By Phil Huff
January 23 2003

Last year's Lucky Strike British American Racing Honda racer was an Indycar, not a Formula One car, says outspoken team driver Jacques Villeneuve. "We had an Indycar instead of a Formula One, it was designed with an Indycar mentality," said the 31-year-old French Canadian, perhaps not endearing himself to new CART team owner and long time friend Craig Pollock.

"They had the idea that it was 'good enough' type of thing rather than trying to make everything perfect. The car was not up to F1 standard, that is all."

After four disappointing seasons with the Brackley-based team, though, Jacques is finally looking into 2003 with some confidence. They have a new engineering structure, a new designer, and the impressive and sleek 005 racer penned by ex-Williams specialist, Geoff Willis.

As far as Jacques is concerned, he is willing to see out the final installation of a lucrative three-year contract - despite intense differences with new team boss David Richards - so long as the car is good.

"I'm confident," he says. "Last winter I was saying I don't have any expectations - and that was probably a good thing," he smiles. "There wasn't anything good about it," Jacques adds of the season past. "At least '99 was to be remembered - this year didn't even exist, just empty."

Jacques is back up and running at the Circuit de Catalunya with testing this week, the first time he's agreed to complete a full three-day BAR development session since the dismal first season.

He has a new English team-mate, Jenson Button, to beat but the Canadian makes it clear his respect for the 22-year-old is reserved.

Villeneuve thinks the slowly-fading trend of hiring untried rookies has, along with Michael Schumacher's Ferrari dominance, "destroyed Formula One."

"A lot of people just lost interest in F1 because nobody was really racing," he says. "For a while it was if you were young, you had a contract, it didn't matter how good or how intelligent you were. It didn't even matter if you had good racecraft or not, cheap and young and they put you in a race car - it has destroyed Formula One."

But while his new working relationship with Jenson Button is already strained, Villeneuve is furious with BAR boss David Richards - the man who replaced his mentor and manager Craig Pollock - for planting stories in the press.

"I found it very unfair," says Jacques. "The pressure that was put in the media by the team was unfair because I never brought the team down in four years when I could easy have. I stuck with them."

Richards told the media it was 'unwise' for BAR to have such an expensive driver on their books in a re-building phase. He later urged Jacques, with the help of the press, to head back to CART Racing.