The 1997 F1 title winner is one among 4 drivers as a consequence of get behind the wheel of the Gibson-engined Vanwall Vandervell LMH over the course of a three-day check on the Spanish monitor beginning on Wednesday, Autosport has realized.
Villeneuve, 51, is thought to be scheduled to share the potential World Endurance Championship contender with Tom Dillmann and Esteban Guerrieri, who’ve undertaken nearly all of testing with the automotive thus far this yr, and Joao Paulo de Oliveira.
Dillmann and Guerrieri are the nominated check drivers for the Vanwall LMH developed by the German ByKolles operation, whereas de Oliveira, who received the Formulation Nippon (now Tremendous Formulation) title in 2010, has hyperlinks with the crew relationship again to his participation in German Formulation 3 in 2002.
No affirmation was forthcoming from the crew on Villeneuve’s participation within the check.
Villeneuve was half the Peugeot line-up with the 908 HDi turbodiesel LMP1 on the Le Mans 24 Hours in 2007 and ’08, ending runner-up within the second of these years with Marc Gene and Nicolas Minassian.
He outlined a need on becoming a member of Peugeot so as to add a Le Mans victory to his F1 title and 1995 Indy 500 victory and is known to nonetheless harbour aspirations on the French traditional.
Jacques Villeneuve
Photograph by: Carl Bingham / Motorsport Pictures
Villeneuve described this because the triple crown of motorsport, which extra normally incorporates the Monaco Grand Prix relatively than the F1 world championship.
The newest sportscar expertise for Villeneuve, who this yr contested the Daytona 500 NASCAR Cup blue riband on the wheel of a Group Hezeberg Ford, got here in 2019 when he took half in three endurance rounds of the Italian GT Championship driving a Ferrari 488 GT3 Evo.
The Daytona outing adopted his participation within the Whelen Euro Sequence sanctioned by NASCAR: he undertook a full marketing campaign in 2019 and half seasons in 2020 and ’21.
The Barcelona run is the newest check for the non-hybrid Vanwall, which has been up and working since late March.
It was given a shakedown on the Zweibrucken airfield earlier than shortly transferring on to Most within the Czech Republic for its first check on a race circuit.
It’s understood that ByKolles will file a minimal of 1 entry for the WEC subsequent yr below the Vanwall Racing banner.
Its try to hitch the sequence this yr from spherical two at Spa was thwarted when its entry was turned down by sequence promoter the Car Membership de l’Ouest and the FIA.
Sequence boss Frederic Lequien refused to provide particular causes for the rejection of the Vanwall, however it’s understood that considerations over ByKolles’s proper to make use of the title of the title of the previous F1 crew that received the 1958 constructors’ title and its modest document in LMP1 with its CLM P1/01 contender had been amongst them.
The LMH guidelines additionally state that an entrant should show it has an affiliation with an current automotive model.
The plans for the relaunched Vanwall marque embrace a 1000bhp hybrid super-sportscar and an excessive track-day machine, whereas it is usually understood additional automobiles are deliberate.