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Jacques Villeneuve Q&A

While Jenson Button scored a valuable fourth place for BAR in Austria, Jacques Villeneuve suffered yet another mechanical problem, although this time he did at least get to the flag after losing a lap in the pits. From the start Jacques lost the electronic functions on his steering wheel. That meant for example that he had no speed limiter for the pits, and thus he had a very slow first stop.

At his second stop engineer Jock Clear realised that he could give him a hand by reading him his speed off the telemetry, and amazingly enough, Jacques got in without breaking the limit. Alas further problems led to him stalling. Despite starting several places behind his team-mate Jacques had driven a strong race, and was right with Jenson. Even more frustrating is that the heavy fuel loads he regularly runs on Saturday do not produce headline-grabbing grid positions, and if he doesn't finish, the strategy doesn't flatter him.

Publicly Villeneuve continues to bite his tongue, but there's no doubt that both he and Clear are more than a little frustrated that problems which have previously been pinpointed have not been solved. Adam Cooper spoke to the Canadian.



"It's the story of the season."



"I lost a lot of time in the first pit stop because of the same problem that stalled me after, because I had no pit limiter, no neutral button and everything, so I did an extremely slow pitstop, and probably lost six or eight seconds. So I ended up behind a few people. Or else we fought with Jenson. It's just becoming frustrating."



"Well, the electronics on the steering wheel stopped working on the first lap, and nothing worked on the steering wheel. I had no idea which gear I was in, and then when I got out of the box everything like the anti-stall didn't work properly, and the car just stalled."



"Very frustrating, because we were working well. In the second pit stop Jock was actually telling me what speed I was doing in the pitlane, so I could adjust my speed to get as close as possible to 80. So we were actually compensating for it. And then it stalled. We changed steering wheels, but then it was too late."



"Our car works better with low fuel, and by Saturday anyway we've worked more with our race set-up."



"I really don't care about Monaco right now. We've had four mechanical failures in six races. We'll just have to keep working on it, and hopefully at one race the problems will stop. But it will be difficult to get a car as good as this in race trim. The car was really great. We keep getting a really good set-up for the race, and we give up a bit in qually, which I'm happy to do, but we need to stop having problems."

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