Jacques Villeneuve is still a spoiled brat

After winning the Formula One championship back in 1997, Jacques Villeneuve and manager Craig Pollock convened a brief press conference at the airport on their way out of Spain.

While Pollock bustled around getting things ready, Villeneuve sat slumped in his chair in his usual attitude of grungy hostility to the universe. I was standing nearby when Villeneuve mumbled something to Pollock that I couldn’t quite hear.

“Stop acting like a spoiled brat,” Pollock snapped. “It’s part of the job.”

Villeneuve is 41 now and his once-promising career is a half-forgotten ruin: a couple of good seasons followed by a whole lot of failure and more than a few childish tantrums – but he’s still a spoiled brat.

You could put everything Villeneuve knows about the struggle to pay tuition – the struggle of life in general – in a thimble, with room to spare. This is the privileged Little Prince who got his education at a Swiss boarding school, then parlayed some talent and his father’s name into a ride with what was then an excellent Williams team.

This is the guy who once signed a contract with Euro Disney that would have fed the population of Burkina Faso for a year. Who made himself so hated by his own pit crew that by the time he left BAR, he was lucky they didn’t drive nails into his tires. Who lived in Monaco so he didn’t have to pay taxes on his millions. Who has spent most of his adult life in a cocoon of beautiful women, fast cars, large yachts and tax havens.



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