To many in F1 circles, Bertrand Gachot is arguably best known for vacating his Jordan seat in 1991 for a then unknown youngster by the name of Michael Schumacher.<\/p>\n
Just before Schumacher’s meteoric F1 debut 20 years ago, Gachot was jailed in England for spraying a taxi driver with CS gas some eight months earlier.<\/p>\n
“The taxi thing happened in December (1990),” Gachot, who now manages his energy drink company Hype, told the German newspaper Bild am Sonntag.<\/p>\n
“Eight months later, in August 1991, I was summoned to court.\u00a0 The lawyers told me it’s a small thing.”<\/p>\n
It was the week before the Spa-Francorchamps race, but the judge refused to release the French-Belgian driver even on a multi-million pound bond.<\/p>\n
“I was a danger to the English population,” he marvelled.\u00a0 “Eight months later!<\/p>\n
“I was sentenced to two years in prison and I had to serve two months.\u00a0 And because the gas was considered a weapon, they put me in a cell with a murderer.”<\/p>\n
It was, however, good news for Eddie Jordan, who had already collected from Gachot’s sponsors in 1991 and was now receiving $160,000 from Mercedes for the one-off Schumacher debut.<\/p>\n
Gachot doesn’t directly accuse Jordan of pushing the CS gas case to court in order to collect more sponsorship money.<\/p>\n
“I don’t want to put that name in my mouth.\u00a0 I don’t mean Michael, who is a great guy, a great racer.\u00a0 My bad luck was his good fortune.\u00a0 His career might have been very different if I had not gone to prison.”<\/p>\n
\u00a9 RIF | GMM<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" To many in F1 circles, Bertrand Gachot is arguably best known for vacating his Jordan seat in 1991 for a then unknown youngster by the name of Michael Schumacher. Just before Schumacher’s meteoric F1 debut 20 years ago, Gachot was jailed in England for spraying a taxi driver with CS gas some eight months earlier. …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"categories":[3],"tags":[3278,451,5262,5340,92],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13544"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13544"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13544\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13545,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13544\/revisions\/13545"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13544"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13544"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13544"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}