A pretender in the wings

EYEBROWS were raised when Jacques Villeneuve turned up in the Formula One paddock, sloping around with his shirt untucked and the laces of his driving boots hanging loose a slacker among the playboys.

Yet no one has worked harder than Villeneuve to ensure that the 1996 season lived up to its promise. The presence of the combative French-Canadian rookie alongside Damon Hill added the contrast of style and attitude necessary to sustain a drama in 16 episodes, and it is Villeneuve who will relish the task of setting the parameters for tomorrow's final act in Japan by going all out to win the race in the hope of becoming the first man to win the world championship in his debut season.

Putting Villeneuve and Hill together in the best ears ensured a poignant subtext to the race for the world championship. Each is what the Italians call a figlio d'arte: a son of the art. But that is virtually the only thing they share. The very different ways in which the two men cope with the burden of following famous fathers into the sport set the tone of whole year.

Hill was 15 when he lost his father. Villeneuve was 11. Neither of them had time to build a relationship, particularly with fathers who spent most of their lives on the road. The contrast between Hill's touchingly painful efforts to define himself in Graham's shadow and Villeneuve's utterly matter-of-fact public attitude to the memory of Gilles says nothing at all about their respective qualities as sons or as men, but everything about what it costs them to be where they are.

Jacques Villeneuve is his own man, as he made bracingly clear when I asked him, before the season started, how he responded to the endless questioning about his father. "The first time I was asked it surprised me," he said. "I mean I think about my father when I'm with my mother or my sister or with people who knew him when he was alive. But when I'm working, there's no room for that. I wouldn't be thinking about him at that moment if he were alive, so why should I think about him just because he's dead? Look, for sure I'm super-proud of my dad. Of course I am. But what do they want me to do? Burst into tears at the thought of his memory every time I see the chequered flag? Ridiculous."

The evidence of the mettle behind this unsentimental attitude was on show during the first weekend of the season, in Australia in March, when he set the fastest time in his first Formula One practice session, took pole position in qualifying, and led most of the race before an oil leak relegated him to second place behind Hill. If you listened closely to the post-race words of Patrick Head, his team's technical director, you could get a sense of the way things were going to work out for both drivers in the months ahead.

"I'm mightily impressed," Head said. "Obviously, he's very, very talented. We know Damon very well and we know how he responds to certain things. It's great to see that Jacques just loves his racing. He's got a grin all over his face. It isn't stressful for him. It's natural, as a way of life. I think he'd hate to have a proper job. So he's a pleasure to work with."

Such a pleasure, in fact, that he will be working with the team again next season, whereas Hill will not.

Villeneuve has something of his father's cherubic looks, and he certainly smiles a lot, but he is a hard little man who is willing to play the percentages. "He's completely unlike his father in his personality on the track," Stirling Moss said after the race in Melbourne. "He has his father's skill, but he's got an older head on his shoulders."

For all his street style, Villeneuve has a sharp understanding of his own value. When he decided to take racing seriously, he hired a manager who would be dedicated to his cause. Craig Pollock had been his ski instructor at school in Switzerland; in the paddock they are seldom more than a few yards apart.

Together they plotted the route progress into Formula One, enlisting the aid of Julian Jakobi, formerly Ayrton Senna's business manager, to negotiate contracts and to take care of matters such as registering Villeneuve's image in order to ensure that the manufacturers of video games, for example, cannot profit from his achievements without paying royalties.

Less endearingly, they attempted to deter a reputable author from writing an unsanctioned biography by cutting off his access to family and team sources. The reason for this is not to preserve Villeneuve's privacy, but in order to give a free run to an authorised book, which will be out in time for the Christmas market.

Villeneuve's aggression is matched by that of his race engineer, Jock Clear, a 33-year-old mechanical engineering graduate who learnt his trade with Lola, Benetton and Lotus, and plays rugby in his spare time. The tone of the season was established during the opening race when Clear saw Hill leaving the pits just ahead of his own driver and shouted to Villeneuve over the intercom: "There he is, go and get him."

They make a formidably competitive team, more obviously so than the combination of Hill and his engineer, the younger, quieter, less experienced Tim Preston.

While Villeneuve was slogging through 5,000 miles of pre-season testing, people who assumed that Hill's seniority entitled him to preferential treatment kept asking the new man if he was prepared to accept a subordinate role.

"There's no way I would race as a number two," was the brusque reply, although he qualified it by saying that he himself wasn't looking for an unfair advantage and that he was happy to race anybody on equal terms.

Still, it has been a learning year.

After that incendiary start at Melbourne he fell behind Hill, with four wins at Nurburgring, Silverstone, Budapest and Estoril - to set against his team-mate's seven. But his style has been increasingly impressive. If the outside-lane overtaking manoeuvre he pulled on Schumacher around the Parabolica curve in Portugal last month wasn't quite the epiphany some suggested, it was certainly enough to tell the outgoing world champion where his main opposition will come from next season, whether the Williams-Renault is carrying the number one on its nose or not.