The weekend had already started on the back foot when the Canadian’s front suspension had broken while running at high speed during practice, but once more, he wasn’t too worried.
“The front suspension just came off when I hit the brakes,” he explained. “That happens a lot of times this year, rear wings, suspensions… and I haven’t hurt myself, so there’s good luck in that.”
Ahead of qualifying, Villeneuve was still not scared by the challenge of Eau Rouge, particularly after the inside wall had been modified for safety reasons.
“The corner is easier now that they’ve removed the wall from the inside. It’s visually not as impressive as it used to be,” he said.
“It’s gonna be flat out.”
Villeneuve was sure Eau Rouge would be flat, but… it wasn’t
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However, his qualifying attempt to take it flat ended in a terrifying explosion of carbon fibre.
The car bottomed out on the uphill compression, snapped sideways at over 168mph (270km/h), and slammed into the tyre wall with such force that the wreckage flew across the track.
Villeneuve climbed out unscathed, but his car was written off.
Again, the Canadian was defiant.
“It’s pretty close to last year. I think the impact was smaller, but I rolled, so there was a bonus,” he quipped after the accident.
After a 12-minute stoppage, the session resumed, and it was Zonta’s turn to go through Eau Rouge with the same intent.
And then the Brazilian rookie suffered an almost identical accident to his team-mate.
Zonta lost control of the BAR going uphill, spinning and hitting the barriers, his car disintegrating in the same terrifying fashion, pirouetting across the run-off before coming to a stop.
Miraculously, Zonta was also uninjured.
“I rolled, so there was a bonus” – Villeneuve
“It was a little bit incredulous,” team boss Craig Pollock said.
“I was sitting up on the pitwall, and I just thought, this cannot be true. This has to be somebody else’s car, can’t be my car.
“But the good thing about it is both drivers are absolutely fine, got no bruises. And I was just thinking, Jesus, how strong these cars have to be.”
Zonta was lucky to walk away from the crash
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Jock Clear, then Villeneuve’s race engineer, joked afterwards that the former world champion felt “disappointed because I think he was outdone by Zonta.”
Despite the severity of the crashes in qualifying, the team pulled off a massive overnight rebuild effort, and both drivers were on the grid for Sunday’s race.
As Ron Meadows, BAR’s factory manager, recalled: “I saw the accident on TV at home and thought I’d better go to work and organise some spares, just in case.
“As I walked past the TV again, I saw what I thought was an action replay. Then I looked more closely and thought, ‘Hang on, that’s Ricardo Zonta’s helmet’.
“The phone rang about five seconds later and someone said, ‘You’ll never guess what’s just happened’.”