CART 1995 Championship

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In his second year in CART PPG IndyCar World Series Villeneuve won the Championship. Racing for Player's Green Team, he scored 172 points and took 4 wins.


The first victory was acquired at the first race of the season, the "Marlboro Grand Prix of Miami presented by Toyota". The race took place at the temporary street course in Miami's Bicentennial Park, along Biscayne Boulevard.


Villeneuve's most significant victory, was at the famous race of "Indianapolis 500".


During the last laps, Jacques Villeneuve was 2nd behind Scot Goodyear. Despite a 2-laps-down penalty he managed to take the lead when Goodyear was penalized for illegally passing the pace car during the restart of the race. So, at the age of 24 he became the youngest driver to win the historical Indy 500.


Villeneuve's victory in the "Brickyard" was the passport in order to attract the interest of Frank Williams himself. In July he made his first private test drive for Williams Grand Prix and after extensive testing during winter he signed a 2+1 years contract .
Many years later Frank Williams confessed about what he and Patrick Head first saw in Villeneuve when he tested for the team, prior to hire him.
"He had clearly outstanding car control and speed," Williams recalls. "In testing he adapted to all the European Grand Prix circuits very quickly. And at the same time he had done quite a bit of racing in America and we always believed that any man who's raced around Indy at over 200 miles an hour, and also run 800 to 900 horsepower turbo cars and won consistently with them, was a bit of a winner. So we thought we'd give him a bit of a go."


After his first successful F1 test, Villeneuve won one of the most breathtaking CART races, the Budweiser Grand Prix of Cleveland in Burke Airport, where he passed Robby Gordon and Michael Andretti on a single move during the last lap.






Villeneuve was the last CART IndyCar World Series champion before the 1996 split and creation of two rival series: The Indy Racing League (IRL) and the ChampCar World Series.