Jacques Villeneuve hopes qualifying for Brickyard helps attract sponsors for future NASCAR effort
INDIANAPOLIS – Jacques Villeneuve qualified Saturday for his first NASCAR Sprint Cup race since a 2008 Daytona 500 qualifier as he earned the 43rd and final qualifying spot for the Brickyard 400 at Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
Don’t expect Sunday to be his last NASCAR race.
Villeneuve, driving for Braun Racing, indicated that he is working on a NASCAR ride for the future. He did, though, also confirm in the last week that he has a ownership stake with a team awaiting Formula One approval.
Which way his career turns remains to be seen.
“There’s a lot going on, and until you have something finalized, you have to look at every opportunity that’s out there,” he said Friday at the IMS, where he has won the Indianapolis 500 and competed in the Formula One U.S. Grand Prix. “I really, really enjoy driving the NASCARs. That’s why I moved back on this side of the ocean in 2006, was to concentrate on NASCAR.
“And it’s taken a while to get going. Right now, we [had] Elkhart Lake going [in Nationwide], we’re coming here to the Brickyard. So, it’s starting to open up a little bit. It would be great if we could carry on doing more ovals.”
After his qualifying effort, Villeneuve was happy not only to make the race but hopefully make people notice Sunday that he is still racing.
“It’s important,” he said. “It’s really hard to open the doors. On road courses, it’s been easier [to get sponsorship] on Nationwide. Dollar General and the Braun team has given me a little bit of help and giving me the opportunity.”
He does not know if his F1 team will get the spot that was vacated from the U.S.-based team.
“I’m concentrating on this race weekend, so I’m not really on top of what’s happening this last week,” Villeneuve said about the Formula One effort. “When there are opportunities, you have to look at them and work hard on them. Right now, I don’t have a full ride in NASCAR, so it would be very stupid to not [explore that].” … Obviously, there’s been a lot of talks about Formula 1, and as long as this is an option, I have to keep it open.
“It’s really hard to tell you what the preference would be because you have to wait until the real opportunity is there on the table. Until there’s something full time that we can get going, I can’t really focus on one.”
Villeneuve, who won titles in the Indy-car series CART and then in Formula One, has been focused on F1 and NASCAR. He said he had some offers to run in the IndyCar Series this year.
“There were some options to do it this year, but my focus was either on NASCAR or Formula One – which are still the top two forms of racing in the world,” Villeneuve said.
In 2007, Villeneuve ran some NASCAR events for Bill Davis Racing and hoped to run the 2008 season. But the sponsorship fell through and the ride never materialized.
The 39-year-old from Montreal has 12 career NASCAR starts – seven in trucks, three in the Nationwide Series and two in Cup. His last race on an oval was at Phoenix in November 2007.
He has done little major stock-car and open-wheel racing since then.
“It was a little bit stressful to qualify,” Villeneuve said. “It’s a great challenge. … The race craft on an oval is very, very difficult.”
The only race left on his schedule as of now is the Nationwide race at Montreal next month, again with Braun.
“Most of the racing I’ve done in NASCAR over the last couple of years has been road courses,” Villeneuve said. “What I was really wanting to do was the ovals, so to come back and to be on one of the major tracks is very special.”
Villeneuve is working with Braun crew chief Trent Owens this weekend. Owens also has been his crew chief for the last few Nationwide events he has done.
“Sometimes the conversations can be a little bit confusing because it’s hard to understand what we’re both talking about because we’re using different words and different habits of working,” Villeneuve said. “But that just takes a little while to get up to speed with. We’ve been working. We’ve done Montreal twice together with the team, with Trent [as] my crew chief [and] Elkhart Lake this year.
“Now it’s quite easy to understand what we’re saying to each other.”
