The contrasting Formula 1 style legacy of Canada’s Gilles and Jacques Villeneuve

Few father-son duos have left a mark on Formula 1 quite like the Villeneuves. Gilles Villeneuve, the fearless Canadian racer who became a legend with six wins at Ferrari before his passing in 1982, and his son Jacques Villeneuve, who took his talents a step further by claiming the World Championship in 1997 – put Canadian motorsport well and truly on the map.

The Villeneuves didn’t just make an impact on the track – their approach to style followed a similar pattern. Gilles was many things, but a man preoccupied with his look was never one of them. Jacques on the other hand, bleached his hair peroxide blonde after watching Trainspotting and absorbed the collective shock to his new look with visible amusement.

But both father and son somehow became icons for their look in their own right, and as F1 returns to the circuit named in Gilles’ honour, let’s unpack their distinct styles.

Gilles Villeneuve – a Ferrari icon

A French-Canadian from rural Quebec who learned car control on frozen lakes, Gilles caught the eye of Enzo Ferrari in 1977 and never looked back. Six wins and a runner-up finish in the World Championship followed for the Ferrari man, but it was his raw and fearless driving that made him a legend.

Off the track, however, Gilles didn’t quite match his ferocious driving style with his fashion choices. His look was decidedly more subdued but akin to his late seventies and early eighties era. Jeans, open collars and casual jackets became his stable style in the paddock, which reflected the Canadian’s quiet personality despite his daring profession.

While his counterparts checked into hotels, Gilles lived in his motorhome while on the road with his wife Joann and their children, Melanie and Jacques – a quiet and nomadic existence which pretty much said everything about his priorities. Fashion was a sidenote – the Ferrari race suit was his real passion.

When asked what he spent his F1 earnings on, the answer was characteristically straightforward from Gilles – not much on clothes, and not much on cars either. Instead, he channelled his spending into chasing adrenaline rushes, with the Canadian buying both a powerboat and helicopter.

After retiring from the 1981 Austrian Grand Prix, Gilles famously took off in the helicopter, hovering low over the track so he could watch the racing for a while before bowing to the paddock from the cockpit and leaving. That sight was typical Gilles – a man who could not stop being a spectacle, even when it was the furthest thing from his intentions.

Racing aesthetic

Gilles’ off-track looks were relaxed and clean, but his on-track designs with his race suits and helmets live long in the memory of many fans. His bulky, five-layer Nomex suits were thick at the shoulder, high at the collar, and featured knitted cuffs. What made it iconic on Gilles was the Ferrari red, the white roll neck visible at the collar, and his unmistakable helmet.

In the book Formula Helmet, Jacques describes his early memories of his father sitting in the motorhome with his prototype lid balanced on his knees and Crayola pencils in hand. He watched as Gilles designed his famous vivid orange and near-black design with a stylised V motif devised with Joann – one that would later inspire his son.

In 2025, his family launched a brand in his honour – with clothing, a web platform and social media presence, all built around a logo designed as a tribute to their father.

As his daughter Melanie told CTV News at the time, the brand is “a little bit vintage, but we’re super proud of the way it looks” – and given Gilles’ relative indifference to fashion, we reckon he’d have actually quite liked a few of the pieces.

The helmet inheritance

Having spent some time running around paddocks as a child, Jacques found his way back to racing after a period of throwing himself into downhill skiing in Switzerland. A CART World Championship and Indy 500 win in 1995 had given Jacques quite the reputation behind the wheel. By the time he arrived in F1 with Williams in 1996, he was also building an iconic visual identity of his own.

A driver’s helmet can say a lot about the driver who designs and wears it, and Jacques’ helmet said it all. His distinctive personality was channelled through the design – a vivid collision of pink, yellow, green and blue separated by bold black lines. As he mentions in Formula Helmet, that design likely came to him from a subconscious childhood memory, with Jacques saying: “At that time, my mother took fashion lessons, and I just randomly used her pencils to make my design… The subconscious may have played a part.”

Jacques Villeneuve – unapologetically himself

Gilles’ image could be described as measured off the track and fierce on it, but that wasn’t who Jacques was. He arrived in F1 during a great cultural shift, and he wanted to stay true to himself.

This was the mid-1990s, and while Britpop and grunge were dominating style, the F1 paddock was still filled with carefully managed corporate looks until Jacques walked into it. His oversized, baggy overalls sat wide on the shoulder and bunched at the ankle, matching the grungy streetwear he preferred off-track. Where his peers wore their fireproofs fitted and their sponsor logos pressed, Jacques looked like he had borrowed someone else’s race suit altogether.

Off the track, the look was just as deliberate. Some of the press at the time may have thought it was sloppy dress sense, but the combination of his baggy jeans, oversized unbuttoned shirts and small oval wire-framed glasses, was pure ’90s – anti-tailored and anti-corporate.

The peroxide bombshell

Arguably the most memorable part of Jacques’ look had nothing to do with what he wore. In the summer of 1997, between the Canadian and French Grands Prix, he watched Trainspotting and decided on the spot to bleach his hair blonde, telling nobody – not his management, his team, nor his sponsors.

He turned up to a pre-arranged photoshoot at Magny-Cours and absorbed the collective shock with visible amusement. “When the media wrote about me losing my marbles because I did my hair, that made me laugh” he revealed on the official F1 podcast Beyond The Grid.

Four months later, Jacques was World Champion, and the Williams team celebrated on the podium wearing yellow wigs – the peroxide having become an emblem of the entire season. But when pressed on the ‘peroxide rebel’ label in later years, Jacques pushed back. He wasn’t a rebel, he insisted. He simply refused to perform a version of himself that had been written by someone else. In that respect, he was very much his father’s son.