The Ottawa Citizen from Ottawa, Ontario, Canada • 113

made Road America faster. Perhaps for next year the authorities will also improve the fencing between the track and the woods of Wisconsin was wide open on the back straight when I saw the deer," Robby Gordon recounted after the session. "It was HUGE! But I'm not sure whose eyes were In the qualifying session, wherein the drivers set the lap times that will determine the starting order for Sunday's race, Villeneuve improves his speed to 139.031 mph; but he is still second, just over a tenth of a second slower than the American Scott Pruett. Saturday: Track times will be quicker today. The set-ups should be better, and it is still cool at the 9 a.m.

practice session so everything brakes, engines, drivers will work better. Villeneuve, though, drops down to twelfth spot. His crew is experimenting with a new set-up more down force mainly and it is obviously not working. They switch back for the 1 1 :30 qualifying session. On his last lap, Villeneuve sets a new track record, having averaged 142.206 mph; no-one is left with a chance to try and better it.

Until the previous race, two weeks ago at Portland, Villeneuve had never qualified first, and now he has two pole positions in a row. And that last lap, like his others, is smooth; the only drama is in his timing. "Well, on the last lap you give it everything you have. Sometimes you have to go a little bit over the edge; sometimes you crash and sometimes it works. Today," he adds, chuckling, "it worked." Twenty-seven other drivers will start behind Villeneuve here at Elkhart Lake.

Altogether, they represent nineteen different racing teams (and an untold number of corporate sponsors). Jacques Villeneuve races a Reynard 951 with Ford-Cosworth power, applied to the track via Goodyear rubber, for Barry Green's Team Green -owner, Barry Green; principal sponsor, Player's Ltd. The Player's hospitality tent is just behind the Team Green racing paddock. There are a dozen or so tables each with a good compli- "I love speed," he says, "but not any kin mentary spread of racing magazines and packets of Player's Light cigarettes laid out on the grass alongside the Team Green bus. Inside, Barry Green is in an understandably upbeat mood.

Villeneuve has been driving for him since 1993, when he raced in the Atlantic Formula a traditional stepping stone on the way to Indy and Formula One racing for a team co-owned by Green. Villeneuve then graduated with them to IndyCar in 1994. When Green split with his partner to form his own IndyCar team for 1995, Villeneuve stuck with him. "You know Villeneuve was here until eight-thirty last night," says Green. "He was trying to figure out how he could rearrange the gears so that they would better suit him today.

Maybe he picked up pole position today by improving the car that much. Or maybe we picked up nothing from it. But the fact that he spent two and a half hours trying to figure it out with the team Car racing demands better teamwork than any other sport; races are won and lost in the pits as well as on the track But only the driver can translate all that cooperative effort into speed and results. "As young as he is," Green remarks a little wistfully, "to be as fast as he is around this racetrack is quite incredible. You've got to be really fluid around a track like Road America, really smooth." Gilles Villeneuve, Jacques' father, was born on January 18, 1950, in St-Jean-sur-Richelieu, thirty kilometres east of Montreal.

Seville Villeneuve and Georgette Coupal had a second son, Jacques, on November 4, 1953. Young Gilles used to love sitting on his father's lap while he drove, especially since Seville liked to drive so very fast. Seville, who worked for much of his life as a piano tuner, had a penchant for accumulating speeding tickets while making his rural house calls. When Gilles was nine maybe ten he got his first taste of actual driving, on an empty stretch of road with his father in the passenger seat. By the time Gilles was eleven, Seville was letting him blast around the fields near their home in an old pick-up truck.

When Gilles was fifteen, his father bought him a run-down 1958 MG, and Gilles coaxed it into occasional function. That same year he stole and totalled his father's new Pontiac, and then, the year after, when he got his driving licence, he also wrecked his own car, another MGA. That was on the country road to Joliette: it was the first road course Gilles would perfect, because it was the route to Joann Barthe, his girlfriend and future wife. They married on October 17, 1970; their first child, Jacques, was born on April 9, 1971, and their second, Melanie, on July 26, 1973. When Jacques was six, he was already steering the family car at sixty mph while his father, the new driver for the Ferrari Formula One team, operated si.