More than he bargained for: interview with Jacques Villeneuve

One of the more fascinating aspects of 2006 will undoubtedly be how Jacques Villeneuve fares at BMW Sauber. There's no escaping the fact that the new management has inherited a driver that the company would not have put very high on its wish list, and that was made pretty clear by the tardy announcement that the Canadian was actually staying.

Jacques always had a contract that lasted into 2006, but there were times when it seemed that he wouldn't even see out '05 with the Swiss team, so messy did the situation become.

"I don't understand why the criticism is so strong," he was fond of saying. "But I've had good training at BAR over the last few years for that..."

So was the criticism he faced last year justified? Villeneuve himself cites Barcelona and Nurburgring as races he's not proud of, but elsewhere he reckons he did a fair enough job, especially considering that for the early part of the season the car was not to his liking.

He also lost out in a series of bumps and scrapes that weren't always his fault, and he probably held the 2005 record for race nose changes. I lost count at four...

Villeneuve is by no means the only driver to struggle to find his feet in a new team, and he had the added problem of missing most of the 2004 season. By the end of last year, he was more of a match for Felipe Massa. He was doing a solid job - in fact just the sort of thing that BMW needed for their first year, and yet still no decision was announced.

"There's no decision because there's no decision to make," he said at the end of the season. "The only thing is that they can either be happy to be working with me, or not happy to be working with me. I think that's what they're waiting to know, if they're going to be happy or not. Right now I think they're happy, and I hope it will remain like that. It makes life, and work, a lot easier.

Jacques Villeneuve testing the BMW F1.06 at Imola this week © XPB/LAT

"Things will get better with BMW. Why would I have raced this year and now want to be there next year?"

In the end all the speculation came to nothing, and as Villeneuve said, there was no decision, other than when to make an announcement that he would indeed be a BMW driver in 2006. So surely Jacques must have been pleased that, after all the trouble and criticism, everything was finally sorted?

"What trouble?" he smiles when asked now. "What criticism?"

Ah. Perhaps he's no longer allowed to talk about all that then.

"I'm allowed to talk about anything I want..."

You can't really blame him for being reticent. Over the years he's often got himself in trouble by speaking his mind. Usually he has an agenda, such as the times he attempted to encourage Honda to pull its collective finger out. He said a lot late last year about his future with Sauber, and now it's all sorted, there's no point in raking it all up again. On a slightly more serious note, Jacques insists that he really was never worried.

"I think I was the only one who wasn't frustrated or stressing about it. I just didn't dwell on it, that's all."

As he implies, all that is in the past, and whatever happened in the winter is now largely irrelevant. Driver and team have to get results, and thus they have to work together.

There can be no questioning Jacques's motivation. He's actually far better off than he anticipated when he signed the Sauber contract. Not even the team boss knew that within the deal's two-year span the team would have a new owner and works status.

"No, I didn't anticipate that BMW would own the team the year after, that wasn't in the plan. It's a big bonus," Villeneuve concurs.

Jacques likes what he's seen so far. In 2005 he was at times frustrated by the lack of testing and development, the sorts of things that were a direct result of the team's privateer status, when every Swiss Franc had to be counted.

"We weren't doing much testing, and there was not much development on the car. So it was hard to get the direction I wanted, not because the team didn't want to, but because the team didn't have the money to do it.

Jacques Villeneuve & Nick Heidfeld © XPB/LAT

"You can't just try everything. I've been in teams before where you just try it, and if it doesn't work, put it in the bin. At Sauber, it meant that the money that goes onto that didn't go onto something that was better.

"You have to be convincing before proving that something is good, and when you're a little bit slower it's even harder to convince. But until you get what you want, it's hard to be faster, so it's a vicious circle. I think I paid the price for that."

Now there's a little more of everything, more chance of getting new things tested and onto the race car. People who couldn't really show what they could do have no excuses now.

"I'm very happy. There's everything in there to make progress. Now we just have to use it properly. It's the same factory, just more budget. Ultimately it's still a lot of the people who were there last year anyway, you just don't change their habits. What was there last year is still in place, just made bigger and more efficient, that's all."

So what is the biggest challenge that the team faces?

"The biggest challenge for the team will be not being a just an engine supplier, but running a whole team. It's a lot more work, a lot more pressure, but I don't see it being any trouble."

No doubt, from time to time this year we will hear the 'We're a new team' excuse from BMW. Villeneuve was of course part of the start-up at BAR, but quite rightly he doesn't see that there's a valid comparison: "Yes, a new team is always difficult, but this is not a new team. It's an evolution, so it's a little bit less difficult."

But what of the man himself? It really is hard to see him surviving beyond the end of this season at BMW. By any normal standards, a good performance will be to match Nick Heidfeld on points and in qualifying over the balance of the season, but realistically even that still won't be enough to save him. BMW has its own ideas, as simple as that.

The list of teams where Jacques might have a chance would seem to be a short one, but anything is possible in F1. Despite the obvious lack of job security, he's not worried. "I've raced all my life with pressure, so that's not a problem," he says.

Of course, Jacques could be in the same situation he was when he left BAR. There he struggled through five difficult seasons only to leave just as things were coming together, and thus missed the 2004 season when the team finally fulfilled their potential. Will the same happen with BMW? Will he share in the team's growing pains, only to be overlooked at the end of the season when a corner is about to be turned?

Jacques Villeneuve, Craig Pollock and Peter Sauber at a fashion event ahead of the 2006 BMW launch © XPB/LAT

"If that happened it would be a shame, but there's nothing I can do against that," he says. "All I can do is work as hard as I can and do the best job I can do, and then we'll see."

That's a conundrum for later in the year. In the mean time, Jacques has the start of the season to look forward to. The true potential of the new F1.06 is hard to judge, but it is certainly a good starting point.

"I'm confident that it will be better than last year, but I don't want to imagine how good it could be. The chances of being disappointed are high, if you aim too high.

"In the next few years it will become a winning team. How long it will take, I have no idea."