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It's February in London, Ontario, weeks before the start of the 1995 IndyCar season, and Jacques Villeneuve is thinking he would rather be with his girlfriend in Montreal, or at home in Indianapolis, or anywhere but here, doing this. He slumps forward on the table, knocking valuable inches off his 5'6" frame, and blinks at the double line of reporters stretched before him. Sighs.
Press conferences are painful for the youthful driver from the small town of Bertierville, north of Montreal. An intensely private individual, curiously so for a budding star in the speed business, he remains uncomfortable with the notion of celebrity. Now, peering over the sum of London's sporting press, he anticipates questions. There will be the usual ones about his father. And there will be questions about the Phoenix oval, where Villeneuve himself barely escaped death in a wild crash, a crash that began deep in turn three with Hiro Matsushita and Teo Fabi brushing one another at 170 mph and spinning off together into the wall. He remembers it as if it were yesterday.
Just as I turned in I heard through the radio that the yellow was out, and at the same time I saw the guys in front of me start braking," he tells the reporters, speaking in a cultured, Monaco-French accent. "I was already 10 miles an hour quicker and I was getting closer and closer to them. So I moved even higher. And that's when I saw the car in the middle of the track. (Smiles) I'd like to say that I aimed for the space between the driver and the engine, but, really, I can't remember. I knew that if I hit the driver he would be dead. And if I hit the engine, I would be dead. I remember thinking 'poor Japanese, this is going to hurt."
In one of the most spectacular crashes in IndyCar history, the sky-blue Player's car of Jacques Villeneuve knifed into Matsushita's Lola at 119 mph, chopping it in two. Miraculously, the Japanese driver escaped with a separated shoulder, and Villeneuve walked away unscathed. Still, some of the veteran drivers complained: Villeneuve was too brash, too reckless. A danger to others.
That was April, 1994. Two months later, at...