Monaco Grand Prix Review

This was one of the two races Ferrari did not win in their all-conquering 2002; indeed, for all their recent dominance, this is an event Maranello has not claimed victory in since 2001. In 2004, Michael Schumacher's bid to win a record-breaking sixth race at the start of a season came to a screeching halt as he recorded his first DNF since Brazil last year, assuring a well-deserved maiden success for Jarno Trulli. On these fabled streets, the Italian came of age and finally shook off his 'great qualifier, poor racer' tag.

More than that, we had a genuine race that went to the death, and carnage and controversy galore that had team bosses shaking their heads at the impending repair bill, and fans wondering how so many elite drivers could make such serious errors of judgment that threatened to turn this week's F1 headlines into a soap opera. Still, the fact that the race produced a popular victor and generated so many talking points gave the sport a temporary new lease of life that didn't exist before the start of the weekend.

Indeed, the major point of discussion before the action started was in relation to the splendid track revisions that saw a brand new grandstand on reclaimed land and a sensational new pit lane that finally did away with the dangerously narrow and overcrowded old strip. The only criticism that could have been levelled at the changes was that it now made for a much more open and easy approach to the Rascasse, all but doing away with one of the great challenges on any F1 track anywhere in the world.

By contrast, despite having topped the time sheets for most of free practice, for the first time Ferrari seemed to be genuinely in the doldrums a little bit. Neither Michael nor Rubens Barrichello impressed in pre-qualifying or qualifying proper. What was far from clear, though, was whether this was a tactical move - if so, it was a strange one considering how crucial a good grid position at Monaco is - or just a function of the harder Bridgestones they chose taking longer to get up to proper working temperature.

The rest of the grid contained other points of interest. Kimi Raikkonen and David Coulthard lined their McLarens up 5th and 8th, and again, no one was quite sure what it meant. Was this the start of the Woking revival, or was it just that the MP4/19 was less unsuited to Monaco than it has been to every other track thus far? But while the silver cars were seemingly starting to claw their way back into contention, the same could not be said for Williams, which only seemed to be digging into an ever-deepening hole.

Last year, it was at Monaco that Juan-Pablo Montoya kick-started Williams' championship challenge by taking an assertive victory. This year, in practice and qualifying it was his lack of speed that caught the eye. On the other hand, the justifiably-maligned Ralf Schumacher showed us that he is capable of some speed by recording the 2nd fastest time, but as luck - or karma perhaps? - would have it, he'd already had an engine change and would only start 12th.

To the race then, and when it finally got under way, whilst Trulli held onto the lead and Fernando Alonso jumped Jenson Button for 2nd, the shooting star was undoubtedly Takuma Sato in the second BAR. From 7th, he gave a slow-starting Michael a big don't-argue nudge, scythed past Barrichello and Raikkonen as well, and almost blasted past his team-mate as well. Whether or not he had false-started is unclear, but if he had not, then this was without doubt one of the best starts F1 has seen in a very long time.

However, it was soon to prove entirely academic when almost immediately Taku's Honda engine began smoking, with a queue of cars behind him. As Barrichello said after the race, the Japanese driver should have been given the black flag with the orange disc. On a street circuit where there is hardly anywhere to safely pull a car off the track, and where the lack of open space makes it even more difficult for the potential plumes of smoke from a blown engine to dissipate, this was a disaster waiting to happen.

It is arguable that Sato himself could have seen the wisps of smoke emanating from the back of his car, but even if he did not, and even if he had not been given any flags, BAR should have called him into the pits. Although Coulthard won here in 2002 despite his car having begun to smoke, that was when two-way telemetry was allowed and McLaren could fix his car from the pit wall. That was not possible here; the Honda was always going to expire at some point.

Fisi was lucky to walk away from his potentially nasty face-to-face meeting with the armco. Perhaps he should have slowed down more than he did, but how was he to know how much the cars in front had backed off? Had he slowed too much, might not he have been the clouted instead of the clouter? At the end of the day, the blame lay fairly and squarely with race officials and with BAR for not calling Sato in. For causing what was a very avoidable situation, the FIA ought to issue some severe reprimands.

But the McLaren and the Sauber were not the first cars to sustain damage. On the very first lap, Christian Klien had already touched Nick Heidfeld's Jordan and stuffed his Jaguar into the wall at Loew's hairpin (alledgedly losing one of the special Steinmetz diamonds worth a quarter million embedded in the nosecone in the process - or is that what George Clooney, Brad Pitt and Matt Damon want you to believe as they spirit away the jewel in another heist?). Not long after Mark Webber also stopped on the approach to the Rascasse. That brought an appalling weekend for the Leaping Cats to an end.

Tony Purnell and David Pitchforth must be tearing their hair out, counting the cost of two accidents for Klien, another for Friday tester Bjorn Wirdheim, two fires for Webber and an eventual transmission failure on the Aussie's car. All this on their special Ocean's 12 promotional weekend, and on perhaps this year's 'freak result' weekend when almost every other midfield team took advantage. As a result, Jaguar now find themselves a pitiful 9th in the constructors' title, and with points normally hard to come by, that is a huge blow.

Marshals invading the track too close to the racing line was also a feature of the Sato blow-up and Fisichella crash, except on this occasion one fellow in question proceeded to drop his yellow flag altogether! Marshalling anywhere is a difficult and hazardous duty as it is, but at Monaco it is positively life-threatening, though most of the time the Monegasque marshals' brave efforts are more sublime than ridiculous. But in the case of these two moments, it was certainly more the latter.

At this point, once the race resumed, Michael found himself trapped behind Raikkonen and Button, but once both of them pitted, the German put in a serious of fastest laps, culminating in a lap record that saw him leapfrog them both and move up into 3rd. It was a glorious, mesmeric display, which the director was smart enough to follow on camera. We may have seen this kind of thing many times before, but one can never tire of seeing a champion at work, visibly hurling his machine right to the edge.

Raikkonen didn't last much longer though, McLaren doing what BAR should have done with Sato and bringing the Finn in at the hint of a problem. But McLaren's horror season thus continued with yet another double-DNF, and with Sauber scoring handy points Ron Dennis and co have now slipped down to 6th - yes folks, the bottom half - in the manufacturers' table. It is probably fair enough to say that they can kiss 4th place goodbye, and are now fighting with Sauber, Toyota, Jordan and Jaguar for 5th.

Alas, the three-way battle for the race win came to naught, Alonso the first to depart when he crashed in the tunnel whilst lapping Ralf who was being troubled by a gearbox problem. The two already have history, of course, after their collision at Imola. But while the Spaniard was livid, perhaps the person he should have been fuming about was himself. He had simply made a fundamental error of getting onto the marbles, not lifting off and losing front-end grip as a result.

Fernando claimed afterwards that Ralf had been holding him up, and that the Williams had suddenly slowed before speeding up again as the Renault drew alongside. None are viable excuses. If a backmarker has held you up, that doesn't entitle you to lose your cool and do something daft. It wasn't as though Ralf had suddenly slowed and forced Alonso to quickly jink left to move past - on replays it is clear his move left was smooth. And, even if Fernando backed off slightly, he could have held his line alongside the Williams and had the inside for the next chicane.

For all his admirable qualities, there's a darker side to young Alonso which is coming out this year. To give Ralf 'the bird' whilst his car was still decimating itself against the armco - and whilst it is probably advisable to keep one's limbs inside the cockpit - was as pointless as the accident itself. Like during his battle with Webber in Bahrain, not only won't the other drivers see his gestures, but Fernando needs to lose the attitude of expecting everything to go his way.

That Ross Brawn did not bring Schumi in, or that Michael himself decided not to come in, is incomprehensible. More than that, it blew any chance of victory he had. One can only surmise that they thought Trulli would stop a third time whereas Schumacher only had his second and last stop to go, which would have given the Ferrari track position. But what if Jarno had enough fuel to make the finish, which he did? By not stopping, Ferrari had handed the Italian a free pit stop.

If Michael had pitted and emerged on Trulli's tail behind the safety car, with neither to stop again, sure that would have put the Renault in the lead, but it would have given the German 35-odd laps to apply pressure. For all of his improvement as a race driver, We're not convinced that Jarno would have been able to hold a determined Michael off for that long. At any rate, Ferrari's failure to bring Schumi in at the same time as Button and Trulli effectively checkmated themselves out of the equation.

But the World Champion compounded that error with another equally inexplicable blunder behind the safety car, choosing to do one of his typical 'squirt and brake' tyre and brake-warming exercises in the poorly-lit tunnel of all places. Accusations that the safety car had also slowed are unfounded; the brake lights on the Mercedes never lit up. The lapped Montoya - and how unfortunate that it did happen to be Michael's usual sparring partner - could not possibly have been expected to see that coming.

Despite the competition from the likes of Jaguar, BAR and Sato, and Alonso for the prize, and despite the sheer brilliance of his sequence of laps during the first round of pit stops, for two such glaring blunders under pressure that firstly lost him any hope of victory and then put himself out of the race altogether, we award 'Reject of the Race' to Michael this time around. The flip side was that we would finally see a non-Schumi victory this year, and a straight fight between two men looking for their maiden win.

In the end, Trulli kept his cool, kept his head, and kept his car on the track. He knew Button was closing, and while at the time it may have been disconcerting to see the BAR catch the Renault hand over fist, to within 0.4s at the finish, either you could say that Jarno was tightening up under pressure, or you could also argue that he was always in control of the situation - and, going by the post-race interviews, the latter is what the Italian would want you to believe. Only he will ever know.

At any rate, it was a fully deserved win, capping off a wonderful pole position with an assured race drive. Before the season's start, many had predicted Trulli to take his maiden win; his improving Sunday performances have been threatening as much. But both bad luck and his infamous race-day lulls had thus far denied him. Perhaps now the tide is turning. After all, with a third of the season gone, Jarno is 10 points clear of team-mate Alonso and 7 off 2nd on the drivers' table. His star may yet rise again.

REJECT OF THE RACE
Michael Schumacher
Two race blunders leaves win record with Mansell!

Likewise, Rubens' excuses for being made to look silly by Michael's pace are getting tiresome. Once again, he gave about three nanoseconds of thought to the question posed to him at the post-race press conference, preferring instead to launch into his time-honoured, well-prepared, interminable rant about his ailment-of-the-day: this Sunday, a locking rear-end that apparently made most of his race sheer hell. Even if Schumi made some uncharacteristic mistakes this time, he remains so much better than Rubens, and it's time for the Brazilian to recognise that.

Montoya's anonymity in practice continued into the race, a lapped 4th surely not what his employers were expecting. Ralf soldiered around hoping to steal the last point, only for his car to ultimately fail just short of the finish. So neither the reliability or the speed still is there in the FW26, the drivers are at loggerheads with the team, and both JPM and Ralf seem to have made arch-enemies out of Michael and Alonso respectively. What a superb foundation on which to tackle twelve more races this year. Not.

Little to say about Felipe Massa except that he stayed out of trouble on a relatively ordinary weekend for him, but nevertheless that was what it took to score four points and move Sauber into 5th in the constructors' table. However, for much of the race it looked as though Cristiano da Matta would take 5th, a strong race effort from the Toyota driver blighted by a perhaps controversial drive-through penalty for ignoring blue flags, but still making up for a mediocre pre-race lead-up.

It has been a tough year for Eddie Jordan's team, and especially for Heidfeld, who has driven well but suffered a lot of unreliability. Two points for 7th place was a welcome boost, but Giorgio Pantano's retirement showed that there is still much work to be done. But while the likes of Toyota and Jordan lucked in, Minardi were unable to do so, Gianmaria Bruni dropping out early and Zsolt Baumgartner finishing oh-so-close to the points in 9th place.

It wasn't a bad weekend at all for the Hungarian, out-qualifying his more-skilled team-mate, and getting started again after stalling in the first corner concertina. But whereas the likes of Heidfeld made life miserable for the leaders, Zsolt has managed to perfect the skill of almost crawling to a standstill and losing as much time as humanly possible to politely let the front-runners by. The calling card of a pay driver if ever we've seen one, and the art of anti-racing at its best ... or worst. Still, over this weekend, an 'A for Effort' to Zsolt.

After such a dramatic Monaco GP, there's only a one-week turnaround before the European GP. You can be sure that many of the post-race debriefs would have been rather heavy, with several teams also staring down the barrel of massive repair jobs. But who knows, there's every chance that normal Ferrari dominance will be resumed at the Nurburgring. Perhaps that's why there should be more armco and concrete-lined street tracks like Monaco on the calendar each year. Who's up for a return to Dallas/Phoenix/Las Vegas!