He was at the wheel of his own Alpine road car and that convinced him to enter the new Renault 8 Gordini series in 1966, and to race a Mini-Marcos in 1000km races in Paris and at Monza. Jabouille prepared the cars himself, helped by a friend called Jacques Laffite, who would later become his brother-in-law when the pair married the Cottin sisters, Geneviève (Mme Jabouille) and Bernadette (Mme Laffite).

Jabouille, who was often nicknamed “Jelly Baby” by the English who struggled with his name, then moved on to Formula 3  in 1967 with a Brabham and soon began to make an impression. A year later he had an ex-factory Matra F3 car and by 1969 had been taken on by the Alpine-Renault team to race in Formula 3.

In the years that followed he represented Matra in F2 and sportscars. When Matra quit competition at the end of 1974, Jabouille and another longtime racing friend Jean-Claude Guenard got hold of an Alpine A367 Formula 2 car and reworked it as the Elf 2J (the J being for Jabouille) and with funding from Elf, Jean-Pierre won the European F2 Championship. He had made his F1 debut the previous year with an Elf-funded outing for Tyrrell at the French Grand Prix, but after his F2 title he was taken on by Renault to develop the first F1 turbo engine. It was a long job but, in the summer of 1979, Jabouille broke through, giving Renault its first F1 win at the French GP at Dijon-Prenois.

The elegant Frenchman scored another victory in Austria in 1980 but by then he had been eclipsed by his faster team mate Rene Arnoux, who benefitted from Jabouille’s set-up skills.

He was on the way out at Renault by the end of the year but signed a deal to race for Ligier Matra, alongside his brother-in-law Laffite. Sadly, at the end of the 1980 season he had a big crash in Canada and suffered serious leg injuries that would leave him with a permanent limp. He was not fit at the start of 1981 and his car was driven in the first two races by Jean-Pierre Jarier. After that he failed to qualify in Argentina and it soon became clear that he was no longer competitive and he announced his retirement and stepped back into a management role with the team. He was replaced by Patrick Tambay. Further operations followed in the course of the next 18 months and at the end of 1983 he tested a Ligier-Cosworth, although by then he was in charge of the Ligier CART team, which aimed to take the team to the Indy 500, as Renault was then the owner of the American Motors Corporation (AMC). The project never really got off the ground.

He then drifted away from Formula 1 and ran a restaurant in Paris, while racing for Peugeot in the French Touring Car Championship. He developed a strong relationship with the company and was a member of the Peugeot sportscar team at Le Mans in 1992 and 1993 before retiring (again) to take on the role the head of Peugeot Sport boss, replacing Jean Todt. He headed the company’s F1 engine programme (with McLaren) until January 1996 when he was replaced. He then established his own sportscar team with Jean-Michel Bouresche and ran Ferrari sportscars with some success and before switching to run Philippe Alliot’s Force One Racing team.

In recent years he has often demonstrated his old Renault F1 cars, a reminder of his greatest days…