Austrian Grand Prix Review

There were indeed two sides to the controversy of Barrichello letting Schumacher take the win in the last few yards of the race. From the most cold-blooded, brazenly pragmatic perspective, the fact is that Ferrari's goal is to bring home both the drivers' and constructors' championships. Schumacher is the anointed one to take the drivers' title, and, by virtue of his 19-point lead going into Austria, justifiably so. Barrichello is contractually the German's number two, to help his team leader to the crown.

And whilst the superiority of the Ferrari F2002 is such that regardless of whether Schumi finished 1st or 2nd at the A1-Ring, he will probably be clinching the title come Magny-Cours anyway, the harsh reality is that anything can conceivably happen in Formula One, and should Michael lose the title to one of the Williams drivers by 4 points or less, then the Ferrari hierarchy would have looked incredibly silly not to have taken the course of action they chose here.

Last year in Austria, Rubens had done exactly the same thing, at just about the same distance away from the finish line. But on that occasion, the Championship race was a lot closer, and David Coulthard was a few metres ahead, taking the win. The gift was for 2nd place only. There is an aura, a prestige attached to a victory that is not accorded to a mere podium place. The statistics record a driver's number of wins, not his number of 2nd places. When team orders deny a driver of his rightful number in the 'wins' column, there seems a greater injustice in that.

Mika Salo knows all about it. He was the moral victor of the 1999 German GP when, deputising for the injured Schumacher, he was forced to let Eddie Irvine take the win. He took home the winner's trophy, and Barrichello will too, but neither of them won the race. As it stands, Salo has never, and may never, win a Grand Prix. Yet it is arguable that he was lucky to be in that position in the first place, considering firstly Michael's broken leg and then Mika Hakkinen's misfortunes during that Hockenheim race.

Furthermore, when Michael slipped Eddie the win, it was in the penultimate race of a very closely-fought championship. In Austria, we were only a third of the way through this year's title, with Schumacher having already won four of the first five, and the Ferrari looking invincible. Williams had been nowhere at Imola; they had been nowhere at Barcelona; they were nowhere in Austria, where they expected to be closer. It will take a miracle to make the rest of this championship even half-competitive.

In addition, it should be pointed out that Ferrari's team orders have never actually made enough of a difference to be said to have won them a title. In 1999 Irvine was pipped at the post, and in 2000 and 2001 Schumacher was good enough to have done it on his own, team orders or otherwise. So why impose them here? Added to that the general esteem in which Rubens is held throughout the paddock, and the last-minute decision to impose team orders here seemed particularly heartless.

Modern Formula 1, it seems, faces a crisis of conscience. Wins have been gifted before, as 'thank-yous' (Ayrton Senna and Gerhard Berger in Japan 1991 springs to mind), and team orders have been applied as tactics in races that have actually made the races more exciting (Irvine and Schumacher in Japan 1997 and Malaysia 1999 are examples). But where is the line crossed from team tactics to result rigging? Wherever this line may be, Ferrari crossed it on the 12th of May, 2002. The global outcry at these events must not go unnoticed.

Apart from the Championship context of this race that made team orders seem especially merciless, it was also the way in which the whole farce was played out that left an awfully sour taste. Why did Jean Todt have to leave it until the last lap to pass a note to Ross Brawn? Why could they not have asked Barrichello to move over five laps from home? Why did they have to leave everyone on the edge of their seat thinking that Rubens was going to win this one, right until the last moment?

Then there were the drivers' antics on the podium and in the press conference. First Rubens was on the top step; then both of them were on the top step. The German anthem was rightfully played. Michael then let Rubens sit in the middle for the press conference. To put it mildly, it made a complete mockery of the formalities. Schumacher may not have been in the decision-making process this time, but he did not have to drive past Rubens either.

If he was man enough to play out the team orders, he should have been man enough to take the public consequences of it; that is, stand on the top step and accept the win. While Schumacher did himself a great deal of credit by genuinely stating his remorse, intimating his shame at winning this way, and explaining the cold logic, there was still an inherent contradiction. If you took his word, then what he said was that he believed in such as thing as a moral victor of the race, and that moral victor was Rubens.

A key question asked in the FIA press conference, to which the drivers had no comment, was "You are talking about this as a team sport. Then why do we have an individual World Championship for drivers?" A good question indeed. People have been talking about Schumacher's recent domination of F1 as a parallel to Tiger Woods' recent domination of golf. But no-one gifts Woods his victories. Ferrari entirely mishandled their cynical, cold-blooded (if pragmatically-justifiable) action, and turned F1 into an utter joke. There is no choice but to award them our 'Reject of the Race'.

In the end, it destroyed what had been a simply sensational drive from Barrichello. His effort at Hockenheim in 2000 was always going to be hard to top, but this was potentially his best weekend yet. Here, he had the measure of Schumacher all weekend, comfortably took pole and commanded the race virtually from start to finish. It showed tremendous team spirit and intestinal fortitude to let Michael by like that; most mere mortals would never give up what was rightfully theirs in such magnanimous fashion.

REJECT OF THE RACE
Scuderia Ferrari
Cynical decision debases the value of a Formula One victory

No doubt the extension to his Ferrari contract for 2003 and 2004 was the tonic that lifted him to even bigger and better things in Austria. Either his re-signing was a Schumacher decision in that he liked having Barrichello as a submissive lackey, or it was a Ferrari hierarchy decision in that they thought Rubens would be a better man than, say, Jenson Button or Felipe Massa to continue Ferrari's dominance when Schumi retires. I sincerely hope it was the latter, and that Rubens gets a crack at title glory for Ferrari.

On the whole, Ferrari accentuated their superiority by going on a two-stop strategy, allowing them to pull away imperiously by ten seconds for every six or seven laps. They would have made the strategy work perfectly and run 1-2 all race had it not been for the first safety car period forcing them to bring both drivers in at once, Michael's delay in having to queue putting him temporarily behind his brother Ralf Schumacher. But with one stop each left, on sheer pace there was never any hope that Ralf could stay there.

Now that would have made for a truly exciting finish. The only question was whether the Williams had a large enough fuel tank to facilitate this. Tyres may have also been a factor for Ralf, but not for Juan-Pablo Montoya, who had yet another disappointingly quiet weekend, but who had elected to go on the harder Michelins and did the whole race on the one set of tyres. Having said that, he was tremendously fortunate to even finish the race, let alone in 3rd place.

After all, it was the Colombian who frighteningly had the best seat in the house for the incident that brought out the second safety car, when Nick Heidfeld lost control of his Sauber as he got freaked out by Alex Yoong's brake lock-up (in circumstances similar to what happened in Melbourne), speared across the Remus curve and slammed into the side of Takuma Sato, narrowing missing the Williams which was following the Jordan. It was a collision of horrific impact which tore off the right sides of both cars.

In the end very little was made of the fact that Giancarlo Fisichella in the other Jordan actually came home a 5th, scoring the Irish team's first points of the season, and leaving BAR as the only team yet to open their account. On the other hand, it was a depressing race for Sauber, which had seen Heidfeld and Massa qualify so well in a career-best 5th and 7th, and then seen Massa lose the plot and damage his suspension after some very ragged driving in the early stages, before Heidfeld's incident sealed their misery.

Fisichella was 5th by being able to get past David Coulthard's McLaren just after the second safety car period, the Woking team having yet another woeful weekend looking all at sea. Kimi Raikkonen was finally deposed from his customary 5th on the grid, qualifying 6th, while Coulthard could do no better than 8th and looked justifiably disinterested all race, although he did get past his team-mate before the Finn's engine blew up, making it five retirements in six races for the luckless Kimi.

Although the A1-Ring, being such a short circuit, always produces close qualifying times, the fact that 4th down to 18th on the grid were covered by just one second shows how competitive the current F1 grid is, barring the Ferraris and Williams out front and the hapless Jaguars and Minardis languishing behind. As such, McLaren and Renault need to be careful; other teams showed enough improvement in Austria to suggest that the midfield battle in the remaining races will be very interesting.

Apart from Sauber's qualifying pace and Fisichella's improved performance, the other team to impress somewhat was BAR, clearly showing that Honda have made some small gains. Olivier Panis was excellent in qualifying to start 9th, leaving Jacques Villeneuve a shocking 17th, but the Canadian made up for it in the race. Although he ineptly punted off Heinz-Harald Frentzen on lap one, and quite rightly had to serve a drive-through penalty, he utilised a two-stop strategy and drove an aggressive race that maybe deserved points.

Arrows and Toyota had also impressed in qualifying, but much less so in the race. Frentzen and Enrique Bernoldi in the Arrows had shown good pace all weekend, and shared the 6th row, the Brazilian starting a career-best 12th. But in the race they hit each other in the concertina effect of the first corner, Frentzen got clouted by Villeneuve at the next corner, and then the German had a number of moments as he tried to recover, giving the world-feed director reason to focus on him for an exorbitant length of time for the rest of the race!

Salo had also done very well to start 10th, and McNish was also closer to the mark in qualifying 14th. Salo may have been on track for points, even 5th place, were it not for a poorly-timed pit stop during the safety car period, which was exacerbated by confusion as he tried to leave the pit lane, when he was stopped by a red light, in the process allowing Irvine's Jaguar to go through. Toyota continue, not unexpectedly, to be a little inconsistent from race to race, but overall the impression they have given is positive.

But in the final wash-up, everyone was a bit player in the Ferrari soap opera. Their domination of the entire weekend was yet again a sight to behold, but their needlessly blatant resort to team orders at the end will be talked about for a very long time, more so than other incidences of team orders in the past. One can only wish that, as Schumacher said himself, the title can be wrapped up nice and early so that Barrichello can add to his tally of wins as he should have done here.

If he does, hopefully these wins will be on merit, and not gifted by Schumacher; quite simply, two wrongs don't make a right.