Au Revoir Jacques

As Jenson Button secured a thrilling triumph for Honda last Sunday, finally putting the team that started life as British American Racing on the top step of the podium, Jacques Villeneuve, the man who with manager Craig Pollock created and developed that team, was miles from the action, contemplating life after Formula One.

Villeneuve was absent from Budapest after, according to the official line from his BMW-Sauber team, he chose to recuperate from his crash the preceding week. But it was soon evident that he would not be returning and, after the cancellation of his contract with the German marque, his time in Formula One appears to be over.

It was not the way he wanted it to end. Always determined and committed, Villeneuve spent his time in Formula One driving at the limit and sometimes beyond it. Despite suggestions to the contrary at certain times in his career, Villeneuve would never shirk work on the track and he never backed away from a challenge.

Now, but for a surprise turnaround by a top team, it is unlikely that the outspoken Canadian will grace a Grand Prix grid with his presence again. In a career of 163 starts, it seems, his glory days with Williams, in 1996 and 1997, long before his BAR dream turned into a nightmare, are destined to be his only legacy.

"I would like to be remembered for fighting through adversity and winning through adversity, to know that you have never given up," Villeneuve said back in 2002. His feelings, it is fair to assume, remain the same four years later but sadly, for many, he will instead be remembered as a driver who failed to achieve his true potential.

1996 British Grand Prix Winner Jacques Villeneuve © LAT

His early career statistics display the promise that was never nurtured. In 33 Grands Prix - over his debut season in 1996 and his championship-winning year in 1997 - he claimed 13 pole positions, 19 podiums, including 11 wins, and a total of 159 points. That is an average of 4.8 points per race and one victory in every three outings.

Compare that with his time at BAR. Over five years with the team, between 1999 and 2003, he competed in 81 Grands Prix and claimed no pole positions, stepped on the podium twice, took no wins and collected just 39 points - an average of 0.48, or one tenth of his average over those first two years at Williams. He retired from almost 50 percent of his races with BAR.

Villeneuve was hot property one year after his 1997 title success, but he passed up the chance to join Benetton, a team that went on to take race and championship victories as Renault, and joined Pollock's efforts to win from scratch with the big-budget British American Racing team.

That his career failed to accelerate beyond its initial success was in great part down to a positive 'never give up' character that made him determined to carry on with the challenge at BAR. He only saw the light when it was already too late.

Sky-high promises failed to materialise and after three years it was clearly not working. But Villeneuve would not give up on the dream and committed to a further three years with the outfit, only to discover that the rapid demise of Pollock and the arrival of David Richards as team boss marked the beginning of the end.

Unhealable political rifts emerged and by the end of 2003 the dream-turned-nightmare was over. With new stars in a new era at the front of Formula One, Villeneuve's chances of a return to the top were over. "I tried everything but I knew this story would end in a bad way," he told the French press in 2004.

"I think it has been noticed that I have never given up and I have always driven as hard as I could and worked as hard as I could. In the first few years, when an ex-world champion would just have given the finger to the team and disappeared, I didn't, I worked hard and I stuck with it. But I gave my career to BAR, for nothing."

The tragedy is that Villeneuve's statement is true. He gambled his career on a dream, and lost. After a brief sabbatical, something he had previously claimed he would never consider, he returned to the grid with Renault, for three races, then Sauber, for a season, before hanging on by a thread at BMW until that final lifeline was cut.

The BAR experiment, however, is something that he has always spoken of without regret. After the fall-out from his departure in 2003, he said: "Of course if I had stayed with one of the top teams I would have had many more results and ultimately more money, but I followed my heart and I always have. I followed a dream."

It was a shame for Formula One that the dream failed to become a reality.

Jacques Villeneuve celebrates the 1997 World Championship with his Williams mechanics, who donned blond wigs © LAT

Villeneuve, both on track and off, was one of the sport's great entertainers. It was he who put the 'grunge' in Grand Prix racing, his baggy clothes, his changeable hair colour and, at one time, his pop star girlfriend Danni Minogue all providing a breath of fresh air in an increasingly formal paddock.

He cared little for opinions outside his own head and, when questioned about his hairstyle in 1997, he exclaimed: "As long as you can be yourself and be happy in your own skin, that is what is important. I am not trying to be a rebel, I am just being myself and if that goes against the establishment well so be it."

His on-track approach mimicked his care-free off-track attitude. Although his famous father, Gilles, was killed in Formula One action for Ferrari in 1982, young Villeneuve, while persistently steering away from the inevitable family comparisons, has always embraced the element of danger he faces every time he steps in the car.

"It's not the speed, it's the rush you get from being on the edge," Villeneuve remarked upon his arrival in Formula One in 1996. "And that means knowing that you control that edge. You know you're on a razor blade and that if you make a mistake, you are going to pay for it.

"If you start from pole, cruise around and end up winning, it's boring. If you have to fight for it, then it becomes entertaining."

Entertaining is something that cannot be used to describe Villeneuve's twilight years in Formula One. After being tempted by the chance of forging a career resurgence, Villeneuve quickly discovered it was tough to come back to the sport following a lay-off, as he struggled with Renault alongside Fernando Alonso.

In almost all of his Formula One career he had been used to having the upper hand over his teammates. Despite being out-performed in his debut year in 1996, when Damon Hill outqualified him 13-3 and won the world title, Villeneuve had the better of Heinz-Harald Frentzen 13-4 and 10-6 over his subsequent two years at Williams.

At BAR he outpaced Ricardo Zonta 15-1 in 1999 and beat him 15-2 in qualifying sessions during 2000. Olivier Panis fared little better, losing out to Villeneuve 11-6 in 2001 and 10-7 in 2002, and Villeneuve was only narrowly beaten 8-7 by Button, despite difficult political circumstances in the team, in 2003.

After the embarrassing struggles at Renault, Villeneuve's time with Sauber, racing alongside young Brazilian Felipe Massa, a man who nobody was quite sure how to rate, also proved difficult. He was outqualified 12-7 and could only scrape 9 points himself as the young Massa staked his claim for a future at Ferrari.

Villeneuve's career, in fact, was so in the balance over the winter that the music-loving racer pulled a few mates together and hit the recording studios to cut his first album, a single from which was released to some critical acclaim earlier this year. But his music career went on hold as he was given a brief stay of execution by BMW.

Jacques Villeneuve, 2005 Grand Prix of Germany © XPB?LAT

His performances, or his contractual ties, proved good enough to keep him on the grid, but as he saw out his final few races with BMW there were few highlights to suggest he was destined for anything but being consigned to the Formula One scrapheap and looking at a career outside the travelling circus.

"The day you are not hungry any more, you should stop," Villeneuve once said. "As soon as you are not 100 percent, that you are not on top of everything, you are way behind, then you do not want to take the risks any more, that is when you have to stop. The one day I do not enjoy it as much, I just stop.

"You know what is frustrating? When you have done a 60-lap race and you know you have done 60 qualifying laps and they were perfect...and it's worth nothing, nobody saw it, you were on your own, you finished ninth and you weren't in the points. That is just meaningless."

It may, then, have been with a mix of relief and sadness that he was dropped for a young Polish test driver. But it was tough for it to happen on the same weekend his old team, and a former teammate who he once described as a 'boy band racer', hit the big time.

Now, as Button aims to play his own tune in Formula One, it seems Villeneuve's future records will be purely musical.