The forgotten member of F1’s greatest rookie crop

Fernando Alonso and Kimi Raikkonen will mark the 20th anniversaries of their Formula 1 debuts when they line up on the grid for next week’s 2021 season opener in Bahrain. If the cards had fallen differently, they might have expected to rack up many more than their combined total of three world titles, given the potential they showed in their rookie seasons with the backmarker Minardi and upper-midfield Sauber squads respectively.

Together with Colombian Juan Pablo Montoya, whose flame in F1 burned brightly but briefly with the Williams and McLaren teams before his departure for NASCAR, the trio’s 2001 emergence represented a changing of the guard in F1. But their ‘F1 debut’ club had a fourth, often-forgotten member.

On the face of it, the Brazilian Red Bull protege partnering Jos Verstappen at Arrows had an anonymous year, scoring no points. But from being threatened with career oblivion by McLaren boss Ron Dennis in Monaco to his lucky escape when a flying wheel struck his car at Hockenheim, to convincing team bosses who were all set to eject him that he was worthy of a second season, Enrique Bernoldi’s rookie campaign was anything but uneventful.

Bernoldi was something of a surprise signing by Arrows. Pedro de la Rosa had appeared safe in his seat, and Bernoldi’s 16th-place ranking in his second season of Formula 3000 wasn’t exactly much to shout about. That result is deceptive though – fourth at Imola was lost to a gearbox problem, and two wins at Barcelona (where he’d qualified on pole) and the Nurburgring had gone begging due to a puncture and suspension failure respectively.

Without those lost points, which effectively ended his title hopes and caused him to switch attention mid-season to testing duties with the Red Bull-backed Sauber team, he would have finished third in the standings – ahead of F3000 rookies Mark Webber and Alonso.

Enrique Bernoldi, F3000 Nurbugring 2000

Photo by: Motorsport Images

The 1998 British Formula 3 runner-up – “I should have won but I did so many mistakes, it was not lack of speed” – had raced for Helmut Marko’s Red Bull Junior Team in F3000. Marko had earmarked a Sauber seat for Bernoldi, only for Formula Renault UK champion Raikkonen to appear out of nowhere to take that, so Bernoldi tested for Prost before a deal was agreed with Arrows boss Tom Walkinshaw. De la Rosa out, Bernoldi in.

“I knew I would have some bad press,” reflects Bernoldi, one of four Brazilians on the grid that year along with Ferrari’s Rubens Barrichello, Jaguar-then-Prost racer Luciano Burti and Alonso’s Minardi team-mate Tarso Marques. “Even Rubens was not positive about what happened in my team. But I said the only way I can answer that is with performance.”

The performances took a while to show in an A22 that, contrary to its promising testing form, was faster only than the Minardis.

“Arrows had a better year than Sauber in 2000 and somehow we were fast during winter testing, so me and Marko thought we were in a better place,” he says. “The results clearly show that something was making the car go faster than it could possibly go. When we got to Melbourne, we were not that fast anymore!”

“I could handle a very pointy car for one timed lap and I think that was the biggest difference. I could be faster with the car the way it was” Enrique Bernoldi

Arrows anticipated that the tyre war between Bridgestone and F1 newcomer Michelin would lead to an increased wear rate and make two pitstops commonplace, so committed early to a small fuel tank. But this logic was proved misplaced, and the strategic limitations it created – “It would be for the first five laps maybe half a second faster than the others, but we would fall back to the same place where we started” – would prove a millstone around the team’s neck all year.

Combined with ex-Peugeot engines (badged as Asiatechs) that were well down on the power output of the benchmark Williams-BMW, a lack of downforce that made the car nervous to drive, and a “crude” traction control system that “was so harsh that it would unbalance the car”, conditions were hardly ideal for a rookie, but Bernoldi still outqualified lap-one overtaking king Verstappen (who scored the team’s only point with sixth in Austria) 10-7.

“Jos, the way he drove, he was very aggressive and I was very smooth,” he explains. “I could handle a very pointy car for one timed lap and I think that was the biggest difference. I could be faster with the car the way it was.”

Enrique Bernoldi, Jos Verstappen 2001 Brazilian GP

Photo by: Motorsport Images

At a drying Spa, Bernoldi was on course for a top-seven grid slot, despite being sent out on intermediates when he’d requested dries, only to run out of fuel at the Bus Stop and end up 21st.

“There were things that could have been done better that could have changed the way the season looked, but nobody knows them,” he continues. “To be top-seven at Spa in my first year would have been recognised, unfortunately it wasn’t there. I was happy with the performance [in qualifying] but in the races the reliability was really not there.

"All I could do was try my best in qualifying – that’s what Red Bull always asked for. Once you’re a Red Bull driver, and you are also an Arrows driver, you sort of have two bosses – Tom as the team owner, and Helmut Marko [representing] your sponsor. Who do you really answer to? That was a tricky situation.”

Reliability indeed was lacking. After a rookie mistake in Melbourne when he crashed out on lap two, and getting caught out in the Malaysian monsoon along with several other drivers, he was hampered by six reliability-induced DNFs in the next eight races. But one of his finishes came in Monaco, the grand prix for which Bernoldi is arguably best-known.

Poleman David Coulthard’s McLaren had stalled on the dummy grid, but the Scot quickly stormed up behind Bernoldi – who was smarting from a team order to allow Verstappen through – only for his progress to be frustratingly halted for the next 40 laps until the Arrows finally pitted. It sparked a war of words between McLaren boss Dennis and Walkinshaw, while everybody from Michael Schumacher (“Enrique did everything right”) to Jackie Stewart (“scandalous”) and Gerhard Berger (“Bernoldi’s job is to drive hard, they were fighting for position”) weighed in with their opinions.

“I’m sure that’s not a great highlight,” says Bernoldi, who finished ninth. “But friends of mine have been in F1 and nobody even remembers they were there, so at least somebody remembers that I have Monaco!”

Bernoldi reveals that he missed a shift into the tunnel when Coulthard first appeared in his mirrors – “I could only listen to the Mercedes engine behind, it was so much louder than mine, revving so much higher than mine” – but the pass he thought was inevitable never came. After Coulthard showed his nose at Mirabeau early on, Bernoldi “ran to the marbles and almost crashed” trying to leave him space. “That got me pissed off,” he says. “I said, ‘Now you’re going to stay until I pit.’”

Enrique Bernoldi, David Coulthard 2001 Monaco GP

Photo by: Motorsport Images

“I watched him for maybe 10 years since I was in go-karts and I knew he was not the most aggressive guy,” Bernoldi continues. “Senna would have put me in the harbour if I don’t let him pass, but David would not do that.

“I just was driving to not do a mistake. People say, ‘You just blocked him’, but it is difficult because I’m driving a car which has no downforce, no power steering, no automatic gearbox and I’m holding the fastest guy on track. Honestly, I think he was not aggressive enough. Maybe the public didn’t like it, but I think it was good for me and I did what I was paid for.”

"In Canada after the press conference Schumacher came to me and said, ‘If you get in this position again, you do exactly the same, because that’s racing’" Enrique Bernoldi

Famously, Dennis and Mercedes boss Norbert Haug sought Bernoldi out after the race to berate him for not allowing a championship contender through. How did he respond to Dennis’s assertion that his defensive driving was “unsporting” and threat to “finish your career tomorrow”?

“I said, ‘I’m sorry but if I was ahead of your car, it’s because your car didn’t start – that was not my fault,’” Bernoldi says. “Helmut Marko told me, ‘Don’t worry about whatever Ron said, if somebody likes racing here, they liked what you did’. In Canada after the press conference Schumacher came to me and said, ‘If you get in this position again, you do exactly the same, because that’s racing’.”

At Hockenheim, Bernoldi was fortunate to escape when a severed wheel from Burti’s Prost landed on his sidepod, perilously close to his helmet. But he says his only thoughts during the subsequent race stoppage were about whether the damage it caused to his car could be repaired, and describes his drive to a career-best eighth that followed as “probably my best F1 race ever” after staving off pressure from Verstappen to the flag.

“We were like killing each other,” he recalls. “I’d been faster than Jos all weekend and, on the grid, my engineer tells me he’s going to level two of the rear wing; I was on three, so he wanted less wing. I looked at my engineer and said, ‘OK, let’s go one’ because that was the minimum possible. He said, ‘But you will kill your tyres’, and I said, ‘Yes, but at least in a drag race I will beat him, and then the tyres I hope I can handle’.

"After that race, I got a letter from Arrows saying that they would not renew with me. I had my best race, but I was kind of jobless…”

Luciano Burti, 2001 German GP

Photo by: Motorsport Images

But Bernoldi dug deep, and at each of the remaining races, except for Spa, he outqualified Verstappen – including in the spare car at Indianapolis after an engine blew on his first qualifying run.

“The spare car never had outqualified the race car that year, and that was the first time,” he says. “I was doing what I could and with the material that I had. At the end of the year we were lacking in power, we were lacking in downforce, lacking in everything.”

Bernoldi’s record against Verstappen, allied with his sponsorship, was enough to keep him in the seat for 2002. The Cosworth-powered A23 was an improvement that allowed new team-mate Heinz-Harald Frentzen to score points in Spain and Monaco, but frustrating reliability niggles meant Bernoldi didn’t record a finish until Monaco, where he lost time being elbowed off at Turn 1 by Felipe Massa’s Sauber.

A points finish was on the cards in a wet-dry race at Silverstone before a halfshaft failed, but the writing was already on the wall for the cash-strapped Arrows team – and Bernoldi’s F1 career. After a token effort to qualify at Magny-Cours, the team made a final appearance at Hockenheim where, fittingly, Bernoldi retired with engine failure. He still had one more year on his Arrows contract, but would not start another grand prix. The timing couldn’t have been worse, because the four-year deal he had signed with Red Bull, and which had started in 1999, was also at an end.

“It was a bad situation,” says Bernoldi. “I couldn’t get my helmets back, my overalls back, I couldn’t get my paycheck back.”

Bernoldi admires Alonso and Raikkonen for their “amazing” longevity and praises Italian GP winner Montoya – “really the guy of the rookies” – but admits to a twinge of regret that his debut came at Arrows instead of the Sauber C20 that launched Raikkonen into a McLaren seat for 2002.

“It was a bit frustrating with Kimi because he drove the car that I should have been driving,” he says. “I didn’t have a career like the other three guys had. Maybe if I started in the other cars I would, maybe not. Who knows? But it was like you go to a gunfight with a knife, or with a baseball bat!

Enrique Bernoldi 2001

Photo by: Motorsport Images

“We had some top-10 finishes, which at that time was worth nothing. My engineer liked it while Coulthard was behind me [in Monaco], but after that he didn’t care because we didn’t get a point. That was the situation. It was frustrating because it was only a few cars that could be constantly in the points. You needed somebody to break down, needed some luck somehow.

“With Instagram, Twitter, you see a lot of comments from people who don’t understand anything. People might say, ‘There is three great drivers and Bernoldi did nothing, Red Bull paid for him’. But are all the Red Bull drivers paying drivers?

"There is always a way to see things and unfortunately, having a bad car in 2001 and 2002, I couldn’t show all the faith that Marko and Dietrich Mateschitz had in me.”

Enrique Bernoldi, David Coulthard 2001 Monaco GP

Photo by: Motorsport Images

Bernoldi after F1

Since his abrupt F1 exit in 2002, Bernoldi’s career has traversed plenty of categories without making a lasting impact. Now based in California, the 42-year-old hasn’t raced since 2016 (in one-make Lamborghinis), which he admits stems from finding it “difficult to be 100% committed” to any category other than F1.

“I always wanted to be an F1 driver, not a race car driver,” he explains. “F1 is what I dreamed of, not racing in IndyCar or at Le Mans. Racing gave me everything I have, but I was only really interested when I had the chance to be part of F1.”

When Arrows collapsed, he stepped down to the World Series by Nissan feeder series – Bernoldi won four races across the 2003 and 2004 seasons – and engaged Didier Coton as a manager to get him back into F1. That yielded a testing berth at BAR – “another world to what I used to drive, in every sense” – but, with Jenson Button, Takuma Sato and Anthony Davidson ahead in the pecking order, there was no viable route back into a race seat.

A season of Brazilian Stock Cars preceded a moved to Champ Car for 2008, but it was a struggle as the series was absorbed by IndyCar and transition teams had to play catch-up.

Opportunities dried up after a disappointing 2011 FIA GT1 season with Nissan, as his Platinum driver grading proved a frequent sticking point

“I didn’t like the ovals, being very honest,” says Bernoldi, whose best finishes were fifth in his first road course start at St Petersburg and fourth at Long Beach in the outgoing Champ Car Panoz. “Then I had a suspension failure [at Sonoma] and broke my hand – I had to get three surgeries. It all started to go a little bit downhill.”

The football-themed Superleague Formula single-seater championship in 2009 didn’t generate the same buzz, although he returned to winning ways at Paul Ricard with a DKR-run Corvette C6.R in the FIA GT Championship. He joined the all-conquering Vitaphone Maserati squad for the inaugural season of the GT1 World Championship in 2010, and won at Interlagos, but opportunities dried up after a disappointing 2011 season with Nissan as his Platinum driver grading proved a frequent sticking point. It was here when Bernoldi “started to lose interest”, and he now focuses on his family’s business interests in real estate and attending sports practice with his three children.

“Something which is really routine is to wake up every Sunday at 6am to be on the ice practising [hockey] 7 until 10,” he says. “Believe me, it’s harder than being an F1 driver!”

Enrique Bernoldi, Helio Castroneves 2008 IndyCar St Petersburg

Photo by: Motorsport Images