Berger struggles to choose a story that best illustrates their friendship, their love of having fun, of being the old-fashioned racing drivers they were. Some are simply not printable here; many have little do with racing. “We’d be here at least another hour to tell all the stories,” he says. “There were so many times when we raced each other, beat each other in a nasty way or an unfriendly way, or blocked one another, and I don’t want to say it was him, or it was me. I think we were equal in what we did to each other on the track.
“So I choose the best, the funniest thing that happened with Jean.” He’s already starting to laugh and that famous mischievous look is spreading across his face. He enquires whether I know about the day they crashed a ‘borrowed’ road car at Fiorano? I do not.
“Oh, shit, this is funny. We were testing at Fiorano just before the 1994 season started and we went for lunch at the restaurant near the circuit. After lunch we go back to the little office Jean had near the track and someone calls to say the car is ready and we must start testing again. It was three weeks before the first race, a brand new car, first time out at Fiorano so, you know, it was an important test. We realised neither of us had a car to get back to the track so we found this Lancia in the car park; the keys were in it, so we just took it.
“So we set off. Jean was driving like an idiot; I put the safety belt on and I said: ‘OK, you do what you want,’ and I started playing with the handbrake. People were already jumping out of the way, we were completely sideways, down this road towards Fiorano, and we went past the guard at the gate, Jean was flat out, sideways into the circuit. And there was the new car, in the pits, in front of us, the mechanics working on it.
“I pulled the handbrake on and – I don’t know why – for some reason, the bloody car started to take off and we started to fly. We landed heavily on the roof and it collapsed, like paper, down onto the seats. Jean wasn’t wearing his seatbelt, his feet were hanging out of the window and I was hanging, you know, like this,” – he’s hysterical with laughter now, acting out the chaotic scene – “and we came to a halt about six feet in front of the new F1 car and the mechanics, it was like a crazy film. We couldn’t get out of the car, we were trapped. Anyway, they pulled us out, and Jean was bleeding, he’d cut his head and his knees, and the funny thing was the Fiorano ambulance was there and they got very excited because they hadn’t had to do any work for 25 years… The doctors sit there, with the engine running, every time there’s a test day… and now they had a shunt. They ran around and took Jean to the local hospital and I thought, shit, now we’re in real trouble. So anyway, we cleared up the mess, put the wreckage out of the way in a corner and threw some kind of sheet over it. Then along come Montezemolo and Todt and I thought, ‘shit, now we really are in big trouble. We are out of a job, and it’s three weeks before the first race.’
“I didn’t want to talk to anybody, I thought, OK, I’ll go out, do a race distance or something, let it all calm down. So I put the helmet on and got in the car. When I had to come back to the pits I saw Todt there and he was talking to Montezemelo and it didn’t look too good, so I kept my helmet on.”
Berger is now creased up, reaching the climax of his favourite Alesi tale.