The hard charger who punched his team manager

My childhood years were dominated by Jean Behra, the first - and greatest - hero of my life, and it started one evening in April 1954, when I saw on TV a clip of the Pau Grand Prix, in which Behra's Gordini defeated Maurice Trintignant's Ferrari. It was, the commentator said, the triumph of a better driver over a better car.

These were two very disparate Frenchmen, Trintignant a dapper little man whose driving mirrored his appearance, Behra also small, but stocky and tough, with charisma to throw away.

At eight, I was instantly ensnared, and for the next five years 'Jeannot', his chequered helmet, his victories, his innumerable accidents, became my world: when he was killed, in August 1959, I came to face to face with grief for the first time. Sixty years on, photographs of him retain pride of place on my office wall.

It didn't matter to me that there were greater drivers, that he was never world champion, nor - somehow - ever won a world championship Grande Epreuve; what appealed above all was his utter fearlessness. Injured countless times, Behra always came back for more. Fangio described him to me as 'too brave': inescapably he was right, but this can never be a fault in a childhood hero.

I never met Behra, of course, but my late friend Jabby Crombac knew him well, and often talked of him. What was he like?

"Well," Jabby said, "you know Jean Alesi - he is the Jean Behra of today [the 1990s]. Lovely guy, looks the part, tremendous guts, too emotional, drives with his heart..."

Born in Nice, Behra first made his name racing motorcycles, becoming champion of France several times before joining the little Gordini team in 1952. Totally against expectations, in June he defeated the dominant Ferrari team, including Alberto Ascari, 
in the Grand Prix de la Marne at Reims.

"I don't think he could ever quite believe his luck - that people would actually pay him to drive racing cars" Raymond Mays

"It was impossible," said Crombac, "to overstate the importance of that victory in France. It was only two weeks after Le Mans, where [Pierre] Levegh, trying to drive the whole race on his own, blew up his Talbot's engine, and left victory to Mercedes - to the Germans!

"This was not so long after the war, you know, and the French couldn't forgive him, so when Jean - who was new in car racing - won at Reims, he was instantly a national hero. Beating
 the Italians was almost as good!"

Further successes with perennially cash-strapped Gordini were few and far between, however, and for 1955 Behra signed for Maserati, thus beginning the happiest period of his professional life.

For him a day without time in a racing car was a day lost. He savoured constant testing at the Modena autodromo, taking up residency in the nearby Albergo Reale, where he passed the evenings playing cards and drinking wine and talking racing.
 It was an existence he found completely fulfilling.

Raymond Mays (for whose BRM team Behra later drove) once related to me an anecdote revealing of Jean's love affair with his job: "I don't think he could ever quite believe his luck - that people would actually pay him to drive racing cars.

"He was a magnificent little driver, and a charming man, but terribly temperamental in a French sort of way. If things weren't going well, he sometimes got demoralised, but it was never for long, and I asked him how he kept his spirits up.

"He told me he would get his passport out. 'I look at all the stamps in there, the places racing has taken me to, and then I look at the first page. Name: Jean Behra. Profession: Racing Driver. And it reminds me again how lucky I am to have this life...' I found that rather moving - and different from most drivers I've known."

During that first season with Maserati, Behra might have sought the solace of his passport quite often, for the races were utterly dominated by Mercedes. There were, however, several non-championship and sportscar victories, and these would continue over the next couple of years. At Casablanca in 1957 he trounced everyone, including team-mate Juan Manuel Fangio.

At the end of that year, in which Behra also won for BRM at Caen and Silverstone, he joined the team full-time for 1958, following Maserati's withdrawal. It was a disappointing F1 season, but for sportscar racing he joined Porsche, for whom he excelled.

For 1959, Jean moved to Ferrari, and the new association began well: in the gorgeous Dino 246 he won the Aintree 200 from team-mate Tony Brooks. I was there with my parents, thrilled beyond imagining at what would be my idol's last victory.

Because the Cooper revolution was underway by now, and the front-engined Ferraris were outpaced on all but 'power' circuits.

There was a desperation in Behra's driving through the last months of his life. Here was a man with a mechanical understanding of racing cars most untypical of the time, yet now he repeatedly abused his engines, and at Reims did it once too often. Team manager Romolo Tavoni glanced at the rev counter tell-tale, and remonstrated with his driver - who felled him with a single punch.

"Behra was one of the greatest fighters I ever came across. If you passed Castellotti or Collins that was the end of it, but with Jean you had to keep your eye on your mirrors!" Stirling Moss

Unsurprisingly fired forthwith, Behra immediately sought a return to BRM for the German Grand Prix at Avus. "Unfortunately," Raymond Mays recalled, "there wasn't time to get it organised, so Jean turned up there with his own F2 Porsche."

It was a ludicrous race track, Avus, comprising two endless straights, with a hairpin at one end and a steeply banked bowl - with no wall at the top - at the other.

The day before the grand prix there was a sportscar race, for which Behra had also entered. It was raining torrentially, and Hans Herrmann, a close friend, implored Jean not to start.

Fighting for the lead, his Porsche RSK spun on the lethally slippery banking, then hit a concrete block. Behra was thrown out, a lurid photograph showing him like Icarus, silhouetted against the grey sky.

"He was in the pit next to us," said Mays, "and I remember feeling sorry for him - he seemed very much alone during those last few hours of his life. All the elements of a Greek tragedy were there."

His colleagues remembered him well. "I liked Jean a great deal," said Dan Gurney. "Even then he was something of a throwback to a different time - he was a fiery guy, and he was there to race. I thought that was great - he had a look in his eye, and he didn't mind getting with the programme, that was for sure!"

"Behra," said Stirling Moss, his Maserati team-mate in 1956, "was one of the greatest fighters I ever came across. If you passed [Eugenio] Castellotti or [Peter] Collins or whomever, that was the end of it, but with Jean you had to keep your eye on your mirrors!

"He was incredibly tough, but also completely fair. I mean, he wasn't about to say, 'After you', but I'd always feel quite happy going into a corner alongside him. He was a very likeable bloke - perhaps not as sociable as, say, Trintignant, but he was there to get on with what he was doing, and he did it bloody well..."

Whenever I am in Nice I invariably visit the grave. Nearby is the Boulevard Jean Behra.