The Ottawa Citizen from Ottawa, Ontario, Canada • 114

of speed. Speed when you feel the limits, and you have to push beyond' the foot pedals. Gilles Villeneuve died on May 8, 1982, flung from the wreckage of his number 27 Ferrari during qualifying for the Belgian Grand Prix; his son Jacques was eleven years old. By that time, Jacques Villeneuve had already stopped watching his father race; his younger sister Melanie enjoyed it, but he could not. "He was old enough to be aware of the danger, and it made him nervous," his mother, Joann, explains from Monaco, where the children were raised and where she still lives.

"But, you know, if you are afraid of spiders as a child it does not mean that you will be afraid of them for the rest of your life. "Jacques always wanted to be a race-car driver. Part of that comes from having grown up with it. I never discouraged him, but I did try to give him as many different options as I could. He went to a very good private school in Switzerland." The spiffy international college, called "Beausoleil," is near Gstaadt, some fifteen minutes from Lake Geneva.

Jacques did not finish his schooling, however. At the age of fifteen, he flew to Canada to attend a three-day race-driving course at the Jim Russell school at Mont-Tremblant. (His father went to the same school on his quest for a racing licence in 1 973, at the age of twenty-three.) The next year he attended the Spenard-David racing school, in Shannonville, Ontario, honing his skills further under the direction of Richard Spenard, his father's team-mate in Formula Adantic in 1977. From there, Jacques began his career in Italy, racing first in Alfa Romeo touring cars and then graduating at the age of seventeen to the Italian Formula Three series. In Italy, where people follow motor racing the way Montrealers do hockey, and where the fans of Ferrari, the tifosi as they are known, consider the Formula One World Championship their entitlement, much as Montrealers regard the Stanley Cup, Gilles Villeneuve their Villanova- ranks first in the surveys of people's favourite Fl drivers of all time (yes, they do that there).

"In a way, I miss not having gone to university," Villeneuve says. "I was getting good grades at Beausoleil. I was doing maths and physics and I found that very enjoyable. And it's a fun life when you're a kid with other kids at a boarding school. But when I started racing, the school thought it best to kick me out, because it wasn't fair to the other students.

He was away too often. And that was it. "The F3 circuit was fairly friendly. I was a young kid having fun. The older drivers on the circuit were a bit tougher on themselves.

But they were okay with me." Villeneuve pauses and laughs, "I was just a little kid playing basically." Joann Villeneuve watches all her son's races from Monaco, where they are broadcast live on Eurosport. "I would not say that I enjoy watching them," she says, "but I am very proud of his success. Whatever happened to his father well, Jacques is perfectly aware of it but it is a different thing for him than the rest of us. Race-car drivers, I have learned, seem to be capable of disassociating such events. They have a very different mind than others do.

They don't see these things in the same way at all." Sunday: Race day. Some 75,000 fans will attend today's race. Crawling towards Road America, wedged between a white Cadillac, windows tinted black, with licence plates that read "COWGIRL," and a woman driving her Harley-Davidson helmedess, it is clear that the local Wisconsin roads were not conceived for this, what turns out to be the largest gathering for a sporting event in the history of the state. Things are not going well for Villeneuve and Team Green this morning, either. Villeneuve's car, the number 27 Reynard-Ford, has inexplicably developed gear-shifting problems overnight.

The mood in the hospitality tent is a little tense. But Craig Pollock, Jacques Villeneuve's manager, is taking die Sunday-morning developments in stride. Pollock, a handsome and dapper Scot, lived most of his life in Switzerland before settling in Indiana, near Indianapolis, like Villeneuve and almost everyone else involved in this sport. Jacques Villeneuve is the only driver Pollock has managed. "The reason I got to know Jacques Villeneuve was that I was his teacher," Pollock explains.

He was the director of sports administration at College Beausoleil in 1 982. "He was eleven years old then, just a little brat. That was a pretty bad year for him." Pollock pauses, dropping the subject. "It was pretty evident to us at the school that Jacques was destined to do something with his speed. Even the way he skied he was exceptionally fast and talented." They lost touch when Pollock left teaching shortly thereafter, and switched to business motorsports promotions which involved him in the Formula One circus.

They met again in 1991 at the Monaco Grand Prix. Run through the temporarily converted streets of Monte Carlo, it is the most glamorous of the Formula One races. Jacques, who was in Formula Three in Italy, had been invited to make an appearance. Pollock bumped into him in the paddock. Pollock took him out that night was dressed in a camel overcoat, looking a real scrufF.

He was a bit and introduced him to some of his Formula One friends. Villeneuve returned to A i tSiBBSSl (left) at the Molson Indy; manager Craig Pollock (above, far right) and Team Green owner Barry Green (second from right); (right) Villeneuve's girlfriend, Sandrine Gros d'Aillon. "The more success you have the more others want you" 1 ITT, jwdj' 1 1 Saturday Night September 1995 33.