A Moment of Madness at Rascasse

I watched Monaco qualifying, as I usually do, from the Swimming Pool. Not only is it a great bit of circuit on which to view the cars running at the very limit, but the giant TV screen up on the cliff face allows you to follow the action around the track. We all knew this was going to be a great session, but no one quite expected the conclusion that we got.

After watching Michael Schumacher clatter over the kerbs at the exit, I caught his little Rascasse moment on the screen. I didn't have a great view at the time, but even without the benefit of studying replays, I was stunned. My main reaction was one of anger. We had been robbed of a fair conclusion of what should have been a magnificent sporting contest - the battle for Monaco pole.

Muttering a few rude words to myself, I headed straight back to the pitlane, curious to see what the reaction would be. Had I really seen what I thought I'd seen? Would people from other teams be willing to suggest that a little gamesmanship had been employed?

I need not have worried, for I was not alone. The first guy I bumped into was Renault chief Flavio Briatore, and he was livid. And everyone else you came across said the same thing - Ferrari, or Michael at least, had taken us all for dummies, or Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, as Flav put it. Something had to be done.

Before the situation really began to escalate, Ferrari's technical director Ross Brawn - who looked a little shell-shocked - had the job of explaining what happened.

"He lost control of the car on the left-hander," the Briton said. "He locked the brakes and lost the line and lost it in that corner. We've still got to talk to him and find out exactly what happened. There was a lot of cursing on the radio.

"We wouldn't do that sort of thing on purpose. Michael had clearly done a very good lap, and he was on another lap with low fuel, so it wasn't a deliberate act."

There was no need for Renault or any other team to take a complaint to the FIA Stewards. They had already registered the incident as 'strange' and launched an investigation that didn't reach its conclusion until the final verdict was typed up and signed off at 10:22pm.

The GP2 and Porsche races that followed qualifying and took the attention of some key officials explained only part of the delay. The rest was because this was a decision of monumental proportions, and they wanted to get it right.

Not surprisingly, the media immediately went to town. Michael was branded a cheat in the British newspapers on Sunday, and he had similar treatment around the world. There was no reason to hold back or present a balanced view, after all. He'd been found guilty as charged, and the stewards had made it quite clear what they thought in their announcement.

So what really happened?

It's easy to get caught up in conspiracy theories and suggest that Schumacher's action was cooked up by Ferrari, possibly even before the weekend. The big joke in the paddock was that Felipe Massa had somehow confused the message 'crash on the last lap,' and done it on his first! But taking a charitable viewpoint, I'm prepared to believe that nothing quite as blatant as creating a yellow flag was really discussed in the Ferrari camp.

Having said that, it was rather handy that Schumacher was the first key player to take to the track for his final run, and that at least gave him the opportunity to do what he did. Of course, had his final lap been a brilliant one, he would have had no reason to create an obstruction. He would have finished it, improved on the pole time he already had, and then just hoped that neither Alonso nor anyone else went faster.

Although the first sector was good, the second wasn't, and Michael knew it. He didn't have to be told on the radio, because he gets timing information on his steering wheel screen, and he would have known instinctively where he'd gone wrong. He must also have known that through the final third of the lap the chances of regaining the ground he'd lost, and on top of that finding an improvement on the best time he already had, were slim.

And yet he carried on at full speed. He's perfectly entitled to do that, and still set a time, be it slower or not than the one he already had. Nevertheless, it was a key piece of evidence that the stewards referred to in their statement.

What the stewards couldn't do was look inside Michael's brain to ascertain what happened next, but they could look at hard, concrete evidence from the telemetry. Finding a smoking gun was absolutely paramount, and it proved to be the braking pressure he applied on the way into Rascasse.

The most obvious conclusion is that on arrival at the corner he was quite deliberately attempting to do something - spin the car or sail straight on in a cloud of tyre smoke - that would create a track blockage and bring out the yellow flag that would neutralise the sector for everybody following. Did the electronic systems that usually work so hard to keep the Ferrari glued to the road actually frustrate his 'sabotage' attempt? That was one viewpoint.

Ferrari would argue that he arrived there on the limit and jumped on the brakes a little harder than normal in a desperate effort to find the lost fractions, and that led to a loss of control.

Somewhere in between is another scenario that, being generous, is possibly more likely. Frustrated by his earlier mistake, only too aware that others were behind and potentially about to eclipse him (although he claimed there was no detailed news on the radio about his rivals), in some spontaneous, instinctive reflex, he did what he did.

As someone said, it was a 'Michael moment', something we've seen in the past when the guy was put under extreme pressure. Adelaide '94? Jerez '97? Many other less celebrated incidents were remembered and brought up over the course of the weekend, such as those occasions when he's, shall we say, not done as much as he could have to get a crippled car out of the way after a first corner shunt. Red flag, anyone? It worked once in Hockenheim, it didn't in Austria, where he finally abandoned his car only after he saw the safety car drive out.

More premeditated was that time at Silverstone when both Schumacher and his then-teammate Rubens Barrichello had 'phantom' spins in first qualifying so that they'd be at the bottom of the times and thus go out early in the second session, and thus miss the expected rain. At the time there was no suggestion from the team that errors were anything but genuine. The truth came later....

A beginner's error?

As for what happened after he 'lost control' at Rascasse, there is no logical explanation, regardless of whether the initial lock-up was a genuine error of judgement or something else. It was those bizarre steering motions, which saw him come to a halt next to the barrier, that just don't add up, and in particular, the subsequent stalling of the engine. Anyone in the paddock with any real knowledge of the sport knew that the steering movements were simply not consistent with the speed the car was doing.

Now, we're dealing with probably the greatest driver of all time here. I've seen Schumacher spin a Benetton down the straight in Argentina in the pouring rain, come to rest facing the right way, and continue while barely losing momentum. Dozens of times he's recovered out-of-shape cars from impossible angles. He's found grip in the wet, on the grass, even on gravel, that others just could not find. And on Sunday, he drove a quite magnificent race, right on the limit for 78 laps.

I won't say without mistakes, because that's the point. When you drive at his level you make 'mistakes' all the time, in that you're almost constantly on the very edge of adhesion or on the verge of locking the brakes. He probably had dozens of such moments on Sunday, but he dealt with them, and from the outside we were not aware how close he'd come to potential disaster.

So how to explain that the great man had to indulge in what one of the stewards later described as 'some absolutely unnecessary and pathetic counter steering...until there was no chance to go through the turn normally'?

On Sunday night, I made this point to Jean Todt, but he didn't seem to see what I was driving at - he just looked me in the eyes and reminded me that in Australia, Schumacher had indeed made a proper mistake, and paid the price.

Anyone who has any lingering doubts about his actions following the lock-up should just consider it this way. Imagine he'd had the same moment on lap 78 of the race, or indeed, any of the 77 others. Would we have seen such a feeble progress towards the barrier, and then no attempt at all to manoeuvre the car out of the way and get going again? Judge for yourself.

You don't need to be Einstein to realise that selecting reverse for just a couple of metres would have given him the space to make the turn. Alternatively, right behind was a huge gap in the Armco and parking space for several cars. If he really wanted to, in a matter of seconds he could have banged it into reverse, steered into the gap, and the track would have been clear. The world would have said what a generous gesture to get out of the way like that.

This after all is the man who knows where the gaps are behind gravel traps at tracks all over the world, and has shown so many times how aware he is of the environment around him. His excuse for not taking reverse was of course concerns about traffic.

The other question is, when did you last see Michael Schumacher stall a car, in any situation? It just doesn't happen. The stewards determined that the engine switched off because Schumacher wanted it to, and that's drawn from both telemetry evidence and, most damningly, the on-board camera.

When it was still running, he still had the chance to manoeuvre away, but he chose not to do so. And when it was running, the engine that had to do 78 laps on Sunday was also cooking quite nicely, and at some point, he decided it was time to cool things down.

The benefit of the doubt

After the race I heard at first hand the stories of two of the key players. Michael Schumacher gave an impromptu briefing in the pit lane, and later Jean Todt spoke to a small group of us at the Ferrari motorhome.

Schumacher spoke at length, aware that it might be better to justify himself than hide away or give glib answers. In a way, he was quite impressive.

"It was pretty disappointing to have to go and not be able to do something," he said. "Although there was plenty of evidence and we managed to provide very important information that it was not possible to see from the outside.

"But nevertheless, at certain moments, certain situations are prejudged and that's where you are. You have to pay for it. We paid for it, we did it in style, we raced as hard as we could, and we got some points. What is important now is that we've got to look forward from now on."

He had no time for suggestions that 'everybody' shared the same opinion about what had happened.

"When you say everybody, it's everybody you want to talk to or you want to listen to," the German said. "Because the others are either with us and they don't talk, because they don't see any reason to say anything. Others do. That makes the picture as I said prejudged. You have your enemies, you know your enemies. But I think it's more important to know that I know what happened, what really happened. I don't see any reason to explain in detail.

"A lot of people - they believe what they want to believe. You can give them whatever proof, and it doesn't really change, because that's what they want to believe. So you care more for the people that believe in you, and they don't need to have this explanation, because they believe in who or what you are. But there you go. I mean, the world doesn't stop, you have to continue, and the way to continue is that there are 11 races to go."

Todt admitted that he hadn't expected the storm of protest that engulfed the team: "Yes, I must say I was surprised. But, you know, we are in a world where people very easily overreact. On my side I try not to overreact and understand exactly what is happening. Saying that, Michael has in the past done some mistakes, he has admitted that he has done some mistakes.

"But I don't know any driver, having been world champion, who is in a position to say he never did a mistake. Yesterday Michael made a mistake, as a driver, but it was not something unfair or twisty towards his competitors. It will be an empty discussion. Everybody can make his opinion.

"I know that the majority of people around were saying that Michael did it on purpose. I feel when you are facing charges or a tribunal it's what is called benefit of the doubt. And nobody could really demonstrate, and we tried to demonstrate with the information we had, with the telemetry data we had, that it was a driver's mistake. It was not taken into consideration."

Loyalty to the prodigal son

You have to give Todt some credit for standing by his man, and the same goes for Brawn. After all, they know him a lot better than we do, as a driver and a human being, and they've weathered many storms together. Doubtless in the past there were times when the world was having a go at Schumacher after some incident or other, and only Ferrari insiders knew for sure that he was utterly, genuinely innocent.

But this time, I believe Michael really dropped them in it, left them defending the indefensible. And that, arguably, wasn't really fair. I can only surmise that Michael indulged in a moment of madness that was so extreme that even he couldn't quite believe it afterwards. Was he unable to explain it fully and justify it even to Ross and Jean?

He could have come out and say, 'Shit, I did what I did out of frustration because my lap had gone. I realised straight away that it was pretty stupid and I honestly regret it now.' But to admit that might have left him open to even more trouble than has actually been heaped upon him. That being the case, how could his bosses do anything else but defend him? The policy seems to be, stick to the story and hope the problem goes away.

On Sunday, I asked a team principal whose own driver had been involved in a controversial scrape at Monaco last year what he would have done. The message was clear; you can't condone such actions, and the key thing is for the driver to be straight with the team, apologise for screwing things up. Dealing with the outside world was another problem.

Both Schumacher and Todt seemed to see a conspiracy by enemies in the paddock; that those criticising Michael all had an axe to grind. Todt also had a lunge at the stewards in an official team statement

The general attitude was a little blinkered and disrespectful. I couldn't find anyone in the paddock who, at the very least, didn't have serious doubts about what had gone on. Some tried to see a positive side - they couldn't quite believe that such a great driver had done it - but they had to admit that the evidence of their own eyes meant they struggled to justify that view.

It's often said that you should be judged by your peers, and if that was the case, Michael would probably be facing a life ban rather than relegation to the back of the grid. Most top drivers refused to go into detail - they couldn't be bothered with the hassle of being quoted - but they made it pretty clear what they thought. There were of course mutterings about an official response from the GPDA. Their meeting at Silverstone will be interesting.

The point is that these guys were in a much better position to judge what was actually going on in the cockpit as Schumacher's car snaked towards the barrier than anybody else. Pedro de la Rosa made no secret of his feelings. Michael was a superstar in his eyes, and now he's "a nobody".

Did the penalty fit the crime?

Much has been made by Ferrari about the severity of the penalty, but it simply reflected the view that the stewards took. Bear in mind that Giancarlo Fisichella went back from fifth to 10th (which then became ninth) for holding up one car, namely that of David Coulthard. His act was clumsy, perhaps, but certainly not deliberate.

Alonso was by no means the only driver whose grid position was affected by Schumacher, so the punishment had to be severe, and it had to serve as a deterrent, not just to the 21 other drivers, but to all those guys in GP2, F3, Formula Renault and whatever around the world who aspire to compete at the top level. If you dick around, you'll get caught - that is the message.

It was also important that the FIA found a way to penalise him for an infringement that was not subject to appeal, so that the punishment was final and could not be challenged, much to Ferrari's frustration.

"When you are in front of a judge, it doesn't mean that their opinion is always right," said Todt. "At the end of the day, if you want to get deeper into what is Michael, who is Michael, what he does in F1, for F1, outside of F1, it's up to the people to judge.

"Myself, I have the privilege to know him very well. I respect him, I admire him, and I think he's one of the best persons I've ever met. But, again, we cannot avoid people thinking what they want."

The sad thing is that even people who were not previously Schumacher fans have been pleased to see him back in the thick of things this year. Not everyone will necessarily want to see Schumacher win an eighth title, but most would probably be happy to see him win a few races and keep Alonso on his toes until October.

To a large degree, even his enemies had forgiven past indiscretions, as there has been relatively little to generate any serious criticism in recent years. His overall contribution to the sport has far outweighed earlier controversies.

Now, the situation may have changed. And even if he does race on in 2007, he's not going to have enough years left to erase from memory the madness at Rascasse.

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- The Autosport.com Team

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