Jules Bianchi remembered: ‘The conditions were much worse than they looked’

Jules Bianchi died two weeks shy of his 26th birthday, having suffered catastrophic injuries in a crash at the 2014 Japanese Grand Prix.

Bianchi had been a leading light of Ferrari’s junior driver programme and was hotly tipped to arrive at the Scuderia in the mid-2010s. But, tragically, the French driver’s life was cut short due to a crash he suffered at Suzuka in 2014.

Graeme Lowdon remembers Jules Bianchi

Jules Bianchi’s accident occurred in the 2014 edition of the Japanese Grand Prix, on what was a miserably wet day in the Mie Prefecture.

Heavy rain and poor visibility had been caused by the arrival of Typhoon Phanfone, and, in the closing stages of the race, F1’s safety vulnerabilities were exposed when Bianchi ran off the road at high speed and suffered life-threatening injuries upon colliding with a track recovery vehicle in the gravel trap removing another car.

Bianchi suffered a diffuse axonal brain injury and never recovered consciousness before he tragically passed away in the hospital on July 17th, 2015. He was just 25 years old.

The French driver, who hailed from Nice, was the godfather of current Ferrari star Charles Leclerc; had fate not been so cruel, it’s likely both would have ended up as rivals at the sharp end of the F1 grid in recent years.

Bianchi’s path appeared certain that he would have ended up at Ferrari. He had been the first recruit of the Driver Academy and had been putting in the hard yards with the Scuderia behind the scenes, working as a test and reserve driver alongside his Marussia F1 team race duties.

Just weeks before his accident, Bianchi had tested for Ferrari at Silverstone after getting the call-up to replace Kimi Raikkonen, who had had a hard hit during the Grand Prix. Bianchi had finished with the quickest time of the day in the truculent F14-T, and he was strongly linked with stepping up into the Italian team upon its next available vacancy; whether that be for the departing Fernando Alonso, or if Raikkonen was replaced.

But Ferrari was Bianchi’s future in late 2014, when he headed off to Japan. His present was at the beleaguered Marussia team, a small underdog squad struggling for survival at the time. The former Virgin F1 team had changed hands after 2011, becoming the F1 arm of a small, and now defunct, Russian automaker.

Bianchi had scored a points finish in Monaco in May 2014, with his ninth-place classification enough to move the team into ninth in the Constructors’ standings ahead of Caterham; the difference in the prize money would make all the difference in the team surviving into 2015 as finances were so tight in the vastly different commercial environment that existed in a pre-Liberty Media age.

Graeme Lowdon was the CEO of Manor Motorsport, which operated the Marussia F1 team, working closely alongside team boss John Booth, when Bianchi suffered his accident.

Lowdon is set to return to F1 full-time next year as he’s been appointed as Cadillac F1 team boss, and the British businessman’s time is highly in demand as preparations continue apace for his team’s pending arrival in the sport. But Lowdon graciously gave of some of that time to sit down with PlanetF1.com over the British Grand Prix weekend, visibly getting lost in the events of a decade ago as our conversation turns away from the here and now to discuss the sad final months of Bianchi’s life.

“I never watched it back, never watched the TV coverage back. It’s strange the things you remember,” Lowdon said.

“I remember it was way darker in real life than it appeared on TV, like way darker.

“The conditions were much worse than it looked. I remember the fact that there was no medical helicopter. I remember driving to the hospital. We couldn’t get into the medical centre at the circuit, which is not unusual, actually. And I’m not a doctor, so I’m not essential.

“I remember driving to the hospital and taking a phone call from Bernie [Ecclestone, former F1 chairman], because he wasn’t there that weekend, but he wanted to make it super clear very quickly, whatever we needed, we would have.

“That was helpful. At the time, I was having a lot of discussions with Bernie about the team as well, because we were trying to find new investments. We could see that there were issues on the horizon with the sponsorship from Russia and what have you.

“In this instance, it was a complete switch in the discussion, a normal discussion about structuring a team or whatever. Instead, it was, you know, ‘What do you need?’

“I’d read before, actually, that, when Bernie ran teams, I think he was highly affected by some of the incidents that happened with his own team. It occurred to me that you’re talking to a guy who’s been through something like this before, and they know what’s important and not important.

“I really remember that, and I remember a lot about what happened at the hospital. It’s difficult and… we still had a Formula 1 team to run as well. It was a back-to-back race with Sochi, and we’re going there as a Russian-owned team, so the pressure was on in so many ways. So yeah, it was a big challenge.”

The nine months between Bianchi’s crash and his eventual passing saw him initially remain in hospital in Japan but, with Bianchi coming out of his coma and breathing unaided, albeit still unconscious, in late November 2014, he was repatriated to a hospital in his hometown in Nice.

There he remained until the end, with Lowdon visiting his bedside when he could.

How did those months weigh on his shoulders?

“It’s the fact that you’ve got a teammate in hospital somewhere. You think about them. Not all the time, but something is there all the time, for sure,” he said, visibly getting lost in the memories.

“We were trying to rescue the team as well. We were trying to do our own sort of survival thing on a business point of view. So there was a lot happening at the time.

“We were really encouraged when Jules got Medi-vaced back to Nice, so he got out of Japan and into a hospital in Nice, and so that made it much easier to go and visit.

“One of the things that I’m thankful for, I guess, is one particular visit. I went down there, I used to fly down on an easyJet. You couldn’t get down and back in a day.

“So I’d fly down, stay over, go visit him or whatever, and then head home.

“On this occasion, I met Jules’ dad [Philippe] in the hospital. I remember having a long conversation with him.

“I don’t want to say anything about his condition, because that’s very much for the family, but what I would do is just go and sit and talk to him about what we were doing as a team, in the hope that, in some small way, it might help, or whatever… You don’t know in these situations.

“So I remember talking to him about the fact that we were racing in 2015, I would have told him what was going on in the last race, or whatever.

“Then I went home, it takes a bit of a while to get all the way back to Northumberland. I got all the way back, and I hadn’t been back long when I got a call from John to say that Jules had passed away.

“I was always thankful for that particular visit, I at least had sat and said what was happening with the team. You build a bond in the team. There were people in the team who were much closer to Jules than I was.

“When you run a team, you don’t tend to get too close to the drivers for all sorts of various reasons. But I think everyone in the team has a bond with, not just the drivers, but also other team members.

“Throughout the years, we’ve run teams. We’ve had other people who got hurt in places or whatever. You care for these people because they run your team. So it does have an impact, for sure. As you look around this paddock, there are still people wearing the wristbands that we gave to everybody in 2015.”

It’s at this point that Lowdon revealed a slightly faded red plastic bracelet on his right wrist. It’s engraved with some markings from the happiest day of the Marussia/Bianchi partnership, and Lowdon explains it’s never left his wrist in the decade since.

“I’m not the only one here,” he said of the tribute item.

“You’ll see a bunch of people in the paddock who have got these. Monaco 2015, Jules was in the hospital in Nice, so literally just a few miles away.

“We had the whole team turning up in Monaco, and the team survived because of the points that Jules had had such a major contribution in scoring. So we thought, ‘What should we do? ‘

“We knew the team was going to be thinking about him. He’s not that far away, but it’s not practical for everyone to go there. In the end, we decided we would just issue everyone in the team a wristband, and it just says ‘Monaco, 2014, P8, JB17.’.

“I know it was P9 in the classification, but that was due to the strange ruleset at the time; on the road, it was P8. We gave everyone this, and it meant that, if you’re a mechanic and you’re working on the car, you don’t have to do a big gesture or whatever.

“You can look at your wrist and say, ‘Yeah, we’re remembering him’.

“We knew that, if Jules knew what was happening, he’d want the team to be successful going forward and all the rest of it, and wouldn’t want everyone to be thinking about stuff.

“This gave everyone the opportunity to, whenever they want, just have that little reminder that, you know, he’s still in our thoughts. He’s not far away; we’re racing partly for him. He’s made this possible as well through his contribution.”

Since Bianchi’s death — the last F1 driver death to have been caused by a crash on track during a Grand Prix weekend — the sport has evolved considerably. The explosion of F1’s popularity, as Liberty Media has embraced social media and modern entertainment platforms, has resulted in the teams becoming highly profitable and valuable ventures.

Even the smallest teams are now big businesses and had Marussia/Manor survived beyond 2016, the year of Haas’ arrival on the grid, it’s entirely possible the outfit could be a very different proposition nowadays.

The changes on the commercial front have coincided with a big evolution in the sport’s fandom. Embracing a younger and more diverse audience, there are a lot of new fans since the days Bianchi raced, fans who might not be aware of the extent of his potential and the character of the man.

I asked Lowdon what those fans need to know about Bianchi.

“He was a bloody good race driver, a really, really, top-class race driver, an exceptional talent in my mind,” Lowdon replied.

“I remember he brought Charles Leclerc along to a race, Charles would have been really young at the time.

“He said to me and John Booth, who I ran the team with, ‘John, this is Charlie. He’s going to be so good. He’s going to be way better than me,’ and all this.

“When Charles went to Ferrari, it was really nice to see, because you kind of thought that that’s the continuation in some way of Jules.

“I remember when Jules was racing in Monaco in 2014, he made that move around Rascasse, and it was so cool. Everyone in the team, after that race, got the aerial picture signed by Jules, and it’s a super cool thing to have.

“Then watching Charles at that race when he was in the Ferrari, and he made two almost identical moves like that, I couldn’t believe it!

“It was a real goosebump moment. The first time it worked, but the second time, if I remember rightly, it didn’t work!

“I remember thinking Jules up there looking down watching this, and that he’d take his cap off for the first one, and then give him some stick for the second one, for making a mistake!”

Bianchi’s death played a large role in the FIA hastening its quest to research and introduce a cockpit protection system for drivers, leading to the creation of the Halo device that has since directly contributed to the prevention of serious injuries, and perhaps worse, of several drivers across F1 and its junior categories.

While Bianchi himself may not have been saved by such a device, Lowdon said Bianchi’s contribution to modern F1 simply cannot be overlooked.

“The key thing for me is that people don’t forget Jules,” he said.

“A lot of people talk about who’s made Formula 1 what it is. The reality is that there are an awful lot of people who have all contributed in lots of different ways.

“I think Jules is one of those people who played a big part, actually, in F1. You see that from the safety changes that were made afterwards, but the fans were definitely robbed of a significantly bigger part that I think he was set to play.

“So we should definitely not forget him. That’s why everyone wears these. That’s why we commemorate.”

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