myself later on, so we bought the property here. It’s 140 hectares, with an area for farming, a forest and a small river. That was always my dream. When I go out into the park with the dogs, I feel like I’ve travelled back in time to when I was 10 years old. It reminds me of my childhood home.
AUTOMOBILSPORT: You were not born into a career in motorsport.
Pescarolo: No. When I was young, I didn’t want to be a racing driver, I wanted to be an aeroplane pilot. I wanted to flfly a Mirage fifighter aircraft. Nobody in my family knew anything about motorsport and Le Mans meant nothing to me. When I went there for the fifirst time, I sat in a racing car straight away!
AUTOMOBILSPORT: So how did it come about that you became a racing driver instead of a pilot as originally planned?
Pescarolo: The reason I became a racing driver was pure coincidence. I’d heard on the radio that there would be a talent scouting programme for racing drivers in the region where I lived. You see, there weren’t any young drivers in France in the early ’60s. You didn’t have karting or something like that in France back then where you could enter as a young person. So the French automobile federation decided to establish a programme for 1964, called ‘Ford Jeunesse’. Among the sponsors were Ford and French magazine Sport Auto. They gave 12 Lotus Sevens to 12 automobile clubs in France, and each club was to choose a driver for a season that featured both circuit and hillclimb racing. I was interested and applied, and at the end of the season, I was hillclimb champion in the Paris region. I only took part in three circuit races, so I didn’t win that part of the series. But because of my success, Jean-Luc Lagardère picked me for his Matra programme as one of the young talents for 1965.
The biggest problem at the end of the season was that my father accompanied me to the award ceremony and asked the people there what we should do next. When they told him he would have to buy me a new Formula 3 car, he was totally shocked. He told me I would have to quit studying medicine. And then came Matra ...
AUTOMOBILSPORT: Why did you wear a green helmet? …
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by Robert Weber
Photographs: Cahier, Archiv Pescarolo, Teissedre, DPPI, McKlein, Siebert, Alfa Romeo
