The 2004 Schumacher record that still motivates McLaren's boss

Among Formula 1’s most famous ones that got away is the 1988 season, where McLaren would have won every single race had Ayrton Senna not tangled with Jean-Louis Schlesser’s tardy Williams in the closing laps of the Italian Grand Prix, is Michael Schumacher’s 2004 season in what was also among the most dominant F1 cars ever: the Ferrari F2004. The German won 12 of the first 13 races of the season, a run blighted only by a clumsy DNF in Monaco.

For McLaren team principal Andrea Stella this is a defining period, because he was Schumacher’s performance engineer at the time and remembers the heady sense of excitement in the air as Ferrari realised the F2004 was far faster than its simulations had predicted.

Since this weekend’s GP at Imola is likely to be the circuit’s swansong, Stella was invited to share his memories of the track and one of those was that revelatory first open test of the F2004.

“I also have quite a lot of passion for Formula 1, and Imola resonates with this passion,” he said.

“At the time [the mid-2000s], you could still take two cars of different seasons, and we had the 2003 and 2004 cars here in Imola. They were going around at the same time – one driven by Michael and one driven by Rubens [Barrichello] – and we realised that we had a super car in hand for 2004 because the lap time and the consistency of that car was great. So, a lot attached to this circuit, definitely from me.

Lando Norris, McLaren, Andrea Stella, McLaren

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images

“That car won 12 of the first 13 races with Michael, and the only one we lost was because Michael crashed with [Juan Pablo] Montoya under the tunnel in Monaco, while Montoya was actually one lap down during a safety car. Otherwise, likely we would have won 13 out of 13.

“That’s a reference that I actually often use even to motivate myself – like, that’s where we want to be. But I don’t think this will happen this year.

“So, there is hard work ahead of us to make sure this happens in the years to come. I think we are a few steps behind compared to those kinds of references.”

Turning point for Ferrari

Such is the legend of the F2004 that on the rare occasions an example comes on the market, it attracts an eye-watering price. Twenty years ago, Sotheby’s sold a chassis Schumacher had driven to five victories in 2004 for $3.2million.

Time magnified both the reputation and the values: five years ago, four-time world champion Sebastian Vettel revealed he had wanted to buy one at auction but the price was too rich even for his tastes.  

Michael Schumacher, Ferrari F2004

Photo by: Lorenzo Bellanca / Motorsport Images

The car arrived at an inflection point for Ferrari, as it faced a resurgent ‘Team Enstone’ (formerly Benetton, recently acquired by Renault) and a McLaren-Mercedes partnership whose progress in 2003 had been stymied by its failure to render the radical MP4-18 race-ready.

There was a feeling that Ferrari had been too conservative the previous season and a big step was required. Enormous resources were poured into aerodynamics, finite stress analysis, and suspension kinematics – the latter to better exploit an ever-closer relationship with tyre supplier Bridgestone.

After a shakedown test at Ferrari’s home track, Fiorano – you really could just test a new F1 car there in those days – the F2004 was taken to Imola for a back-to-back evaluation with the previous season’s F2003-GA.

The comparison astonished everyone at Ferrari.

"I remember at the first shakedown we were doing lap times that didn't match our simulations," chief race engineer Luca Baldisserri told Autosport in 2018. "In those times they were not so sophisticated simulations.

“But considering the ambient temperature, we were completely off, but in a good way! Everybody was saying we had to check that everything was OK, and that we were on the weight limit."

Michael Schumacher, Ferrari F2004, celebrates victory as he crosses the finish line and takes the chequered flag, to the delight of the team who wave Italian flags.

Photo by: Motorsport Images

The Imola test provided further evidence of the car’s speed, but Ferrari still couldn’t quite believe it.

"It was mega," Rob Smedley, chief test engineer at the time, told Autosport. "We had the 2003 car, and then Michael jumped into the F2004.

"He got out of the car and he had this massive smile, and he said, 'I'm telling you it's real.' And we were saying, 'It can't be, we know what the aero numbers are, we know what the engine is, there's absolutely no way.'

"Afterwards, we spent about 12 hours with 10 of us poring through every element of the data. We were wondering what the hell we'd done wrong, because there was clearly something wrong – had we put different tyres on it? Was the ballast not in it? We did so many checks.

"We designed this test for the next day where we would be able to outfox ourselves and find out what we'd done wrong, and hopefully confirm that it was only the half-a-second quicker than the 2003 car that we thought it was.

"And we couldn't find it. It was two seconds a lap quicker. But it wasn't just that. The biggest difference was that, when we went out and did 15-lap runs, it went from being 1.5s quicker at the start of the stint to 2s quicker at the end of the stint. We were like, 'What are we going to do now? Why don't we have an easy winter and turn up in Australia with this thing?'

"But we didn't, we pushed on."

This is the spirit Stella is now trying to channel at McLaren.