Hill, Villeneuve in no-holds-barred battle for the title

JACQUES Villeneuve's victory over teammate Damon Hill in Sunday's Hungarian Grand Prix has cleared the decks for a no-holds-barred sprint for the world championship between the two Williams drivers over the remaining four races of the season.

Although Hill unquestionably remains the favourite and slightly faster of the two, his 17 point advantage over Villeneuve leaves him by no means impregnable and there will certainly be no team orders to favour either driver now that they are free from any third party challenge.

It would only take another couple of bad starts - or another mechanical failure - to put Hill's title hopes in a tight mathematical corner with very little room for maneouvre.

In such an event, Villeneuve could make history by becoming the first driver to win the championship in his debut season at the wheel of a grand prix car.

"Damon and Jacques have been told quite specifically the only team orders are not to take each other off the circuit," said a Williams insider before Sunday's race. "Apart from that, they are free to get on with it."

This understandable reluctance to impose team orders is not simply a matter of contractual obligation - both Hill and Villeneuve enjoy absolutely equal status - but a reflection of Frank Williams's passionate belief his drivers are entitled to race each other with the same zeal they focus against other drivers.

Ironically, this strategy has worked against Williams in the past.

In 1986, Nigel Mansell and Nelson Piquet were allowed to take championship points off each other throughout a close-fought season. But when Mansell suffered a spectacular 190 m.p.h. tyre deflation in the final race of the season at Adelaide, and Piquet was obliged to make a precautionary pit stop to check the state of his own rubber, the title fell from their grasp to be scooped up by McLaren's driver Alain Prost.

This PR debacle certainly did not amuse the elderly Honda founder, Soichiro Honda, whose company provided the Williams team's engines, and who had made a special journey from Japan to watch one of their drivers win the championship.

Many believe that Honda concluded Williams had mismanaged their strategy and, 12 months later, the Japanese car maker prematurely terminated its deal with the British team.

By contrast, there have been situations where drivers have been content to play second-fiddle to their team-mates, thereby relinquishing their chances of world championship glory. Ironically, one of those was Jacques Villeneuve's late father, Gilles, who dutifully sat in the wheeltracks of his Ferrari team-mate Jody Scheckter in the 1979 Italian Grand Prix, allowing the South African the unchallenged victory which guaranteed him that precious title crown.

In those days, standing Ferrari team orders demanded that drivers hold position in the order they were when the cars assumed first and second places in the race.

Three years later, Gilles Villeneuve's team-mate Didier Pironi broke that rule to win the 1982 San Marino Grand Prix.

Hill and Jacques Villeneuve will be happy that no such factors exist to constrain their performance over the next four races. The fans should be happy too, for without the Williams duo battling each other there might be precious little in the way of close racing given the relative uncompetitiveness of their key rivals.