MONTREAL -- For a Nationwide Series rookie at Montreal, Jacques Villeneuve didn't need much time to get up to speed. He was required to attend Friday's rookie driver meeting, but decided against taking the pace-car tour, probably because Villeneuve may know the place better than any other driver in the garage area.

"I didn't go around the track," Villeneuve said. "We just had a meeting. It's not a question on how to drive the track. It's the different rules in NASCAR. They're different than open-wheel racing on the road course, so there was stuff I needed to know, as well."

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This track has always been a rough track for racing because there are so many opportunities to overtake so people will go for it. In NASCAR, that's even truer.

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JACQUES VILLENEUVE

Villeneuve was sixth-fastest of the 43 cars which made at least one lap during final practice for Saturday's NAPA Auto Parts 200. His best lap was 93.533 mph, almost exactly one mile an hour slower than Marcos Ambrose, who topped the speed chart despite having to make some repairs in between sessions for a gearbox issue.

The second of two session was hard on several cars. Ambrose, whose No. 59 Ford is sporting a retro STP paint scheme this weekend, needed some tweaks to the connections on the gearbox after his car began to show signs of smoke a couple of laps into the practice. Boris Said and Brad Coleman also brought out full-course red flags after stopping on the track with mechanical issues.

And the session came to an end when Steve Wallace's transmission broke while he was trying to traverse the back side of the course, dumping a large amount of fluid on the track. The No. 66 Chevrolet wound up on the back of a flatbed for the ride back to the garage area.

The rest of the top five included Max Papis, Scott Pruett -- who turned the quickest lap of the day in the first session -- Patrick Carpentier and Said.

But the story of the day was Villeneuve's return to the track named after his father, Gilles. The 37-year-old Quebec native finished second to teammate Damon Hill in the 1996 Formula 1 event here, and won the 1993 Formula Atlantic race. But driving a stock car on the 14-turn, 2.709-mile circuit located on a man-made island in the middle of the St. Lawrence River is a new challenge.

"This is very, very different," Villeneuve said. "There's a lot of suspension movement, it's very low grip, a lot of power. It just drives very differently. And you can't drive them aggressively. You have to drive very smoothly to go fast. It's a little bit strange." (Continued)