1,000 Greatest Drivers: Jacques Villeneuve

Great at qualifying. Less great at actually racing.

This one really takes me back to my early years as a fan as Villeneuve won the first IndyCar race I ever watched, which was the 1995 Indy 500. I don’t think I really understood what a weird race that was in hindsight because I had no context for it. I also think I was only intermittently paying attention as I recall that one of my mom’s neighbors in our apartment building set her clothes dryer on fire because they were using it without permission and I believe we were having it replaced on the day of that Indy 500. 1997 was also the first year I ever followed F1 and got into racing outside NASCAR in general thanks to being addicted to watching RPM2Night, which did a horrible job at actually capturing the important racing stories because second-tier NASCAR drivers got vastly more play than top-tier drivers in any other form of racing (although that probably changed by 2001 when ESPN lost NASCAR coverage, I think I’d already stopped watching it by then). I rooted hard for Villeneuve because I did find Michael Schumacher’s personality to be very loathsome and I was so pumped after Jerez. In retrospect, I can certainly admit that Schumacher was vastly more talented, it was never even close, and Villeneuve was overrated (even if his early BAR period is certainly a little underrated). The more I did research into his career and realized that he had only a 1-4 lead change record in his CART title season and a 0-5 lead change record in his F1 title season causes me to be even less impressed. I don’t even think he was the best driver in his CART title season! You can argue he had a second lead change in CART at Cleveland, but from what I have read, he passed Bryan Herta on that lap because Herta had a mechanical glitch; if I’m wrong, I’ll change that, but the only pass he had for the lead by my records came when he passed Michael Andretti for the lead at Nazareth before Eddie Cheever passed him for the TNL in a Foyt car. And no, Foyt wasn’t really any better then than it was at any point in the post-IndyCar reunion period (until they became a Penske satellite and started running well last year). I wrote that he was “the only full-season IndyCar champion from 1988-2015 with only one pass for the lead”. I had to put full-season because yeah, Buzz Calkins and Scott Sharp only had one lead change each in 1996, but that was a three-race “season” and not really comparable. I did end up being rather harsh here, even calling him a “hack of all trades” in his late career (I’m proud of that one but sadly not the first person to come up with that), but admittedly I suppose it’s fitting for a driver who takes so much pride in insulting other drivers, even drivers who are much better than himself.