Villeneuve Ready to Quit F1

Former World Champion Jacques Villeneuve says he is ready to leave Formula One when his current contract expires if he is unable to find a competitive team.

"Finding myself only with opportunities near the bottom of the grid doesn't interest me and I'll stop," the Canadian was quoted as saying at the motorsport.com website. "I will have to get an offer from a team at the front of the grid or one that's making big progress so that you can see it will be competitive the next year.

"But it's not a question of deciding where I want to go - if you win races, you'll get offers and if you don't, then you won't get much. A bad season in 2003 and I'll be staying at home the next."

31-year old Villeneuve, World Champion with the Williams team in 1997, has a year of his contract with the British American Racing team left to run, but he claimed earlier this year that he was not expecting the team to renew his contract at the end of 2003.

The Canadian joined BAR in 1999 and has only scored two podium finishes so far, but he thinks the Honda-powered 005 will finally allow him to make a significant step forward.

"There's a whole new group of technical people working on it and the numbers on the car look amazing, so we should make a big leap forward," he said. "For once the expectations are high and basically realistic, whereas in the past, every time we had expectations we were hoping for Christmas and it never happened."

BAR finished in eighth place in last season's Championship and will unveil their new car January 14th.