INDIANAPOLIS – There is gray in the sideburns now, and a home truth comes with it. Time never sleeps, it says. History never stops filling up on it.
That’s where the Kid Champ lives now, smiling out at you from the sepia tones of 1995.
In his place is the 2010 version of Jacques Villeneuve, looking around the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and marveling at how completely its history has absorbed his younger self. Can it really be 15 years since he won the Indianapolis 500 here, dark curls spilling from beneath his cap? Is it really a decade-and-a-half since he chugged the milk in Victory Lane, rallying from two laps down in the final hurrah before the Split ushered in a dozen years in the wilderness for open-wheel racing in America?
“It’s an amazing memory,” says Villeneuve, 39. “And to come back here on the oval for the Brickyard 400 is amazing.”
If nothing else, it illustrates just how far away 1995 really is.
That May, Villeneuve was a 24-year-old prodigy, the son of Gilles Villeneuve and center stage in IndyCar’s bright new constellation. After winning Indy, he went on win the CART points title; a year later, he was racing for Williams in Formula One, and the year after that, at 26, he won the World Driving Championship.
After that, the Kid Champ passed into history. Williams didn’t make him an offer for the next year, so he jumped to BAR, where he never finished higher than fifth in F1 again.
Then it was back to America in 2006, and the last major racing discipline out there.
“I really, really enjoy driving the NASCARs,” Villeneuve said Friday. “That’s why I moved back on this side of the ocean in 2006. And it’s taken awhile to get it going.”
It has. Since moving back, Villeneuve’s portfolio includes a handful of truck and Nationwide series starts, most of them on road courses, plus two Sprint Cup starts, both in 2007. And at first, it was a challenge to learn how to communicate.
“The way you set the car up, talking with the crew chief using inches instead of millimeters; … sometimes the conversations can be a little bit confusing,” Villeneuve says. “It’s hard to understand what we’re both talking about because we’re using different words and different habits of working. So that just takes a little while to get up to speed.”
And now?
Now he and crew chief Trent Owens are on the same wavelength, more or less, and Villeneuve is back on Indy’s fabled squared-jawed oval for the first time since ’95. On one level it’s a breakthrough opportunity for a driver who hasn’t run many ovals in NASCAR; on another, it’s a chance to find useful work for all that Kid Champ history.
“The one thing that can be helpful is the memory of how it’s a long race and a lot happens on this track,” he says. “There’s no point in going crazy early on. In 1995, within the first 30 laps, two laps were taken away from us because we got a penalty, and we had to catch back those two laps. This is definitely a track where you have to bide your time.”
On the other hand, time is of the essence. It’s been 15 years since Villeneuve turned a wheel on the most capricious oval track in world, and then it was in an IndyCar. A Cup car is a different animal altogether.
“The pure driving will be different than in an IndyCar because the whole lap, in qualifying anyway, was flat out, with just a little lift in the race,” Villeneuve says. “In the NASCAR, you have to brake. And I have no idea how much braking you need.
“So that will take a few laps to figure out what I should be doing. Until it gets to that point, you can’t work on the setup, because you’re not actually driving the car on its limits or close to its limits.”
And after he gets the setup, he has to qualify. And with rain in the forecast …
“Hopefully it won’t rain,” Villeneuve says.
Time will tell. As ever.
