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Gil de Ferran, Indianapolis 500 winner and Brazilian icon, dies at 56
Quote:
Fellow Brazilian driver Tony Kanaan said de Ferran was with his son, Luke, at the private course in Opa-Locka, Florida, when he pulled over and said he wasn't feeling well. Kanaan said de Ferran apparently suffered a heart attack and could not be revived.
A friend just told me. Hard to believe. Gutting. 56, heart attack.
At least he died in a race car… I guess.
Absolute class, the consummate Penske driver. As good as anyone in his short career.
RIP.
One more serious competitor in the Heavenly 500, Jimi Hendrix playing Back Home In Indiana.
Sad - a really genuine, modest, gentleman known along with his driving talents, for his setup skills:
https://racer.com/2023/12/29/gil-de-...ST_EMAIL_ID%5D
A text to the friend who told me is here…
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.
Well, that sucks. Much too young.
Some cross the finish line before others < but we all cross the finish line
RIP my friend:checkered::checkered::checkered:
A true gentleman and a credit to the sport.
I was so moved by the tribute written by a friend on another forum, I asked permission to re-post it here.
From Nigel Beresford, a career engineer at the highest levels for decades — and a genuine guy with the kind of passion racing thrives on:
>>>
“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.”
(— Nigel Beresford)