Electronics Problems Hamper Villeneuve

Jacques Villeneuve's Austrian Grand Prix was ruined when his BAR-Honda took on a mind of its own when his steering wheel's electronic gadgets failed shortly after the start of the race, his race engineer Jock Clear said.

Clear said Villeneuve's steering wheel problems began within minutes of the race causing problems with fuel consumption throughout the race with the electronics stuck in certain modes.

"On about the second or third lap he told us he had no steering wheel controls at all so basically the communication between steering wheel and car was completely gone which is not a problem for general driving," said Clear. "But it meant we were running in some modes that we wouldn't normally.

"He wasn't stuck in gear, the gear change is automatic, but it does mean we had the wrong fuel mixture on and things like that. We couldn't change it back to the start to where we would normally run so we were running quite heavy fuel consumption, but we couldn't do anything about that."

Clear added that with no read-out from his steering wheel, Villeneuve had no way of knowing if he was within the regulatory 80km/h speed limit when he came in for his first fuel stop, while changing the wheel was also too big a risk to take and could have led to retirement.

"He couldn't know his speed so he had to judge it purely on 'OK how fast is 80km/h' which is quite tricky when you've just been doing 300km/h," said Clear. "At the first pit-stop, we thought about changing the steering wheel, but if we'd done that either the car would have stalled because he couldn't select neutral - that's on the wheel - and the clutch would have stopped working."

Villeneuve was left banging his steering wheel in frustration as his BAR pulled slowly away from the stop and he eventually finished the race a lowly 12th, one lap behind race-winner Michael Schumacher.

Clear added: "Changing the wheel is a risk we could have taken. We could have restarted the car, but if the stall was quite nasty or the engine tried to catch the stall it could have turned the rear wheels while the mechanics were tying to start the rear wheels so that was a definite no-no.

"So we decided not to change the steering wheel and if we could pit exit OK there wouldn't be a problem. The first wasn't brilliant because the anti-stall kicked in. But again all the regimes were wrong. The car doesn't know it's in a pit-stop so it's got all the wrong rev limits set and all that."

Clear also said that French-Canadian Villeneuve would have beaten teammate Jenson Button to fourth place had he not been struck by the problems.

"The pace was there with Jacques' car," Clear said after the race. "Jacques was considerably quicker than Jenson today. He was lapping a lot quicker than Jenson. Before the first stop he was five seconds behind Jenson having started five places behind him. It would have been a real show of how strong we could have been because both cars would have been very, very strong."