Jules Bianchi passed away on July 17th, 2015, after spending nine months in a coma due to the accident he suffered at the 2014 Japanese Grand Prix.
In treacherous rainy conditions, Bianchi crashed into a recovery vehicle while behind the Safety Car, which came out to neutralize the race after German driver Adrian Sutil crashed his Force India.
At the time, Bianchi was part of the Ferrari driver academy and tipped for a great future in Formula 1. He was learning his trade at Marussia before the time came for a promotion into the big league.
Bianchi took part in 34 Grands Prix over the course of the 2013 and 2014 seasons. His best result was ninth place at the 2014 Monaco Grand Prix, a breakthrough for him and the team in terms of scoring points.
The sport has changed a lot since we lost Jules. It has become safer with the Halo device and several other improvements. One would wonder if Jules would've survived had the Halo been introduced at the time, but there is no use dwelling on this.
However, the Halo went on to save many lives since then.
His loss was a huge blow to the F1 world and most importantly to his friends and family. Bianchi was Charles Leclerc's mentor, and the Monegasque was still racing in Formula Renault 2.0 at the time of the Frenchman' accident in Japan.
While we sadly missed out on seeing Bianchi's talents in F1, he would definitely be proud of the work his protégé is doing these days, looking down on him from above.
Leclerc has delivered a tribute to Bianchi on the tenth anniversary of his death on F1's Official Website, but from us at GrandPrix247, we can only say: Jules, gone but never forgotten.
Leclerc's Bianchi tribute
The first memories that I recall of Jules are not of Jules the driver, but rather Jules the person as I experienced him a lot more as a human being rather than a racer.
We spent so much time together growing up and both of our families were and still are extremely close. My older brother and him were best friends, so he was always around.
Jules was eight years older than me, he was closer to the age of my older brother. I was six or seven and when you're that age, you can definitely feel the age difference.
Then growing up, the age difference just felt smaller in a way and we became close friends.
I've got some stories from that time, like the first horror movie I watched was actually with Jules.
He didn't know I was pretending to be asleep. He was trying to make sure that I was asleep because he wanted to watch that movie with my older brother!
Jules was such a genuinely nice person. He was very funny and he had his crazy moments when you got to know him very well.
He was just always happy to help and very happy to have fun as well
The memories that are the clearest are probably when I was six or seven years old and it was the first time that I would be allowed to race a rental kart with him and my brother.
Normally rental karts are for adults but his father was managing the track and obviously was letting us do things that maybe we were not too allowed.
I looked up to him so to be racing with him, with my older brother, with his younger brother, and many, many other professional karting drivers at the time was incredible.
We had so much fun. We would hang out and wait for the karting track to close to the public so we could get on. Then we’d go crazy on track for hours and hours.
These are probably the most special memories I have.
Leclerc competitive because of Bianchi
Jules was the most competitive person I've ever met and I feel like I have that competitiveness in me because of Jules.
When we were doing some races in karting, there was that competitiveness but also in the most stupid things we did at home, there was exactly the same competitiveness. He would get so frustrated when he lost anything!
He was also very obsessive in a way that whenever he wasn't good enough at something, you would see him one month, two months or three months later and he will have trained at every single opportunity he had.
I remember playing him at squash, for example. The first few times, he was already much better than me but then I remember like five or six months later, he had organised a tournament with one of the top 20 in the world.
He was actually doing really well and that was very, very impressive because he had just trained every single day to get better at squash. This is a trait that I've always admired from Jules.
He would never, ever give up and he would work so hard in order to get better at something. Anything he would do, he would give the absolute maximum.
I hope Jules will be remembered as an extremely talented driver, who unfortunately never had the chance to be in a top team with a car that was helping him to show the extent of his talent.
There are some people where you can see through their eyes, through their smile, how good of a person they are – and I think Jules is one of them.
This is probably the most important thing for me to remember from Jules – how kind of a human being he was and how dedicated he was to try and reach his goals.
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