Villeneuve wants refuelling banned

Ever since refuelling was brought back to F1 at the start of 1994, the fight for victory in Grands Prix has often been dominated by the strategy battles taking place on the pit-wall rather than out-and-out action on the track.

Villeneuve believes that the result is races that have become far too complicated for fans to understand.

"Everybody talks about strategy and how exciting it is, but I think at the end of the day the fact that we rely on strategy kills F1, because you watch television and you never know what is going on," he said at the launch of the new BMW-Sauber car in Valencia.

"When I spent nine months at home watching the races, and I was just out of F1 so I understood what was going on, after five laps I was lost. So I can imagine what it is like for the fans. That is a lot to do with strategy so I would just ban refuelling and get rid of electronics, that would be the main thing."

Villeneuve's stance on electronics stems from his belief that driver aids, like traction control, are making the cars easier to race. That means drivers are less likely to make mistakes and get overtaken.

"If you want to have overtaking you need to have drivers that are not fit and that make mistakes," he added. "Drivers that are not fit doesn't exist any more, that was 20 years ago, and drivers that make mistakes are very difficult now because you have all the electronics now. So as long as you have all that, you will never have a huge amount of overtaking.

"But there has never been a huge amount of overtaking in F1, even 30 years ago, so what are you trying to get? When people say the racing used to be better it is only because you remember the one or two good races that we had 10 years ago. But when you look at it over the years there has never really been a lot of overtaking anyway."