Villeneuve: I must change style

In the first hint of frustrations at his lack of pace during this week's test at Jerez in Spain, where Massa topped the times on the first day and was amongst the front-runners on Wednesday, Villeneuve has confessed that he now needs to adapt his style if he is going to extract more speed out of the car.

After spending two days playing with the set-up of the car, Villeneuve has discovered that he has difficulties dealing with the team's braking system and getting the most from the C24's suspension.

Speaking to autosport.com, he said: "The electronics for the brakes seem to be different to what I was used to and I will have to adjust my driving style. I don't think the team can change it to adapt to me.

"Everything on this car is different [to last year's Renault] - even the suspension. I even have to adjust the way I change things on the car."

Villeneuve has been known to have unique preferences for his ideal car set-up - with his most famous quirk being that he loves there to be very little throttle movement in his accelerator pedal. He is also widely known to prefer a very stiff suspension.

Although the teams he has been with in the past, Williams, BAR and Renault, may have had the massive budgets required to spend time and effort changing the car and its components to suit him, the reality is that Sauber is much more tightly controlled in terms of finance - meaning the onus is now on Villeneuve to sort the problems out himself.

"Probably a rich team can change the things to suit the driver, but probably here I will have to change," he added. "Obviously Felipe knows the car and it has been conceived with his comments - so the car is definitely better for him."

When asked about the overall speed of the new car, which has bounced back to competitiveness after a recent disappointing test at Barcelona, Villeneuve said: "The car seems to be better with old tyres. We are still slow, but it is better because we were very slow last week. Now we are just slow."