Jacques Villeneuve's F1 return: 'I left the pits and my brain went back 17 years'

Next week is the 25th anniversary of the 1997 European GP, an event that saw Jacques Villeneuve clinch the world championship for Williams after surviving an infamous assault from Michael Schumacher.

A few weeks ago former Williams engine supplier Renault gave Villeneuve a chance to celebrate his title success by giving him an outing at Monza in the 2021 Alpine A521. It was also a return to the Enstone outfit that Villeneuve drove for briefly at the end of 2004, as team-mate to Fernando Alonso.

It might not have been a current high-downforce car, but it certainly wasn’t a worn-out old street demo machine as used by various teams.

The model with which Esteban Ocon won last year’s Hungarian GP, the A521 has been maintained in operational use mainly to allow Alpine young drivers Oscar Piastri and Jack Doohan to gain F1 mileage outside the tight restrictions imposed on testing of current machinery.

After Villeneuve’s outing it was driven by Nyck de Vries and Antonio Giovinazzi in Budapest before the team settled on Pierre Gasly as a 2023 driver.

Monza was in essence a promotional stunt put together in conjunction with Canal+, one of the channels for whom Villeneuve serves as a pundit. He wasn’t the only man associated with the network to have a go, while Ocon also did a few laps.

But given that this was the first time he’d driven a near-contemporary car since he was dropped by BMW Sauber in the middle of 2006 it was a big day for the Canadian, who never officially retired from F1, and still races whenever he can find a drive.

In total he ran 15 laps, in three batches of three flying laps bracketed by in and out laps. It was just enough to give him a taste of what a current F1 car is like – and was also pretty much the limit physically for a 51-year-old who has stayed fit but is not embedded in the sort of training regime that drivers undertake these days.

Villeneuve has raced in multiple disciplines since 2006, and in 2014 he even had a return to single-seaters at the Indy 500. But an F1 car is something different.

“You get out of the pits and your brain goes back to 16 years ago, or 17 years ago, because I didn’t do Monza in 2006,” he told Motor Sport. “And the habits, braking, lines, how the car should react, it’s as if you haven’t been away.

“It’s really strange, how those memories that you don’t know are there suddenly they just come out on their own. But if you try to get those memories by themselves, they don’t exist. It needs to happen on its own.”

He clearly enjoyed every minute of the experience: “I knew it was going to be fun. I knew that the cars were mental in the high-speed. And that’s exactly how it was.

“What was nice was the ride was good, the cars weren’t as stiff as the ones I used to drive. The straight line was quite smooth, you could see the corners coming, and it made it a bit easier to concentrate.

“The low-speed was fine, and I trusted the car in the high-speed. So it was just a question of pushing the body limit more than the car limit. And it was fun, because it’s been 16 years since 2006, and I’ve been driving mainly NASCAR lately. It’s two opposite worlds.”

“I was on the limit physically, which wasn’t the case in the past”

So just how much more could he have got from the car?

“It’s hard to say, because I wasn’t on the ragged edge. When I was racing, I was on the limit of the car. I still had a little bit to go there. Not much, I was close to it. And also physically, I was also on the limit, which wasn’t the case in the past.

“I probably would have gotten in a painful state, before I could get the most out of the car. That would have been the limiting factor.”

Steering wheels have become far more complex pieces of kit since 2006, but Villeneuve didn’t have the distraction of having to make adjustments.

“Yeah, there’s no point to go through the dials. That’s more when you fine tune a little bit. I could actually just focus on driving. These cars are big and heavy. But the aero is killer, and all the systems, everything is just perfect.”