After a year out of the sport, Jacques returned for three races with Renault at the end of last season before beginning his stint at SAUBER PETRONAS.

In what is increasingly being perceived as a “young man's sport”, Jacques is now one of the senior figures on the grid. However, refreshed and apparently revitalized by his spell on the sidelines, Jacques is sure that he is still capable of repeating his 1997 World Championship triumph.

"I've done it once, I can do it again," JV told F1-Racing magazine. "There’s no time limit. I feel like a baby, like it's 1996 again.

"There's plenty of time ahead of me," he continued. "If something’s easy, then it's no fun. I just want to be fighting people the whole time."

Jacques also gave short shrift to suggestions that he made heavy weather of winning the '97 title.

"At the end of the day, we won it – that's all that matters. In 1997, our car started the season better than Ferrari's, but then we didn’t make any progress. Halfway through the year, Michael had caught us and pushed ahead and we needed to react. For the second half of the season, the two teams were very finely balanced and we had to fight all the way to the last race."

Paddock folklore claims that then Williams Technical Director Patrick Head believed that JV should have won the title earlier in the season, but Jacques was unconcerned by those sentiments.

"He was always getting more involved with the second car because (Williams team-mate Heinz-Harald) Frentzen was always trying to keep Patrick happy. But look how it screwed Frentzen’s year. We did better than him – by a long way – yet he was running the settings that Patrick wanted all season.

"I don't think it's a fair comment. But why should I care? What matters is that I won in the end and in an exciting way. That made it more important. What’s wrong with that? I'm quite happy with the way it worked out."