It isn’t widely known that Gilles Villeneuve started his motorsport career racing snowmobiles in his native Quebec. It’s hard to imagine a racing series further removed from Formula 1 than this but somehow he took his talent from these humble beginnings to win the US and Canadian Formula Atlantic championships in 1976.
In ’77 he was hired by McLaren and his entry into the Formula 1 paddock was complete, it’s widely believed that if it wasn’t for untimely death in 1982 he would have won at least one, and possibly more, F1 World Championships.
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