FRESH LOOK AT RIVALRY
Villeneuve-Schumi re-examined
It happened on Oct. 26, 1997, on the 48th lap of the race at Jerez de la Frontera, Spain, on what was known as the Dry Sack curve.
I was there, red-eyed from the thick tobacco spoke in the press gallery, where the smoke from hundreds of Gitanes, Gauloises, Marlboros, cigars and pipes had turned the plate-glass windows orange with nicotine.
Or perhaps it was fatigue: I had arrived in Spain the Wednesday before the race and found that I was able to book a room in Jerez for that night only. The race had been moved at the last moment from Estoril, in Portugal, to the Circuito de Jerez, a track that was meant for motorcycle racing. Jerez, a smallish Spanish city, was in no way ready for the influx of the Formula One circus, with the German Michael Schumacher and Canadian Jacques Villeneuve battling for the drivers’ championship and tens of thousands of German fans on hand to cheer their hero.
The desk clerk at my hotel in Jerez was helpful. He spent half an hour on the phone and finally located a room in Cadiz, a mere 40 kilometres away. I solved the transport problem by rising at 5 a.m. every morning to meet a friendly cabbie who took me to the track ahead of the nightmarish traffic. In the evening, I took a train back to Cadiz.
Facilities at the track were almost non-existent. The only food available on race day was from a tiny Spanish woman selling waffles. I stood in line for an hour with hundreds of German fans for the two waffles that would get me through a 16-hour day.
Around 7 that morning, a bespectacled young man in blue jeans and a jean jacket was spotted in a rented Opel, searching up and down the rows for a parking spot. He was Jacques Villeneuve, soon to be champion of the world. Not long after, his rival, Michael Schumacher, arrived in a chauffeur-driven Mercedes. The choice of transport was very much in keeping with the personality of the two drivers, as we perceived them at the time: the arrogant and aloof Schumacher, the down-to-earth, man-of-thepeople Villeneuve.
The race, for once in a sport that is too often predictable, was a thriller. Villeneuve, needing to finish one point ahead of Schumacher to win the title, started from the pole position but fell five seconds behind early and did not begin to close ground on Schumacher until both men came in for fresh tires on the 21st lap. He was less than a second behind and had made two attempts to overtake Schumacher when he was held up by a slower driver. After a second pit stop, Villeneuve was 2.590 seconds behind after the 45th lap when he began to reel in the red Ferrari.
It was soon apparent that Villeneuve had too much car. By the 48th lap, he was 15 metres behind when he saw that Schumacher had failed to close off the inside going into the Dry Sack curve. Villeneuve went for it. Schumacher swerved to slam the door and slammed into Villeneuve instead — but it was Schumacher who went off into deep gravel on the left side of the track instead. We had a clear view from the press box as Schumacher sat there, spinning his wheels in the gravel as Villeneuve drove off to the championship.
It wasn’t entirely in the bag even then. Villeneuve had to nurse his damaged car through another 21 laps to get the single point he needed to win the title with Schumacher out of the race — and he had to hold Schumacher’s teammate Eddie Irvine at bay, because Irvine had vowed to do whatever he had to do to ensure that Schumacher won.
Villeneuve stayed ahead of Irvine. Under a grey sky in Jerez, the championship was his.
“It takes a little while to sink in,” Villeneuve said after. “Then you come in and you see all the faces, all the guys on my team. It feels great. I’m proud to be a Canadian. These are people who have been waking up early all season long so they can see me race, and so many times I’ve disappointed them.”
Villeneuve was striking exactly the right note, humility in victory. It seemed like a clear-cut victory for good over evil — or, at the very least, the good guy over the bad guy. Instead, as it turned out, almost everything we learned that day in Jerez was upside down except for the fact that Villeneuve did win the title.
From that point on, the careers of the two men diverged sharply, but not in a way that anyone who covered the race in Jerez might have anticipated. The first sign that all was not quite as it seemed with Villeneuve came a day later, as we were leaving Jerez. Villeneuve’s manager, Craig Pollock, had organized an impromptu press conference at the airport. Villeneuve, wearing dark glasses and plainly hung over, was complaining bitterly. I was close enough to the podium to hear what Pollock said to him: “Stop acting like a spoiled brat.”
In truth, Villeneuve had only just started to act like a spoiled brat. He was on top of the world that day in Jerez, winning the F1 title only two years after winning the last CART IndyCar World Series championship. He had won seven races that season and four as a rookie the previous year.
Villeneuve would never win another race in F1.
The next year, he struggled with an underpowered Mecacrome engine. Then came the move that was either spectacularly daring or spectacularly arrogant, depending on how you see it. Villeneuve left Williams to join the new British American Racing team, founded in part by Pollock. There were all sort of wild predictions about BAR’s soaring future, but the new team retired from the first 11 races of the season and failed to score a single championship point.
In 2000, Villeneuve scored in the points in seven races and it seemed BAR’s fortunes had turned, but in 2001 he was involved in a crash at the Australian Grand Prix in which a track marshal was killed by a stray tire. Villeneuve did finish on the podium in Spain and Germany, the last podium finish of his once-promising career.
By 2003, when Jenson Button joined the BAR team, a different Villeneuve personality had emerged. He greeted Button with a vicious put-down, ridiculing him as a “member of a boy band.” The characterization was both unfair and wrong — Button would outdrive Villeneuve that season and after. By the time Villeneuve was replaced by Takuma Sato before the last race in Japan that season, he was out of favour with his own pit crew.
Button would go on to win the drivers’ title in 2009 and finish second in 2011 and he is still driving in Formula One today, while Villeneuve was out of F1 after a couple of unsatisfactory seasons with Sauber in 2005 and 2006. Fittingly, perhaps, Villeneuve’s last F1 race ended with a crash at the German Grand Prix.
But the real story is what happened to Michael Schumacher after that dismal ending in 1997. He would go on to become the greatest driver in the history of the sport. Along the way, he would prove himself a gracious champion and emerge as what he was all along, a working-class hero who made it to the top, the polar opposite of Jacques Villeneuve, the wealthy, privileged product of Swiss boarding schools.
No one can deny Villeneuve his single world championship. But as we know now, the good guy was the one who lost that day in Jerez.
By 2003, when Jenson Button joined the BAR team, a different Villeneuve personality had emerged.