Has F1 seen the last of Jacques Villeneuve?

Will he be back?
By Mike Lawrence @ pitpass.com (16/10/2003)
October 17 2003

Mike Lawrence is unconvinced that F1 has seen the last of Jacques Villeneuve. "The commercial value of Jacques cannot be denied," writes Mike. "The ideal way to crack America is to have an American star, Americans can identify with Jacques because he is Canadian and has won the Indianapolis 500."

Now that Formula One is over for this year, we can get on with the real excitement, next season.

The season that is yet to come is always better than the season which has just passed, and this year has been pretty good. Who would have thought that, with two races to go there three drivers in contention and the Japanese GP would have been the cliff-hanger it turned out to be?

I suspect the hand of Turk Thrust, but he is incommunicado. Before Suzuka, Turk took himself to the foothills of the Himalayas to cleanse himself spiritually at the feet of a guru. Full of surprises is Turk, though he did let slip that the ashram would be full of nubile heiresses supported by trust funds.

He phoned me before his satellite cellphone was taken from him. He said, "Above the entrance is the wisdom of ages, Que Sera Sera. That means, 'what will be, will be.' It blows my mind that such wisdom is out there."

I said, "Turk, the whole point of your being is not what will be, but how you wish the story to end.

"Are you going to give us headlines which say that Michael breaks all records, or are you going to herald a new era with Kimi?"

"You're breaking up on me, Mike. Got to give some guy big money and then we're going to spend the evening meditating and counting how many beans make five. It's a wild concept."

One thing which seems likely is that that the Bernievision digital TV set-up, put on ice after disastrous 2002 viewing figures, will be back in action in 2004. The precise terms of the revival of Bernievision are not known currently, but did you ever doubt Bernie's long-term plan?

Our editor, Chris Balfe, has made the point that: a) contracts in Formula One are not carved in granite; b) Jacques Villeneuve is free.

France Corbeil, a French-Canadian TV executive, and the guy who slapped writs on the BAR team, once wrote to me to say how much progress the Lucky Strike brand of cigarettes had made since it entered F1 with Jacques. Since he offered corroborative evidence, I believed him.

If Jacques has so much value for a sponsor, his position must be significant. How many World Champions are there in Formula One? You will need no more than two fingers for this exercise.

Put yourself in JV's place. He has more money than he can spend away. Money means different things for different people, at a certain level it becomes a way of keeping the score. There are guys in the world who own one pair of trousers, but even if you own a thousand pairs, you normally only wear one pair at a time.

Jacques is a racer and knows little outside of motor racing. Sir Stirling Moss has kept himself in the public eye more than 40 years after he ceased to be a contender, but he was always good at promotion. He has never been a smoker, but in the 1950s he appeared in ads for cigarettes with the line, I don't often smoke, but when I do it has to be Craven A.

With guidance from his father, Alfred, and his manager, Ken Gregory, Stirling became one of the first sportsmen in the world to be marketed as a brand. Apart from heavy advertising with firms like BP, he was a partner in Britain's first burger bar, was into farming chinchillas for their pelts - we are talking the 1950s - and there was the while-u-wait car respray business which he does not like speaking about. The idea was that you arrived in your black Morris Minor and drove out in a blue or green one.

The great thing about Stirling is that he has always been able to separate the public persona from the private man. On a one-to-one basis, he is one of the most charming people you could hope to meet. I have seen him surrounded by dozens of people asking for his autograph and he'll say something on the lines that its part of the job and the only thing he has going for him is a fading image.

By contrast, Jacques is known for hating the flesh-squeezing side of sponsorship, in fact his contract stipulates that he does not have to sign more than ten autographs per day. There is a big part of me which sympathises with him, but then I am not made a millionaire on the first of every month. Jacques is a driver, he is not a brand.

Jacques is a proven winner so he has that extra something. The thing that makes him a winner means that he could not possibly take a pay-cut at BAR, a team created around him. On the other hand, he could drive for any other team on a payment-for-results basis. To take a pay-cut from BAR is to lose, to take less from another team is to enter a different game.

Three racing drivers in a bar and an attractive girl enters. The guy who walks out with her is the winner and the other two are losers. It is less to do with the girl than it is to do with winning and making the other two lose.

Three racing drivers in a bar and they are alone. Who pays for the round of drinks? The loser, that's who. A team manager I know was taken to lunch by an F1 driver who was thinking of retiring. The manager said, "You're paying for the meal? Then you must be serious about retirement."

I understand that representatives from Red Bull have been seen at Jaguar Racing, which has not confirmed its second driver for 2004. Red Bull has been a phenomenally successful brand and I, for one, first heard about it, and bought it, because it sponsors Formula One.

Red Bull needs market penetration in the USA and has established racing driver scholarships. To crack the American market, you need American stars. Formula One has not had a Yankee Grand Prix winner since Mario Andretti, a quarter of a century ago, and Mario's World Championship merely proved to many Americans that one of their top drivers could cross the Atlantic and whup ass, though Zonta, Zanardi and Michael Andretti showed that it was a little more complicated than that.

There is nothing like a local hero to grab your attention. Single-handedly, Fernando Alonso has ignited Formula One in Spain. There had been Spanish drivers in F1 before but, for various reasons, none had opened the door.

I am old enough to remember Moss and Brooks winning the 1957 British GP in a Vanwall. It was the first win by a British car in a World Championship event and it was inspirational. It changed the whole ethos of British racing because it proved we could win.

It is not just nationalism, though that plays its part, it is the realisation that people with whom you can identify are capable of beating the world. It is the same in any sport, in any activity, in any country. It is easier to believe in yourself when you see an identifiably similar person doing it. Until Fernando Alonso arrived, young Spaniards had the rally driver and World Champion, Carlos Sainz, as their role model in motor sport. Now they can identify with Alonso and Formula One has taken off in Spain.

There was a Swedish GP in the World Championship, 1973-78,, in the days when Ronnie Peterson, Reine Wisell and Gunnar Nilsson were in Formula One. By the end of 1978, Reine was out of F1, Gunnar had died of cancer and Ronnie had died of injuries. The Swedish GP has not been run since.

As soon as there was one top Finnish rally driver, there was a flood of them. In the mid-1980s, more than half the world's top rally drivers were Finns and Finland has a population smaller than Chicago. We have also had two Finnish F1 World Champions, and one runner-up, and this defies statistical probability.

The point is that Finland has developed a culture of success in motor sport. A Finnish youngster can tell his careers adviser that he wants to be a racing driver and not be laughed at, in much the same way that a British youngster can say that he or she wants to be a racing car designer.

Jacques is out there like a loose cannon on deck. Americans can identify with him because he is Canadian and has won the Indianapolis 500, and currently there are not that many Americans in CART or IRL who are winning races. Formula One needs America and so does its sponsors.

How many people attended the US GP this year? I hear from a guy on one of the TV crews that there were around 125,000. Two years ago, within weeks of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, there were about 170,000. You cannot compare that to the 400,000 at the IRL and NASCAR races because the circuits are different, but the grandstand above the last turn, which is the best place to watch, was virtually empty.

The ideal way to crack America is to have an American star. Jacques is important for commercial reasons. I keep banging on about this, but where did I see a photograph of Eddie Jordan in The Sunday Times on 12th October? In the Business Section where I also discovered that, in 2002, Williams made a trading loss of £150,000 in 2002 against a profit of £1.9 million in 2001. When will I be believed when I say that you ignore the sports pages and look at the business news?

There has to be a question over Villeneuve's current form as a driver. He set pole, and led, in his first Grand Prix and won four races in his rookie year. He was World Champion in his second season and has won 11 Grands Prix, of the current field, only Michael and DC have won more races. Apart from Michael, he was the only World Champion racing in 2002 and 2003.

Five years with BAR and we have no idea how good Jacques may still be as a driver. BAR is tied with Honda, but the people at Honda today are not the same people who produced all those wonderful engines for Williams, McLaren and Lotus. Mr. Yamamoto, who learned his motor racing as a mechanic for Brabham-Honda in the 1960s has retired. Recent Honda engines have been over-weight, under-powered and unreliable.

The commercial value of Jacques Villeneuve cannot be denied. Contracts in Formula One are not carved in granite as we have seen time and again.

The big problem for Jacques remains his manager and mentor, Craig Pollock. Pollock has done well commercially for his charge, but linking him to BAR has not been great for Villeneuve's career. The story is very complicated and is for another time, but the fact remains that Jacques is without a drive and I invite you to consider who has a contract for 2004 which you would consider is carved in granite.

This article was written by Mike Lawrence at pitpass.com and is used with permission.