The remarkable Jacques Villeneuve and his career-wrecking F1 decision

Very seldom in the history of Formula 1 has a driver enjoyed such phenomenal early success as did Jacques Villeneuve. Thrust into the F1 limelight by Bernie Ecclestone, who well understood the enduring global appeal of that surname and moved heaven and earth to put it into a race-winning Williams-Renault for 1996, 24-year-old Villeneuve became only the third man, after Mario Andretti and Carlos Reutemann, to qualify on the pole for his first championship F1 grand prix. But for an oil leak that prompted the emergence of the ‘slow’ sign five laps from the end of that race, the 1996 Australian Grand Prix, JV (as he styled himself) would have become only the second F1 driver, after Giancarlo Baghetti, to win on his championship F1 grand prix debut. Instead he finished second, behind his team-mate Damon Hill, who had already won 13 grands prix. Jacques would score four grand prix victories that year, and seven the next, thereby winning the 1997 drivers’ world championship.

Now, as we observe him doing F1 TV punditry in pitlanes and paddocks a quarter of a century after those heady days, bald and bespectacled, often cryptic of countenance, unmolested by journalists or even spectators, it is easy to forget that in the same locations in his heyday he would have been mobbed by fans begging for autographs and besieged by media looking for quotes. Peroxide-blond, wearing over-sized and therefore comically baggy overalls for reasons that were never clear, other than that perhaps they matched the grungy street wear that he preferred, he would usually say no to such requests, encouraged so to do by his manager Craig Pollock, who was new to motorsport and was much derided therefore, particularly by the media.

“If you try to pass there, we’ll have to pick you out of the barrier”

Nonetheless, press-room purists tended to love Jacques in his early F1 days, especially those who had known his father, Gilles, who had not only been an engagingly hard-charging Ferrari driver in the very late 1970s and very early 1980s but also became an F1 demigod almost as soon as his life had come to a violent, tragic and early end at Zolder in 1982. At first JV seemed to be a chip off the old block. His F1 debut, at Albert Park in 1996, had impressed everyone. But it was at Estoril six months later that he first did something truly extraordinary. Dicing for the lead of the Portuguese Grand Prix with Michael Schumacher, on lap 16 he hurled his Williams around the outside of Schumi’s Ferrari on the entry to the long and fast 180-degree right-hander before the pit straight, and clung on, wheel to wheel with a man who was already infamous for giving no quarter, pulling ahead into a lead he would never lose. It later emerged that he had told his engineers and mechanics the day before that he fancied he might be able to pull off an overtake there, and they had laughed at him. Specifically, one of them had said: “If you try to pass someone there, we’ll have to go down there afterwards and pick you out of the barrier.” But he did it. Against Schumacher. It was remarkable.

The next year, 1997, he not only won the F1 world championship, but in doing so he dominated the man whom Frank Williams had hired in place of his own new world champion, Damon Hill: Heinz-Harald Frentzen. Frentzen was talented, undoubtedly, and in the mid-1990s he was widely regarded as a future star. Indeed, in 1990, veteran sports car ace Jochen Mass had publicly opined that Frentzen had been the fastest of his three young Sauber-Mercedes World Endurance Championship team-mates. The other two were Karl Wendlinger and Michael Schumacher, so that was high praise indeed. Yet Villeneuve won seven grands prix for Williams in 1997, Frentzen only one.

The 1998 Williams was a mediocre car, incongruously liveried in red with yellow and white stripes, which made it look more like a 1996 Ganassi Reynard-Honda IndyCar than a 1998 F1 car, the state of whose art had been reprofiled by Adrian Newey in the shape of the svelte, silver and superfast McLaren MP4-13, which won nine grands prix that year while the Williams FW20 won none.

Villeneuve then took a sudden, unnecessary and career-wreckingly bad decision, influenced by Pollock (certainly) and an appetite to make a big, quick buck (probably). For 1999 he joined a brand-new team called BAR, one of whose principals, Adrian Reynard, had boasted pre-season that the new team might win its first grand prix, but instead suffered the indignity of watching it fail to score a single world championship point all season. The following year, 2000, was better, but still Villeneuve was unable to deliver a podium finish, let alone a race win. In 2001 he was third in Barcelona and Hockenheim, but those two promising results only flattered to deceive: in neither 2002 nor 2003 did he record a podium finish, and even points finishes were rare. His five years at BAR had been a disaster and, for 2004, unbelievably, the superstar of 1996 and 1997 was out of work, driving just three grands prix at the tail end of the year, for Renault, whose volatile team principal Flavio Briatore had sacked Jarno Trulli after his home grand prix (Monza) and urgently needed a stopgap.

By now JV was no longer a superstar, and Sauber came in for a deal of media criticism when it signed him to partner Felipe Massa for 2005, and yet more when the renamed BMW Sauber retained him alongside Nick Heidfeld for 2006. Despite his having significantly more F1 experience than either of them, Villeneuve was bettered by both those drivers in both those seasons, particularly 2006, in which year Heidfeld roundly outclassed him. His Hinwil tenure could not last, and it did not. At Hockenheim Villeneuve had a shunt, ending his race. A few days later the team issued the kind of double-speak press release that comms/PR guys like me sometimes have to write, because the lawyers insist on it, but we always feel embarrassed about: “Jacques Villeneuve will not be racing with BMW Sauber F1 for the remainder of the 2006 F1 season. Following discussions last week, Villeneuve and BMW Sauber F1 agreed to terminate their current contract with immediate effect. Jacques has performed well for us this year, scoring the team’s first grand prix points, in Malaysia. He has made a significant contribution to developing the newly formed BMW Sauber F1 team and the performance of our car.” Yeah, right. He was fired, and that is how his departure was reported. Perhaps he had been in poor cars for too long, and had forgotten how to be quick. It happens sometimes. In any case, he never raced in F1 again.

I will finish with a personal reminiscence. Some time in mid-2005 an article was published in the magazine that I was then editing, in which Villeneuve was described in a photo caption as “a tugger”. Genuinely, I cannot remember who wrote that word, but, as editor in chief, obviously I had to take responsibility for it. Jacques was livid. A week or two afterwards, in the Hungaroring paddock, he strode up to me and said, or rather snapped: “When I read that I’m a tugger, well, that’s just insulting. That’s not a word that a professional journalist would use. That’s not proper criticism.”