Elio
De Angelis

Elio de Angelis was born in Rome on 26 March 1958. His father, Giulio, was a powerboat racer. After a short spell in karting, de Angelis won the Italian Formula Three Championship in 1977. In 1978 he raced in Formula Two, first for Minardi and then for the British ICI team, and he also won the Formula Three race at Monaco.

He made his Formula One debut with Shadow in 1979 and finished seventh in his very first race, in Argentina. He ended the season 15th in the championship with three points. Lotus team boss Colin Chapman took notice and signed him for 1980 as team-mate to Mario Andretti. De Angelis stayed with Lotus until the end of 1985 and finished seventh, eighth and ninth in the standings in his first three years there. His first win came at the 1982 Austrian Grand Prix at the Österreichring, where he beat the future world champion Keke Rosberg by just 0.05 seconds.

In 1983 Lotus switched to Renault turbo engines. It was a difficult year with many mechanical failures. His best result was fifth at the Italian Grand Prix, and he finished 17th overall. In 1984 the improved Lotus-Renault brought him the best championship position of his career: with 34 points and three podiums he was third in the standings, his best single result being second at Detroit. In 1985 Ayrton Senna joined him at Lotus. De Angelis took his second win in the third race of the season at San Marino, after Alain Prost was disqualified because his McLaren was underweight. He took his last pole position in Canada. With 33 points he finished fifth in the championship, five points behind Senna. He then left Lotus, frustrated that the team's focus lay mainly on Senna.

For 1986 de Angelis moved to Brabham, replacing Nelson Piquet, with Riccardo Patrese as his team-mate. With the Brabham-BMW BT55, the team fell behind the leading pack early in the season. In May 1986, while testing the car at the Paul Ricard circuit, de Angelis crashed and died the following day. He had started four races for Brabham. In total he made 108 starts and took two wins, nine podiums and three pole positions. Formula One did not race on the full Paul Ricard layout again until 2018. Jean Alesi, who arrived in Formula One in 1989, wore a helmet based on de Angelis's design as a tribute.

Source: Wikipedia, “Elio de Angelis”. Text licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.