FRA: Schuey fourmidable

The question of will they/won't they change qualifying was a key backdrop to the weekend. Meanwhile, the current system served up a super session, with the outcome of the pole battle in doubt until the final corner of the final run and less than 0.3sec covering the first two rows.

With its super-smooth, highly temperature-sensitive surface, Magny-Cours is the toughest of all tracks to read. But one thing for sure is that, with four very slow corners and a tight final chicane, it rewards traction like no other. That being the case, it was not a surprise that a Renault sat on pole.

Fernando Alonso was the man to achieve the feat, helping turn around what, to date, has been rather a low-key season. As usual the Renault was not all that quick down the straights and suffered slow-corner understeer. Jarno Trulli swears that it's still not an easy car to drive, that there's still a lot of potential locked within it if only it could communicate with its drivers better. But despite all this, boy does it explode out of the slow turns! As well as that, Alonso loved its stability through the fast never-ending right of Estoril and the two fast chicanes in the middle of the lap. What's more, none of those hairpins are followed by very long straights, so there's a minimum of time spent exposing its power deficit. All that and Alonso's lap was a peach, a case study in controlled aggression.

It's still not the best car over high kerbs - like those that define the final slow-speed right-left jiggle that ends the lap. In the morning Alonso missed out on what was shaping up into a super-quick time when he all but lost it there. Getting this part right in a car that didn't like it was critical. "I had to find a better line through there," he said, "but it's very complicated." Too little kerb and you're slow; too much and the lap's a write-off - having too much steering lock on as you hit the first kerb compromises you a lot and makes the landing and the left-hander very difficult. The driver needs to get as much direction change as possible completed before the front right meets that towering first kerb. When it mattered, Alonso finally got it perfect. A 1m13.698s was the result, quicker than the BARs but with the two McLarens, Michael Schumacher and Juan Pablo Montoya still to run.

All four were contenders here, saying a lot about the continuing one-lap superiority of the Michelins over Ferrari's Bridgestones, but saying even more about the promising updates of the McLaren and Williams.

Kimi Raikkonen was next out after Alonso. The MP4/19B was proving a big step forward over the 19, a factor right from the moment practice began. "It's more stable at the rear under braking and on the entry to corners," said Kimi, "and that gives you a lot more confidence." But he had maybe too much, for early in the lap he made a crucial error, taking a little too much speed into Estoril, understeering wide onto the grasscrete and having to get out of some throttle. "I tried to make up for that on the rest of the lap," he explained, "and made some more errors." The resultant lap was more than 0.6sec adrift of Alonso's and would stand for only ninth.

Next came David Coulthard, nip-and-tuck as quick as Kimi all weekend and slightly faster in pre-qualifying (where they'd ended up third and fourth behind Montoya and Schuey). It was a neat, efficient lap; a tenth up on Alonso after sector one, a tenth down after two, with it all to play for going into three. It wasn't quite enough, DC a couple of tenths slower there. But it put him on the provisional front row with just two cars left to run. "I was slightly too conservative," said DC. "As you get more familiar with a car you can commit more, but obviously I feel happy we've made such a step forward."

Now came Michael. Fantastically committed into Estoril, the Ferrari fast down the long straight that follows, he was quickest in the first sector. Last year the two hairpins of sector two exposed a traction shortfall for the Ferrari/Bridgestone combo. This year that was nowhere near as apparent and, though he was a tenth down on Alonso through there, he was still slightly ahead overall as he headed into 13. He knew the Ferrari wasn't going to be great under braking for the penultimate turn nor over the kerbs of the final chicane. To have any chance of pole therefore he had to be mighty quick through 13, the sector's only other corner. He over-committed, the car gave a little twitch on the way in, he had to wait a fraction later than ideal to get on the gas. That was it. Pole was gone.

The Ferrari was indeed poor through the final couple of turns, the Bridgestones losing time on this resurfaced area, Michael only 15th quickest on the chicane's exit. It was nonetheless a few hundredths faster overall than DC.

Finally, Juan Pablo Montoya. He'd had a busy build-up, with a big shunt in the damp of Friday morning that ripped every corner off his new car, then a tough time finding a workable set-up on Saturday morning. But for pre-qualifying on low fuel, he'd made a breakthrough with it and had gone fastest. Now on the lap that counted he was within hundredths of a second of Schumacher through the first sector. He was still on course for pole, but "when I went to the last chicane I had a big snap at the exit, I got out of the throttle and managed to catch the car. I got to the next corner but I came out so slow I went to brake deeper and missed the apex. Those two corners were three-tenths just riding there - it is disappointing." It left him only sixth.



It was one of this season's great pieces of outpsyching. During one of the practice sessions on Saturday, Michael Schumacher was preparing to make a simulation race start from the end of the pitlane. Drawing up slightly offset and filling Michael's mirrors came Fernando Alonso, ready to react like a gunslinger to whenever Michael made his move.

Despite giving Michael the advantage of reaction time, the Renault surged past the Ferrari long before they'd reached the track. This was Alonso's ace in the hole - and he wanted Michael to know about it. What Fernando didn't know was that Schuey had his own ace - a four-stop strategy. It was the perfect Ferrari solution to a potential Ferrari nightmare.

The worst set of competitive circumstances the team could possibly face - given the performance pattern of its car and tyres - was a Renault on pole at Magny-Cours.

Here, tyre degradation has more bearing on lap time than fuel weight, thereby making stopping before your rival tactically advantageous (because it makes a high-fuel/new-tyre car faster than low-fuel/old-tyres and the leapfrogging therefore happens on the out-laps). But, relative to Michelin, Ferrari's Bridgestones were weak at the beginning of a stint, strong at the end - exactly the opposite of what was needed if they were racing Renault.

Afterwards, Ferrari was comparing Michael's victory here to that of Hungary 1998, when he took on and beat Mika Hakkinen's McLaren by running an extra stop and unleashing a series of scorching qualifying-style laps. In reality, this wasn't quite so impressive, given that the Ferrari F2004 has a significant performance advantage. All Michael needed to do this time was express it - something that the Renault's pole and dynamite start had denied him. Coming up to Schuey's second stop, it was time to trigger the secret weapon.

Luca Baldisserri, Ferrari's race strategist, had first pondered the idea at Maranello last week. Even with Magny-Cours' super-short pitlane it isn't theoretically any quicker than a three-stopper. All it does is get you out of kilter with a three-stop and that's only of any use to a faster car stuck behind a slower one; in other words, Ferrari. It would not have worked for Renault. So Alonso led Michael away for the first couple of stints and Ferrari's short-fuelling tricked Renault into responding by short-fuelling Alonso for his penultimate stint and thereby making him vulnerably heavy in his final one, enabling Schuey to bang in those on-the-limit low-fuel laps, building up the time needed to make his extra stop. He did it - comfortably.

Renault hadn't lost the race. The team had only failed to win it against the odds, and its performnce had been good enough to force Ferrari into its highly original Plan B.

Earlier, Alonso and Schumacher had sat on the grid waiting for the lights, searing sun beating down on them, taking the track into the low-40C, each car momentarily shuddering as their drivers locked them into first gear. The lights went out and - just as in their practice duel - there was no contest, Alonso scorching away in front, Schumacher slotting in behind. Jarno Trulli in the other Renault burst through to pass the row ahead of him, although he had to sit it out around the outside of Turn 2 with Jenson Button to pull it off. Behind these four were David Coulthard, Juan Pablo Montoya, Kimi Raikkonen and Takuma Sato.

For the first seven laps Alonso was as quick or quicker than Schumacher, opening out a small gap over the Ferrari as they comfortably dropped the rest. Trulli was consistently 0.5-0.8sec slower than Alonso and therefore soon just a speck in Michael's mirrors. With the four-stop strategy in the back of their collective minds, this at least was good news for the Ferrari team. "Because there was no risk from behind, it meant all we could do was go forward. We had nothing to lose," said Schumacher.

Trulli wasn't as comfortable with the Renault's nervy handling as Alonso and had already surrendered any hope of joining the lead battle. Not that he was holding anyone up - Button and Coulthard were on a similar pace to him and all of them were gradually leaving behind Montoya, who was unhappy with the handling of the Williams: "Early in the stint I couldn't do anything with it. We run the tyre pressures really high and it costs us a lot early on. By the end of a stint it's really good. The car has still got too narrow a set-up window."

Schumacher began going faster than Alonso from lap eight and soon had the gap down to almost nothing. He was starting to feel better about this race. On the grid the high track temperatures had seemed to suggest a Michelin day, and this is traditionally a Michelin track. But it wasn't panning out like that. The longer the stint went on, the better the Bridgestones were looking. "It's true, I wasn't optimistic," Schuey admitted. "But today the tyres worked fantastically well towards the end of the stint, whereas our rivals struggled. That was why we were able to close the gap before the stops and attack with the strategy."

Schumacher kicked off the pit-stops as early as lap 11. Renault's Pat Symonds kept a close eye on the stop, and was surprised at its short 7.4sec duration. "I assumed they did that to make up some track position," he said, "so when we brought Fernando in we matched that, making our second stint a little shorter than planned."

Michael came out on the track behind Mark Webber (doing a good job in the Jaguar, running ahead of Marc Gene and snapping at the heels of the top eight), lost a little bit of time passing the Jag, then some more stuck behind Sato for two laps. This was a bad break for Schumacher, preventing him from using his new tyres to gain positional advantage over Alonso, whose out-lap from his lap-13 stop had gone fine. The Renault still led; in fact its lead had opened out to 2.8sec. Trulli still lay third from Button and Coulthard, with Montoya a little adrift and now being pressed hard by Rubens Barrichello. On lap 15 Sato went out with yet another blown engine just after his stop. Raikkonen's early stop had dropped him into slow traffic and he'd been badly leapfrogged.

Montoya was visibly struggling with the FW26, even before he spun it coming out of the chicane on lap 18: "I hit the kerb hard, but no harder than normal, and for some reason it caused the traction control to switch itself off." He got going again but was passed on all sides by Barrichello, Felipe Massa (two-stopping and so therefore out of sync) and Raikkonen. Kimi duly passed Massa, while Barrichello closed down on Coulthard, ready to leapfrog him at the next round of stops. Montoya was left to fend off Webber while, not far behind, the other Williams of Gene had to do the same for the other Jaguar of Christian Klien. The Jags ran this way for the duration - Webber setting the fourth fastest lap - and only the low attrition kept them out of the points.

The Saubers were having a superb ding-dong with each other, but were nowhere near the points. Giancarlo Fisichella would eventually get the upper hand over Massa by converting from a two to a three-stop strategy. "It was a good battle," said Fisi, "but 12th place isn't really what we want to be fighting for." At least that was better than the Toyotas, which were in dire trouble with rear-tyre wear.

Just as in the first stint, Schumacher began going faster about halfway through and closed down a near four-second lead for Alonso. By lap 25 he was again on the Renault's gearbox. That swung it: this time, Ross Brawn decided, they were going to commit to Baldisserri's four-stop plan - Michael's late-stint pace made it the way to go. "I wasn't going to be able to pass him on the track," said Schuey, "even though I had better top speed and, towards the end of the stints, better braking too."

Schuey stayed on Alonso's tail for the last four laps before his second stop. Again it was a quick stop. Again Pat Symonds thought it was about track position and not more fuel stops and so again matched them when Alonso stopped three laps later, pulling back his planned final stop from lap 51 to 46. Fernando was in bad shape in those last three laps after Schuey's stop but before his own, the car visibly struggling for grip. By contrast, Schumacher on his out-laps was taking no prisoners, reeling off what would stand as the race's fastest laps as he used his new tyre advantage to finally take position from Alonso. It should have happened this way the first time, but traffic had prevented it.

Not only did it lose the lead at this point, but Renault also ensured that, with a penultimate stint of just 14 laps (because of the short-fuelling), Alonso was going to be loaded up heavy for the final one. They realised the game was up when Michael, with a 5.5sec lead, came in on lap 42 and stopped for only 6.5sec - nowhere near enough time to take on fuel for another 28 laps.

Then the terrible truth about Ferrari's four-stop plan dawned. It had played its ace and there was nothing Renault could do in response. The team stopped Alonso for the last time on lap 46, already defeated. He rejoined 11.5sec behind. A pit-stop here takes only around 11 seconds plus the stationary time and Michael had enough fuel on board for a 16-lap stint. All he had to do in that time was build up enough of a lead to buy him the stationary time (around six seconds) - in a car that was 30kg lighter on fuel load. The rest was already paid for.

During the same time a tense duel was building between Trulli, Button and Barrichello for third, just prior to their final stops. Button was the last of them to stop. The stop itself was good, but the car stuttered as it left its bay, almost coming to a stop. The anti-stall had kicked in. "If it detects too sudden a deceleration of revs it will do that," said tech boss Geoff Willis. It seems that in the constant quest for revs and horsepower, the Honda's driveability might be suffering. It cost Jenson badly. He rejoined just behind Trulli, just ahead of Barrichello, but Rubens was able to immediately slip past him into Adelaide hairpin by using the Ferrari's straightline advantage.

Meanwhile, Michael was letting rip. The Ferrari was a sight to behold in the fast Grande Courbe, drifting gorgeously through what is now F1's fastest corner. At first Michael was only a little quicker, but by lap 49 the tyres were in their zone and so was he. Four-tenths quicker, then five, then nine, then 1.4sec, 1.0sec, 1.2sec, 1.4sec, 1.4sec and 1.5sec. He was more than 20 seconds to the good when he made his final stop, ample time to get out still ahead. "We didn't lose through strategy," said Symonds. "We lost because we didn't have their pace."

As if that were not demoralising enough, Trulli fell asleep on the last lap and allowed Barrichello to nick third place into the penultimate corner. Rubens, who'd started from 10th, was delighted. "Jarno was slow coming out of Turn 13," he said, "and I was able to get alongside at the next one. It was risky so I was trying just 85 per cent, then I saw the chance of making it, so added another 20 per cent!"

Button couldn't quite take advantage and trailed home a disappointed fifth, with Coulthard, Raikkonen and Montoya filling out the points. But even with 105 per cent effort from the others, even on a track where the dice were stacked against Schumacher, he still won. He had his ace in the hole, thanks to a clever little guy called Baldisserri. 'Baldi' has won plenty of races for Michael before - he used to be his race engineer - but this surely was one of the sweetest.