A contentious win and a tyre war - F1's 700th GP

The first paragraphs of Mark Hughes' 2003 Brazilian Grand Prix race report for Autosport summarises the chaos that surrounded F1's 700th world championship race, which had the wrong winner for five days and provoked a public spat over a cost-saving regulation that exposed one of the worst sides of F1.

An epic race, drama all the way, a surprise around every turn. Yes, it was all those, but Formula 1 had a lucky escape at Interlagos on Sunday.

It was lucky that the worst injury was a nasty gash in Fernando Alonso's leg; lucky that the world champion wasn't decapitated against the side of a truck; lucky that he didn't take a marshal out with him; lucky that Jenson Button and Mark Webber were uninjured in their crashes.

It was lucky that the race was able to get underway at all, that the big rainstorm didn't last too long on a day when there were no suitable tyres.

There was a certain element of luck too for Kimi Raikkonen, who followed up his maiden win in Malaysia with a repeat performance here, in a race where Rubens Barrichello, David Coulthard and Giancarlo Fisichella all felt robbed of victory, and with varying degrees of justification.

Fisichella's overdue win

Giancarlo Fisichella was left heartbroken after thinking he had won his first Formula 1 race last weekend, only to discover that the rules relating to a race stoppage had handed victory to McLaren's Kimi Raikkonen.

The Jordan ace blasted past Raikkonen on lap 54 of the Brazilian GP and then led 55 - before the red flags caused by Mark Webber and Fernando Alonso's accidents stopped the race, meaning the result would be taken from the end of lap 53.

Fisichella was full of joy as he jumped out of his car in pitlane afterwards, just as an oil fire broke out in a breather pipe that was too close to the exhaust of his Jordan EJ13. This was a car that by no means deserved to win, but its driver certainly did.

In one-lap qualifying, a 2003-only format where drivers did one lap on Friday and then went out in reverse order of pace for a second lap on Saturday, Fisichella was at the top of his game and declared the lap that put him eighth on the grid as "almost perfect".

"I asked many times afterwards 'who won the race', and it was a magic moment. I thought I had won and I still think I'm the winner, but rules are rules. I would never have thought I'd finish second [at Brazil], so I am pleased.

Having lost a likely win from its 100th race at Buenos Aires in 1997, which was also F1's 600th race, Jordan had been denied again in Interlagos. And then came the twist.

Three days after the race the FIA revealed that the results given by F1's timekeeper TAG Heuer may be incorrect. A meeting was scheduled for that Friday at the FIA's Paris headquarters to 're-assess' the results.

Jordan was confident it would go its way, while TAG Heuer was taken by surprise that its results could have been erroneous and that the FIA would be reviewing its timekeeping position.

Jordan founder Eddie Jordan and team manager Tim Edwards attended the meeting, presenting evidence Fisichella had, in fact, started a 56th lap.

It matched the FIA's evidence and Fisichella was handed his first grand prix win. Praise for the Italian came from the likes of Michael Schumacher and the European president of Jordan's engine supplier Ford, whose optimism proved worthless as the manufacturer never powered another F1 winner again.

At the following week's San Marino Grand Prix, the team was handed the winning trophies by McLaren's Ron Dennis. In return, Fisichella was supposed to swap his second place trophy, but forgot to bring it along!

The tyre war

As Jordan's frequent financial struggles proved, even multi-million-pound budgets weren't enough to be competitive in F1 by the '00s, and the FIA worked to lower costs.

In previous years a huge number of tyres had been shipped to races; teams with the larger pockets were able to fork out on the compounds of their choice, having tested them for hundreds of miles. That competitive advantage was supposed to be stymied in 2003 by limiting each team to one wet and two dry compounds for each race.

Some, namely tyre suppliers Bridgestone and Michelin, believed the rule was actually creating an advantage. If some cars only had intermediates available to them in a wet race, the FIA would be more inclined to use the safety car for safety reasons.

If conditions worsened the race director would then be cautious in allowing green flag running to resume, and if conditions improved then wet compound tyres would overheat quickly and be immediately disadvantageous if racing got back underway.

Michelin's dry tyre was believed to be functional enough in intermediate conditions, whereas Bridgestone always had to have the intermediate compound choice in case of rain. The situation in Brazil was best explained by Autosport's race report.

"The Sao Paulo rain - historically a fierce beast - rooted out that flaw [in the regulation] like a tracker dog. Bridgestone brought along its intermediate, Michelin a tyre only slightly more suitable to heavy rain, on account of extra lateral grooves.

"It's natural that the teams will want a tyre that is as competitive as possible," said Bridgestone's Hisao Suganuma on Saturday, "and that tyre is an intermediate. This is not suitable for really heavy rain, but in those cases, the race is usually held behind the safety car. Races are not usually wet for the whole duration."

Not usually, but Brazil proved to be one of them. It wasn't that the storm - which kicked off about 30 minutes before the race's scheduled start - continued for long. It had largely subsided by the time the safety car led the field away.

But the amphitheatre contours of Interlagos ensured that the water soaked up by the surrounding earth continued to flow over key sections of track for the whole duration, and at a variable, unpredictable rate. Worse than that, as a dry line went down on the rest of the track, it created the worst possible combination.

Dry-track grip on wet-weather tyres equals horrendous wear. Worn tyres over rivers of water equal aquaplaning accidents, six of them at the high-rev fourth-gear Turn 3 alone, including that of Michael Schumacher.

Later, Webber, his tyres so worn and overheating that he was looking for wet patches to cool them, found that when he did they instantly surrendered their purchase and a humungous accident unfolded, which triggered the fifth safety car, which in turn was the perfect opportunity for a driver nearing his pitstop window to come in.

So while Fisichella and Raikkonen - the first two through the Webber debris - had no reason to be going quickly as they threaded their way through, Alonso did. It's possible to make up 10 seconds or more in such circumstances if you really push. Instead, he found a Jaguar wheel, hit it smack on and suffered an even bigger accident than Webber.

It took a few days of publicly-aired frustration after the race weekend before the FIA stepped in to say a solution had to be found, despite drivers lobbying on the Friday of the grand prix saying they did not want to drive in the wet if they had to use the available tyre supply.

"Racing in the wet is horrible anyway because you can't see in the spray, but the difference is that before you knew the car was in control along the straights. Now you don't know what's happening because you can aquaplane along a straight and the rear just snaps away," was Jenson Button's rather frightening description of driving in the wet at racing speed.

Grand prix drivers weren't the only ones suffering, with 'the worst storm witnessed at an F1 event for many years' bursting the media centre roof and flooding a section of the building, and doing the same to Williams's paddock club roof - rendering a waitress unconscious.

McLaren on top, Ferrari unreliable

The loss of a second straight win for Raikkonen had no effect on his title hopes, as the extra two points would still have left him second in the standings come the end of the year, albeit on win countback.

The same differentiator would have kept Michelin-shod McLaren third in the constructors' standings, not that it looked like the 2003 season would end that way after round three in Brazil. Ferrari had its first pointless race since the 1999 European Grand Prix and failed to get a car to the finish for the first time in 73 races.

After nearly three wins on the trot, McLaren had a 23-point lead over its fiercest rival, with the rising Renault team in between them. It was a gap that took Ferrari, on what was considered inferior Bridgestone rubber, just three races to nullify.

Raikkonen's lead lasted another two races, but McLaren's failure to race its 2003 machine meant the Finn was always going to be on the back foot once Ferrari started campaigning its F2003-GA at the Spanish GP.

Even with its 2002 car, which raced the first four grands prix of the year, Ferrari still looked a race-winning threat. Schumacher was remarkably confident in Brazil despite spinning off under double-waved yellows.

"There are still 13 races to go and the gap to Kimi is not that critical. We still have everything in our hands and knowing that we could've won the Brazilian race with the F2002 helps."

Brazilian team-mate Rubens Barrichello was unsurprisingly less buoyant about his failure to finish his home race, which he had started from pole. His first problem - the tyres - was immediately noticeable, but he was soon having to deal with a misfiring engine and no telemetry contact with the team.

The misfire eventually cleared itself, and Barrichello fought his way back up to the lead with the assistance of the safety car. Two laps after claiming the position he was sitting on a hillock, close to tears.

The early misfire had led to greater fuel consumption and, without the use of telemetry, neither Barrichello or the team was aware the car was running empty on lap 47 of the scheduled 71.

McLaren's phantom menace

Formula 1's two big hitters in the early '00s, Ferrari and McLaren, both began the 2003 season with their cars from the previous year. That's something that would be unheard of today. With such fine margins between the teams, the thought of giving up any kind of performance at the start of the season would be treated with the requisite amount of contempt.

Both were done for similar, yet differing, reasons. Ferrari had the F2003-GA in its back pocket, smashing records at Fiorano, and the Scuderia wanted to give it as much development time as it could.

Assessing that the spectacularly-dominant F2002 could still turn up a year after it debuted and do the job, the Ross Brawn-Rory Byrne-Paolo Martinelli trifecta decided to let the 2003 car brew a little longer. McLaren, meanwhile, did so out of necessity.

Its own 2003-spec car, the MP4-18 was a radical departure from the solid-if-unspectacular MP4-17, featuring an anteater-like nose and tightly packaged bodywork to boost the aerodynamics and draw more performance from the floor. It didn't quite work like that, however.

Newey's signature shrink-wrapped packaging was a challenge for the powertrain engineers in charge of cooling the capricious Mercedes engine, which was already a frustrating factor in the team's fortunes.

But there were also issues with the car itself; the aerodynamics were incredibly unstable and, although Adrian Newey contested in his book 'How To Build A Car' that he and aero pharaoh Peter Prodromou had experienced good numbers in the windtunnel, the car was unpredictable on track.

In any case, the MP4-17D (D, in this instance, standing for development) put together for 2003 was surprisingly competitive, and the Michelin tyres proved to be better out of the box than anything Bridgestone had to offer.

In its May 2003 edition, F1 Racing broke that the MP4-18 car was struggling to make to the track, and "the Brazil paddock was humming with rumours that it has hit a series of glitches".

It continued that "among these, allegedly, is the new Mercedes FO110P engine - which has been criticised internally by Werner Laurenz, the ex-BMW man hired last year to a key management role within Mario Illien's Ilmor operation (the Northamptonshire company who design and build Mercedes' Formula 1 engines)".

But it went further than that; the car struggled to pass its crash tests, and the aero imbalance threw test driver Alex Wurz off the road at Jerez. Newey and Prodromou found the aerodynamics issues were inherent to the design of the car and looked to start again for 2004.

However, they met internal resistance, as some believed that the MP4-18 still had development potential, and it was developed into the unsuccessful MP4-19 - much to Newey's chagrin.

Arguably, the debacle was a key factor in driving Newey into the arms (or wings) of the new Red Bull team, having lost control over McLaren's design direction.

As the season began, one could argue that there were more F2002 cars on the grid than those Ferrari fielded. The car had been the dominant force in the previous year, scoring the same number of points as the rest of the field, and so plenty of the midfield runners had emerged in 2003 with their own variations.

Sauber, presciently emulating today's flock of "B-teams", already had the 2002 Ferrari's rear end, and matched that with a similarly shaped nose, front wing and bargeboard package - albeit converted for its own twin-keel suspension.

Toyota's TF103 also bore more than a passing resemblance with its sculpted engine cover and front end - the drooping nose a popular addition to the majority of the cars in the field.

The idea to develop a pocket of low pressure under the nose for some extra front-end downforce begat the drooped nose on the F2001, which Ferrari carried forward.

Ironic then, that the car most capable of challenging Ferrari was another car carried over from the previous season - Kimi Raikkonen took the title to the final race in the McLaren MP4-17D, as the team couldn't fix the issues in the 18 in time for 2003.