The car so good it shocked Ferrari

The numbers are impressive. Between them, Michael Schumacher and his team-mate Rubens Barrichello won 15 grands prix from 18 starts, and for 10 years the car shared the record of most victories in a season with the 1988 McLaren MP4/4 and Ferrari's own F2002. More recently, Mercedes has moved the goalposts, with 19 wins in 2016, and 16 in both '14 and '15. But Schumacher's strike rate of 13 individual successes remains a record, albeit one matched by his friend and countryman Sebastian Vettel in '13.

Above all, the F2004 was one of the quickest F1 race cars we've ever seen. It had a good but not spectacular record in qualifying, with 12 poles in 18 events, but Schumacher's 10 fastest laps in one season has been equalled only by Kimi Raikkonen, in 2005 and '08. Barrichello added four more fastest laps to bring the F2004's overall tally to 14.

Subsequent rule changes designed to cut speeds, and the end of sprints between refuelling stops, meant that many of those lap records stood for years. And despite the dramatically increased speeds we saw in 2017, seven benchmarks set by the F2004 survive at venues still in use.

"It was a great car," recalls Ross Brawn, then Ferrari's technical director. "It was a dream to set up; it was never a difficult car. It wasn't a diva. So I have very fond memories of that one.

"The car was so dominant, everything happened early that year. We won the constructors' title in Hungary [with five races to go]. In my new role in F1 it would be disastrous if somebody won the championship that early! But that's what we did."

All involved agree that the F2004 was the ultimate manifestation of the 'dream team' put together by Jean Todt in the years after the Frenchman's arrival at an underperforming Ferrari in the summer of 1993. The hiring of Schumacher for the '96 season and subsequent additions of Brawn, and Rory Byrne as chief designer, were the key pieces of the puzzle, but they were just the highest-profile members of what was by the early 2000s an extraordinarily effective organisation.

"I think by then our whole system was really humming," says Brawn. "The whole team, the whole company, we'd gained the confidence in the previous years. It's a hard thing to describe sometimes, but when a team, particularly a technical team, is working well, it has a harmony where you can almost finish each other's sentences in the way you do things.

"Everyone who was working on that car knew what they had to do, what they had to improve, what aspects they needed to focus on. It was just a culmination of everything that we were building at Ferrari that came together that year."

"James Allison was the trackside aero man at the time," says head of test engineering Rob Smedley. "To have somebody of his talent doing trackside aero I think probably shows the level and depth of talent within that group. Consider where all those guys have all ended up. It was just a great honour to work there, and we were all really lucky that it culminated so perfectly."

"Michael got out and 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." Rob Smedley

"There was an amazing atmosphere in the team," adds designer Aldo Costa, who compares that era with his recent experiences at Mercedes. "The feeling is the same, the atmosphere is the same.

"You have the same kind of respect for each other, and you've got that kind of feeling that you are a real team. People are pushing for the development, there are no politics, no hard questions between people, it's very smooth and very calm. Enough pressure to be really motivated, but not nasty pressure to be depressed. It was a very nice time that reminds me of the time that we are living in this moment at Mercedes."

That spirit of cooperation was reflected in the way the team reacted to a challenging 2003 season. That year Schumacher beat McLaren's Raikkonen by 93 points to 91, while in the constructors' table it was Ferrari 158, Williams 144, and McLaren 142 - a little too close for comfort.

"In 2003 and especially in the mid-season we were struggling a bit," recalls chief race engineer Luca Baldisserri. "We were suffering less with Rubens. He was more connected with the car, and Michael could not exploit it as well."

"The best chance I had to win the championship in the Ferrari camp was '03," says Barrichello. "Because that car suited me a little bit better. It was a tricky car to set up, but that was the only car that I could say was almost more to my side than Michael. I had those magic wins in Silverstone and Suzuka, and I was so much on a high going into 2004.

"With Ferrari the great thing was that we had meetings where we said 'What do we want from the car?' And those meetings were translated really well to the next year."

Brawn's conclusion was that the team had been a little too conservative with the F2003-GA, complacent even, and thus no effort would be spared in the development of the 2004 model.

"I wouldn't really want to give away every single secret about the car," says Smedley. "But it was probably the first car really designed around modern-era F1 engineering, where we used new windtunnel techniques, or we looked at certain areas of the corner where we wanted to exploit the car.

"We concentrated a lot on the mechanical installation, we concentrated a lot on getting the centre of gravity down, all of the bread-and-butter things, and just really tidying it up.

"Rory was absolutely amazing at that time. He was a big-picture man, and I learned such a lot from him. He was relentless with people, at exploiting every tiny bit of it, and understanding where the important bits were, and where you could perhaps back off a bit.

"Aldo was the foil to Rory's relentless performance quest. If Rory was the big-picture man, Aldo was exactly what he is now at Mercedes, which was super-detailed. He was a huge architect of that car, making sure that we got all of these huge performance benefits, but the car was reliable as well. That was a key to why that car was so good."

"In 2004 I was promoted to head of design and development, and Rory became design director," says Costa. "Nothing really changed between me and him, but I had a wider input on R&D and the development of the car, and on stress analysis, and the whole design activity of the car itself.

"There was a special effort in 2004 to understand more about tyre behaviour, and using the suspension and the set-up to take the best possible performance from the tyres. With strong aerodynamic development, and the mechanical development, it came out a great car."

By now Ferrari had established a special relationship with its tyre supplier - all the other major teams had gone to Michelin, and as a consequence Bridgestone could focus its efforts on Maranello. Ferrari exploited that advantage to the full.

"Sometimes it's difficult to deal with the Japanese mentality," says Costa. "So we made a very special effort in the tyre-management area, in the vehicle-dynamics area, to stay very, very close to Bridgestone. We tried to bring them into a better relationship, to try to develop together, and get them to react more quickly, designing tyres in the direction more of what we wanted for the car handling."

"It was that magic feeling in the air. We were asking, 'Is the timing actually working, is that correct?' I remember coming back to the pits and those guys laughing their asses off" Rubens Barrichello

The F2004's potential was evident from the start. Following an encouraging run at Fiorano it was taken to Imola, a more representative venue. It was so much faster than had been predicted that the engineers were left shell-shocked.

"I remember at the first shakedown we were doing lap times that didn't match our simulations," says Baldisserri. "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."

By the time the package for the opening race in Melbourne was added for a later Imola test, where rival teams were present, the car's pace was clear for all to see.

"It was mega," Smedley recalls. "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."

"They said we were trying to find a little bit more grip, so you guys can brake later," says Barrichello. "We took to the race track and the tank was full and the time was the best one we could ever set in Imola. It was that magic feeling in the air.

"At Imola on full tanks you're so much slower because of the uphill and downhill bits, braking so hard. We were asking, 'Is the timing actually working, is that correct?' I remember coming back to the pits and those guys laughing their asses off.

"It was the only time we went to Mugello for testing and I was able to go flat-out all through those Arrabbiata corners. It was just magic."

In Australia Schumacher and Barrichello qualified on the front row and finished one-two. The German followed up this dominant display with wins in the Malaysian, Bahrain, San Marino and Spanish GPs. Only in Monaco was his winning run interrupted, when his race ended in a collision with Juan Pablo Montoya, and Renault's Jarno Trulli triumphed.

The writing was on the wall - for Barrichello as well as for Ferrari's rivals. Any thoughts that he'd harboured about challenging his team-mate were quickly forgotten.

"Rubens was doing a great job in terms of backing up Michael," says Brawn. "I think Rubens had rattled Michael at the end of the previous season, and started to pressure Michael, and he really thought he was going to have a good chance in 2004. But Michael seemed to take a deep breath, think about it, and he came out just in sensational form."

Monaco proved to be just a blip, as Schumacher went on to win the next seven races - at the time a record for consecutive successes in one season, only bettered by Vettel's nine in 2013.

"Michael was super, he was really strong, and he was a fantastic driver," says Costa. "Very good in the car, but as well very good out of the car, very close to the team, very patient - he was the most patient in terms of doing little tests, doing cockpit-fitting activity, doing everything really.

"For us he was a real reference point. Michael was in his top form, and also mentally he was so strong and so determined. It was very difficult for Rubens to keep up with him."

Barrichello had to be content with his late-season victories in Italy and China, both coming after Schumacher had secured the title in Belgium in August. He admits that it was tough to take being beaten so often.

"A million drivers outside F1 would probably want to be sat in a competitive car and be second on the grid," he says. "But since you are there and you qualify second to your team-mate it pisses you off the same way. It's just a funny feeling.

"That car was awesome, but it just suited Michael better. I won Monza, and China, which was the first race there. I was pretty good at getting to know things quickly, and I was better than Michael all weekend. But it was the end of the year."

The car's speed aside, Schumacher benefited from the reliability of both engine chief Paolo Martinelli's V10 and the rest of the package, helped by race technical manager Nigel Stepney's meticulous marshalling of the mechanics.

"It was absolutely unbelievable," reckons Costa. "Ferrari was the best in terms of car reliability. There was a lot of development on that side, processes, methodologies, the way we were testing things, it was developed to be superior to the other teams at that moment. Nigel built up a strong team of mechanics, again with very strict processes. This is what he did and the collaboration with me designing the car was very good, and the two things improved hand in hand."

Ferrari was also flattered by its main rivals misfiring - this was the year of the walrus-nosed Williams FW26, while McLaren's original MP4-19 had to be substantially reworked. Both cars improved, but it was too little too late.

"My resounding memory of that season was we used to get back and have a Monday-morning debrief," says Smedley. "And there would be long faces if we hadn't come one-two, because that's what was expected. Jean would have an admonishing look on his face and we'd all hang our heads in shame because we'd come first and third, and this was a great disgrace!"

Brawn made the unusual call to use the car in the first two races of 2005, allowing more time to develop its successor. The one-tyre-per-race rules tripped Bridgestone up that year, but the F2004 did at least add a second place to its record.

"It was a continuous evolution year by year," says Costa. "And probably the 2004 car had all the best technologies that had been developed in the last few years at Ferrari. It was the best synthesis of all that activity that started at the end of the 1990s.

"Retrospectively, looking at what we understood in the years after about tyres and geometry, it was really well thought out, combining all the elements that make a car perform well."

"Certainly from all the cars I've worked on, it was the best," says Smedley. "It was flawless. It was a marriage of chassis, aerodynamics and tyres, and it was the synergy of those that made the whole thing work together."