Feature: Villeneuve Needs to Raise BAR

Canada's most successful Formula One driver returns home this week - with the season's most under-achieving team.

Jacques Villeneuve, an irreverent and individual World Champion at Williams in 1997, will try to lift British American Racing (BAR)'s morale at Sunday's Canadian Grand Prix at the Montreal circuit named after his late father Gilles.

Nine Grands Prix have gone by since the 31-year-old Villeneuve last banked a point - and nearly five years since his 11th and last victory - and BAR are the only team staring at a blank scoresheet after seven races in 2002.

The Canadian has a task on his hands: he has never won his home race, hasn't finished higher than 10th there in the last five attempts and cannot hope to wow the Quebec crowds too much on Sunday either.

But while Ferrari and Williams will be gearing up for yet another private battle, BAR do have some grounds for cautious optimism.

Villeneuve caught the eye for his aggressive overtaking in Austria last month, bringing back memories of old when he ripped through the field from 17th place on the grid to run in the points before his second pitstop.

"It was fun, it was exciting, that's why I started racing years ago - to have fun like that on the track and to play," he said afterwards.

Personnel changes, with the arrival in March of Geoff Willis as technical director, have speeded up development since Villeneuve's mentor and manager Craig Pollock was replaced as team boss by David Richards.

The team will run a revised car in Canada, with a new transmission and gearbox layout as well as an improved aerodynamics package and upgraded Honda V10 engine. Things might just be looking up at last.

A test at the Le Castellet circuit in the south of France last week was encouraging, resulting in an unofficial track record for French driver Olivier Panis.

Write Off

"We go to Montreal with the new evolution car and engine and, whilst we are under no illusions that it will cure all our problems, we are optimistic that it will go some way towards reversing our fortunes this season," said Richards.

But there is still a long way to go.

"We're certainly not in a position in the year where we would write this year off," Willis, who joined from Williams, told BBC radio last week. "We've got to make improvements to the car and I think we already have just in terms of its reliability and operations.

"Now is the time of the year when I'd be really starting to think about the following year's design and that's certainly top in my mind at the moment. But for the next four or five races I have to think about ways of improving our current form. We have to do better.

"We have no points at the moment and that is not an acceptable position to continue in. We've got to find a way of getting ourselves at least out of that dangerous area."

Willis said that when he joined BAR he was struck by how far off the pace the team were behind the scenes and how little awareness there was of the true extent of the problems.

"When I arrived it was pretty clear there were some substantial issues to be tackled," he said. "It became obvious to me that it wasn't understood how poor the car's performance was. They didn't understand almost what they were looking at. They weren't taking notice of what the drivers were saying to them.

"I've found really a lot of problems at all sorts of levels with people almost in some sort of denial about what those problems are," he added.

Reliability

Panis, through no fault of his own, has yet to finish a race this season and the car is still too heavy, too slow and aerodynamically off the pace. But reliability is getting better.

"We've had enough track time on Friday and Saturday to improve the car, to set the car up properly, to make the drivers understand the conditions and that's certainly turned into better qualifying and race performance," said Willis.

"You have to be pretty structured now with the competition levels in Formula One. It's not a question of working harder than the opposition or being cleverer than them because the opposition works very hard and there are a lot of very clever people.

"You really have to be very organised and very focused and that structure wasn't there when I turned up."

Richards, an astute businessman who also owns the commercial rights to the World Rally Championship, has laid out a long-term plan and expects BAR to be challenging for wins as a front-running team in the space of two years. Willis agreed that sort of time frame was about right.

"We have to be realistic," he said. "Where we are at the moment it is not a one-year process to get ourselves up to the right level, to be a top-line team.

"I think that's probably a two-year process. We can do about 75 percent of the improvements in the first year and maybe another 25 percent in the following year."