German GP Race Analysis

He had a floor failure that led to a huge crash, a terminal gearchange failure that also caused another accident, and a fuel pump failure that stopped him right after a pit stop. And yet all those dramas contributed to just one race retirement. Not only that, it happened when he was further away from the lead battle than at any time this year.

Had the problems outlined above been stretched over three races, and DC had managed to win or place second in all of them, we might now be looking at a very different title situation. And what if the costly fuel hose jam that struck Rubens Barrichello at Hockenheim had cropped up on Michael's car at a critical time?

Both camps have been saying for weeks that it ain't over 'til it's over, and I guess they could have been proved right. But as things stand, Michael can wrap it all up in Hungary.



Teams say that tyres are not a major concern at Hockenheim, but inevitably they do make a big contribution, and it was clear from early in the weekend that Michelin was looking strong. Imola and Montreal and Monza testing had already suggested that straights and chicanes favoured the French company.

All the Michelin teams bar Jaguar chose the harder compound, and as at Silverstone the harder tyre allowed teams to start on new rubber, without worrying about a drop-off in performance. There was none of the familiar messing around with scrubbing tyres, except at Jaguar. It put a premium on preserving new tyres, and so pole man Montoya was more than happy not to be forced to take his fourth and final run in qualifying, as it saved him a set for the race.

"It's a different demanding track from Silverstone," said Michelin boss Pierre Dupasquier, "not the same thing at all. They can always start on new tyres, but it depends on what you are looking for. New tyres on the first timed lap and second timed lap are very fast, and sometimes you get some small degradation afterwards, depending on the equation between the rubber and the surface and the conditions. Also it's the weight you carry, whether you are going for one stop or two. Here there was no drop-off at all."

David Coulthard also failed to make a fourth run, but not because he was happy to sit on his time; he suffered a mysterious blistering problem, and the team could not risk losing another set, leaving him struggling for suitable rubber in the race. All the Bridgestone guys went for the soft compound.



A single stop tends to be the way to go at Hockenheim, although two is always worth considering depending on your position relative to the cars you're fighting against. It won't get you ahead of people who are ultimately going to be faster come what may, but it might allow you to beat cars of similar pace. Hockenheim has a pretty fast pit entry, although a lot of momentum is lost at the exit compared to those storming through Turn 1.

"It's an average pit lane," explained BAR's Jock Clear. "It's a very difficult call, which is why some people did two, some people did one, because the numbers really do suggest it's right on the limit, it's marginal between one and two stops. But our view with Jacques was certainly that we ran heavy fuel in the morning, and the car was quick on heavy fuel, so use that car behaviour."

Two stops was tried most famously by Ralf Schumacher with Jordan in 1998, and it allowed him to run with the McLarens early on, but ultimately he faded to sixth. This time a handful of drivers went for two stops. The most significant was Barrichello (who also tried it in '98), who was at the tail of the group of big three teams.

"He was sixth, " said Ross Brawn, "and in all due fairness I didn't see Sauber as being that strong opposition. So why not?" Rubens was joined by Olivier Panis and both Arrows drivers.

Traditionally those on one stop will pit around half way rather than test the limits of the fuel tank with a run to two-thirds distance, as in somewhere like Austria.

"If you're right at the front there's not much point," said Patrick Head, "because half way is the theoretically quickest way if you're on a one stop. You only go long if your car is quicker on low fuel and old tyres, and you've got cars in front to overtake, and we were pretty confident that wasn't going to happen. We thought Hakkinen might try two, but he didn't."



Michael began to experience gear selection problems on the parade lap, which led to some urgent conversation with the team. It was hoped that the problem was related to slow speeds.

"In the past we've had problems on parade laps or running behind the safety car, and we thought it was related to the revs," Brawn explained. "You don't run the engine normally on the parade lap, so we imagined it was just going to cure itself as soon as he started the race. But it was obviously a different type of problem."

Sure enough, when the lights went out Michael couldn't shift out of first gear. He did the only thing possible, which was to stay in a straight line and hope that people would see him. Most people did, but Luciano Burti didn't, and the results were pretty scary.

Burti said that he had cars on both sides and had nowhere to go, but in fact he saw Schumacher so late that he didn't really have a decision to make. To a degree he was wrong footed by Ricardo Zonta, who went to Michael's left. It's hard to apportion blame - guys coming from the back are always more vulnerable - but perhaps a driver with 100 starts under his belt would have been able to avoid contact.

His escape, and that of Enrique Bernoldi on whom he landed, was more than lucky. It was also extremely fortunate that both Minardis had been forced to start from the pitlane. Had Alonso and Marques been caught up in the crash, the consequences might have been a lot worse.

I'll deal with the rights and wrongs of the red flag situation in a later column, but for the record, here's who gained or lost at the first start:



1. Montoya (-)
2. Ralf (-)
3. Barrichello (+3)
4. Hakkinen (-1)
5. Coulthard (-)
6. De La Rosa (+3)
7. Heidfeld (-)
8. Irvine (+3)
9. Raikkonen (-1)
10. Trulli (-)
11. Villeneuve (+1)
12. Fisichella (+ 5)

As you can see Rubens, both Jaguar drivers and Fisichella had made extremely good use of the first lap. Although the red flag cancelled out Barrichello's good start, he benefited in that it gave the team a chance to check his car. At the second chicane he was rammed from behind by Hakkinen, who'd then jumped the chicane.

Ferrari was obviously concerned about any possible damage, so the rear wing was replaced as a precaution, but the main cause for concern was the dented diffuser. It was shades of club racing as the mechanics applied prodigious quantities of silver tank tape to make sure it held together (thus we can tell if any publications try to pass off qualifying shots as being from the race!).

While McLaren had some justification in being upset about Schumacher's second chance, its drivers had both lost out to Rubens, and at least now had another opportunity to keep him behind.

Or did they? In fact the Brazilian's two-stop schedule gave him a little extra speed, and even before the restart the McLaren guys knew that it would be hard to keep him behind second time round.

"Unfortunately we gave the game away a little before the restart," said Ross Brawn. "He got past Coulthard and Hakkinen at the beginning, and Mika came over to him on the grid to apologise for hitting him, and said, 'Oh, I see you're on a two-stop. You're far too fast to be on a one-stop!'. So McLaren were aware, and he didn't have the element of surprise that might have been more useful."

The most significant outcome of this particular red flag situation concerned the tyres. Teams had gone to the trouble to make sure they had the best possible tyres available for the race. New sets were highly prized, but everyone effectively forfeited the set they'd started on because of the risk of punctures from the debris. Michelin specifically ordered all teams to change, and I'm pretty sure that everyone in the field did just that.

This compromised just about everyone to a greater or lesser extent, although afterwards few people had any real complaints. The two stoppers suffered most, because they needed three good sets of tyres. Later in the race Ferrari ultimately solved the problem for Rubens by re-using the set that had been over the debris.



Second time around there were no problems, although in such warm weather two starts, and thus two spells spent waiting on the grid, made the engine men justifiably nervous. Justice was served as once again Montoya got away ahead of his team mate, while behind both Ferrari drivers got ahead of the McLaren immediately ahead of them, giving Ron Dennis even more reason to feel aggrieved about the need for a restart.

We pretty soon knew that this was not going to be a close contest, as the Williams pair just took off. What was surprising was that Montoya opened up a healthy gap, one big enough to ensure that he could not be jumped at the pit stop sequence. Ralf complained of a brake problem in the early laps, and that may have contributed to the fact that by lap 13 the gap was out to 8s. At that point things stabilised a little, and Montoya's advantage had grown to only 9.6s by lap 21. That was more than enough to allow Juan Pablo a comfortable ride home to his maiden win.

It all went wrong in the pit stop on the next lap. Williams has had more than one problem in recent races, some inflicted by the drivers. Shortly before the race I asked the team's refueller if he was hoping that his superstars would stop in the right place for once! Thus I felt some sympathy with the guy as he struggled with the hose.

But this turned out to be an issue with the Intertechnique rig, something totally beyond the team's control. There have been several problems this year, although rarely at high-profile teams, and certainly never with a race win at stake. What made it galling for Williams was the particular item that failed had given problems when being checked out after the French GP, but had subsequently been given a clean bill of health by its makers.

"Basically the refuelling rig just shut down," said an aggrieved Patrick Head. "It's exactly the same controller for the motor that we had a problem with after the race at Magny-Cours. We used it after the race and it failed, when we were emptying the fuel rig. We delivered it back to Intertechnique, and they sent it back to us saying there's nothing wrong with it. We had to give back the one we'd borrowed from the FIA, take the other one back again, and it's done exactly the same thing it did to us last time. It's a software problem - the software is awful, terrible."

By the time the Williams crew had swapped to Schumacher's rig the stop dragged out to 29s. As it turned out the car now had too much fuel on board, but in any case victory was gone. Montoya came out behind Barrichello, who had another stop to do, so he would still have finished second. Within three laps the engine blew. There have been conflicting reports about whether the long stop and subsequent heat build up was the direct cause of the failure, but it couldn't have helped.

After that Ralf was home free. His own stop went without trouble, and he was able to run at his own pace, and there was no real threat from behind, especially after Rubens had a bad stop of his own. Indeed towards the end his times dropped by an alarming amount. By way of illustration here's how his latter lap times compared with what he was capable of:



Lap 17: 1m42.048s (Fastest lap, seven laps before his stop)

Lap 39: 1m45.092s (identical fuel load to above)
Lap 40: 1m45.468s
Lap 41: 1m46.044s
Lap 42: 1m46.931s
Lap 43: 1m47.533s
Lap 44: 1m48.408s
Lap 45: 1m53.002s (finish)

Circumstances played into Ralf's hands. Montoya's failure enabled him to claim that he'd been taking it easy early on, saving his engine, and that was why his team mate got away. It would be interesting to know if that is really what was happening, although to be fair he did eventually admit "...Juan today was quicker."



Barrichello's damaged diffuser proved to be no handicap, and his recycled first start tyres proved to be healthy. In the latter stages he had a lonely race, and even a pit stop disaster proved to be of no real consequence. This was a totally different problem to that suffered by Williams, in that the coupling on the hose locked itself shut rather than a case of the rig refusing to pump any more fuel. It was a more immediate and obvious problem, and Ferrari reacted correspondingly quicker, losing only 10s as opposed to the 20s that went astray in Montoya's stop. On the surface Barrichello's two-stopper appeared to work well, but the high attrition rate at the front made the truth a little harder to discern.

Beating his team mate was never really part of the game plan, and the chances are that had he been running ahead in the last third of the race, he would have been asked to move over. Having said that, with Coulthard out the team might - just might - have allowed him to stay ahead and collect an extra couple of points, which would have helped him in his own quest for second place in the title contest.

Michael was well aware of what strategy Rubens was on, and waved him through on lap 6, although he could have done it a little earlier. His thinking was obvious: Rubens could ultimately take points off the McLarens, and if we need to, we can still swap places. A rather different position from that at Williams, where it's every man for himself between Ralf and Juan Pablo, as Silverstone proved...



In the end it mattered little, for Michael coasted to a halt immediately after his pit stop. This turned out to be due to a fuel pump failure, and unusually for Ferrari, it was not the first instance of a gremlin striking. Earlier this year there were failures for Rubens in Interlagos and Michael at the Nurburgring. Both times it happened a few corners around the first reconnaissance lap before the start, and led to last minute switches to T-cars.

"We thought we'd understood the problem," Brawn confirmed. "And to be fair, previously it was a different type of problem, because it happened as soon as we ran the car. Whereas to run 23 laps into a race and then have a failure is very strange. The previous problem perhaps had been caused by procedures we were going through between the warm-up and the race. We discovered something that probably wasn't very helpful to the pump. But we stopped doing those procedures, and of course this time the pump ran for 23 laps before we had a problem."

Ross wasn't sure if it was a co-incidence that the failure happened right after a load of fuel had been dumped into the tank.

"I don't know to be honest. We've got to understand what's happened before we know. It would seem a curious co-incidence. My first reaction was that we hadn't put any fuel in the car, but the guys confirmed that the fuel had gone in OK. We weren't absolutely sure what the problem was because our radio telemetry has got poor coverage here, as it's such a big circuit, and unfortunately he stopped in a place where we didn't have radio coverage. We tried to get in touch with him to find out what had happened, in case it was something that we had to consider for the other car, but we couldn't get in touch with him."

One presumes that the guy who designs Ferrari's fuel pump system won't have an August break after all...



McLaren could so easily have taken advantage of this slip-up, but the team suffered its first double retirement of the season at the worst possible time. Indeed it was the first time that no McLaren had finished since Australia last year. Then as now, synchronised engine failures was the problem...

That was 28 races ago, which says a lot for McLaren's oft-criticised reliability, but statistics will be of little comfort to Dennis and his crew. There can be nothing worse than Mercs going pop at home, especially on a day when BMW is so completely dominant. And they weren't quick. The McLarens would have finished behind both Ferraris, although the extra long pit stop for Rubens might have dropped him behind at least one of them.

In fact Mika and DC were seventh and eighth in the fastest lap table, both 1.7s off Montoya's best. Even more surprising, they were only 0.5s quicker than both Benettons. That would suggest that Michelin played quite a role last weekend. So what went wrong?

"I've no idea," DC told me. "We had a lot of oversteer, mechanical oversteer, and it doesn't tie up with the balance of the car on other tracks, and I don't understand, I really don't."

One thing the team did do was change his set-up after the blistering problems in qualifying. Reducing camber and toe-in can help to conserve tyres, and it could be that in its revised state the car was less user friendly.

"Yes, we dropped some camber out for the race to try and protect that, and I didn't have blisters on that first set.

"To my mind something was not right, because we've had oversteer all weekend, hardly had any understeer, and it's a very difficult car to drive in that situation. In the race on lap two I was on the radio saying that there were incredible levels of oversteer on entry, and it just doesn't feel like the car that I've driven this year. And as a team we obviously need to try and understand that. I'm part of that process, I wasn't able to work it out in the time we had this weekend."

Hakkinen appeared to be slightly better off in the race, but he has always felt more at home in an oversteery car. Whatever the story, Hockenheim was about as bad as it could get after the high of Silverstone.



The carnage at the front gave everyone else a clear run at a good helping of points, although Sauber and Jaguar missed out. The latter team has had some good races recently, but if nobody at the front retires, you can't do much better than seventh.

It was thus unfortunate that on the day when there was everything to play for Eddie Irvine was struck by a fuel pressure problem (his early pit stop was to cure a misfire and not evidence of a bold strategy). Pedro de la Rosa admitted he had no one but himself to blame for the first lap crash that claimed an innocent Nick Heidfeld, while Kimi Raikkonen also retired early on. These guys should have finished third to sixth, and for Jaguar it was extremely painful to see Benetton pick up a priceless five points.

It's all about finishing, and BAR and Benetton should be congratulated for getting both cars home, and its drivers deserve credit for not making terminal errors (although both Giancarlo Fisichella and Olivier Panis had their moments!). On recent form and after a series of blow-ups earlier in the weekend the odds on both Benettons making the points must have been 1000-1. Interestingly, BAR's fastest laps were quicker than all the Bridgestone runners except Ferrari.

The battle for third to fifth got quite exciting towards the end, and it was joined by Jean Alesi, proving once again that the Prost-Acer is pretty much bullet proof.

Finally, a little snippet gleaned from the speed trap figures just before the second chicane. Despite all the assumptions about the packages's straightline speed, race winner Ralf Schumacher was only 10th on 352.7kph, set two thirds of the way into the race.

However, no fewer than six of the guys who beat Ralf set their quickest speeds of the afternoon on the very first lap, showing just how much tow you can get when running in a big pack of cars. For the record, the top three were Zonta (357.3kph), Irvine and Bernoldi, all on lap one, while the McLarens were both well down the order. Of course, the trick is to be consistently fast without any outside help.

Oddly enough Ralf did come top through the much slower finish line speed trap. That's all about how well you exit the last corner, and how you get the power down...