“I was spat on”

Paul Rouget, Media365: published on Tuesday December 3, 2024 at 3:50 p.m.

Featured in a Canal+ documentary series dedicated to him, Alain Prost spoke about his special relationship with the French public.

Alain Prost confides. The four-time Formula 1 world champion (1985, 1986, 1989 and 1993), recently joined on the list by Max Verstappen, is in the spotlight in a Canal+ documentary series, soberly titled “PROST” and which is made up of six episodes of 26 minutes. Where he does not only look back on his famous duels with the late Ayrton Senna, preferring to dwell on his early career, more unknown to the general public.

“I would have been frustrated if we didn't know him, with all these stories, and it only remained about a fight with Senna. Honestly, everyone only remembers that. It's very good. The proof , I will live with this story and this legend until the end of my days, but there are still important things and, of course, some more important for me,” he told Motorsport during the presentation of this series by the encrypted channel, which will broadcast on December 8 and 15.

He received death messages

Also a guest on Mouloud Achour's show Clique, “the Professor” also returned to the disenchantment of part of the French public at the beginning of the 1980s, a period about which he “still thinks, more than 40 years later”. For Prost, it came “in two stages”. “In 1981, when there was the election of François Mitterrand, I took political positions, perhaps I should not have, but in the end, sincerely, I said nothing about exceptional”, explains this former supporter of Jacques Chirac, who cites, as a second triggering event, the 1982 French Grand Prix, and the incident with René Arnoux, his teammate at the time at Renault: “There is an instruction to team that he doesn't respect, but in the end, I'm the one who comes across as the bastard.”

He was then going to make a radical decision. “I decided to leave France, because there, I really have messages, a burned car, messages of death. I was spat on in the street, in the car. It happened to me once or twice when even, it's very strange. That's where I discovered the 50/50 of this somewhat French mentality, which means that you have people who adore you, they think what you do is great. and then others which are a mixture of jealousy and hatred. Why? I don’t know,” he still admits.