Out of Luck

If the broken Mumm's champagne bottle that Fernando Alonso's mechanic failed to catch under the Shanghai podium summed up Renault's weekend in China, then perhaps it also signalled the end of the team's run of bad luck.

It seemed instead to transfer to Ferrari, and specifically on race day. As crew members climbed through gaps in the Suzuka pit wall debris fencing to go to the grid, Felipe Massa's engineer Rob Smedley failed to spot that there were solid metal crossbars at the top of the openings. He took a nasty blow to the head, and almost knocked himself out.

So just minutes before the start of the Japanese Grand Prix, a key (and irreplaceable) engineer was not talking to his driver about how the car felt on the way to the grid, but was on his knees as panicking team members fussed around and tried their best to bandage him up. If you believe in omens, this was a pretty clear one for the Scuderia...

There have been many twists and turns in the world championship since Michael Schumacher's resurgence began at Indianapolis back in July, but no single moment was quite as dramatic as that which befell the German at Suzuka, and flipped the odds in favour of Renault.

Alonso may have had his own engine failure at Monza, but due to his penalty at the time, he was heading only for third place, and there were still three races left in which he could recover. But on this occasion, Michael was leading, his retirement created a 12-point swing in the favour of his rival, and he had just one race left to sort things out. It was a crushing blow.

Schumacher now not only has to win at Interlagos, but also has to rely on Alonso failing to score. And while that very outcome occurred at Monza, nobody in the Maranello is putting too much faith in it happening again. After the race, the mood in the Ferrari camp was one of desperation. Perhaps there was a fear that Schumacher's engine had in effect a ticking time bomb, and always destined to fail.

The timeline goes back to Monza, when the team fitted the latest spec engine to Felipe Massa's car. He finished the race with it, and it was duly taken to China. Michael was on a different schedule, so he had an example fitted for Shanghai.

There was no cause for concern until Felipe's V8 suffered a valve issue in the Friday morning session, forcing a change and penalty. The obvious question was, would the problem recur in Schumacher's brand new and identical engine? The team took the gamble, and he duly won the race. But that engine still had to survive the whole of the Suzuka weekend...

Ferrari Type 056 V8 © XPB/LAT

The life of engines

On Friday in Japan, Ferrari technical director Ross Brawn talked at length about V8s and reliability, and in retrospect it was interesting stuff. At that time he insisted that Massa's earlier failure was not an ongoing concern.

However, in reality the team had not had an opportunity to properly examine Schumacher's Shanghai race-winning engine, as it was sealed, and there's only so much any team can do by way of physical inspection between races. In fact, there was a suggestion that a foreign object might have been the root cause, so in other words there was no need to fear a batch issue or whatever.

"We're still analysing it, but it looked like a one-off," said Brawn of the Massa failure. "It doesn't look like a systematic problem with the valves, it looks like it's a one-off. You can never be 100% certain, but we've looked at all the other engines with that spec of components, and they all look perfectly OK, and we've had several double-race distances on that spec. So we believe it's a one-off problem, and there's still the possibility of something having gone through the engine and damaged a valve."

Of course, these days reliability is as much about usage as design or manufacturing problems. A key element of the two-race V8 era has been the fact that drivers have routinely been turning revs up and down to a significantly greater extent than in the past. They are down in practice, down for the fuel-burning phase in qualifying, and obviously up for any pukka qualifying laps.

Drivers also have a ration of high rev laps to use during the race. At the start of the season, the Renault drivers apparently had 20 hot laps per race - if they didn't use them in the first event, they could save them for the second. It's a bit like having a turbo boost button. Turn it down when you are stuck in traffic, and up when you have a clear run, especially immediately before or after a pitstop.

As teams have developed the V8s, the peak revs have increased, while they have also been pushing the boundaries in terms of how many laps are allowed on that limit.

"The amount of revs you can use for racing does extend, as I think it's done with everybody," said Brawn. "When you increase the rpm, it's initially just for qualifying and the odd lap, but then of course you try to consolidate that and use it for more and more of the race. I think most teams have a ratio of how many laps at high revs, and how many at low revs, and they can exchange one for the other.

"Here, for example, we didn't do many laps [on Friday], and that would give us a few more laps at higher revs in the race. And you're doing that sort of trade all over the weekend. There's a lot of management of the rpm that goes on over the weekend and over the two races."

While clearly there was some concern about Schumacher's Shanghai engine, there was also good reason to be confident, because the wet conditions and the way the Chinese GP unfolded meant that it was pushed less than it might have been.

Ferrari engine director Paolo Martinelli © XPB/LAT

"Michael's engine had a relatively easy life in China," added Brawn. "We didn't have to use many overrevs, we didn't have to use any particularly hard laps, so those are available for him in the race this weekend. Felipe had an engine that didn't do the complete weekend because of the problem we had, so his has a bit of extra capacity for the race. Of course, I think Fernando, Michael and Felipe all have one-race engines for Brazil, so that will be interesting..."

The team did their analysis and concluded that Schumacher's engine was not at particular risk, and the fact that Red Bull had reported no problems was also good news.

The ultra conservative option would have been to give the German a new engine just before qualifying, and accept a 10-place drop. Ferrari did just that with Schumacher in Malaysia, after Massa had a problem. But that was at the start of the season, and in the present circumstances it would have been an impossible decision for anyone to impose on Michael. Instead, the team played the odds.

This engine has ceased to be

The rain meant that the real story of how Bridgestone and Michelin stacked up at Suzuka wasn't apparent until the end of the Saturday morning session, when the presence of the Ferraris and Ralf Schumacher's Toyota at the top told the story. Clearly the Bridgestone was good over one lap, and both teams took full advantage of that.

However, as in Turkey, Schumacher was outqualified by Massa. In reality, the Brazilian was some two laps - or 6kgs - lighter on fuel, and in addition Schumacher had to leave himself some margin in qualifying, however small it might be, because he couldn't afford a mistake like the one he made in Turkey. In previous title races, Rubens Barrichello often had the edge as the climax approached, although the need to back off is not quite as evident as in the days of the one-lap-or-bust qualifying, assuming that you have at least posted a decent banker time in Q3.

The early part of the race went to plan, and once again, as a team, Ferrari showed that they learn lessons well. After Hungary, Brawn regretted failing to put Massa on dry tyres first as a guinea pig to help Schumacher, but in China, that strategy was employed, and it worked well.

In Turkey, the team allowed Massa to scoot off in the lead and assumed that Schumacher would ease in front at the first round of pitstops. Then a safety car came out, and by being trapped behind his teammate in the pits, Schumacher lost both the potential win and second place - creating an expensive six-point swing to Alonso. This time, nothing was left to chance, and Massa let his teammate by at the first opportunity. As the German edged away in front, it looked as though all was going well.

Michael Schumacher enters the Ferrari pit © LAT

But the first hint of trouble for Ferrari was a slow puncture in Massa's right rear, caused by a cut. He was first aware of it around lap 7, but the team knew even earlier. By lap 13, the telemetry showed that the pressure drop had reached a crisis point. There was a serious chance of a failure, so having left it as long as possible, the team brought Massa in three laps ahead of schedule. There was no time to worry about where he could come out in traffic, and he emerged behind Nick Heidfeld. Just one more lap would have made the difference, but the team couldn't take the risk.

Massa duly got stuck behind the BMW for five laps before Heidfeld pitted, and that cost the Brazilian around a ton of time. Having taken care of the Toyotas, Alonso duly jumped Massa at the first stops, and that was not a situation the men in red had planned on. Alonso instantly had two more points in his sights, and Schumacher now had no one riding shotgun. He had to keep up a good pace and had to use more of the high-rev laps than he might otherwise have done, although he was still within the permitted limits.

As noted, for obvious reasons drivers tend to use up higher-rev laps before and after pitstops. Schumacher came in for a second time on lap 37, and barely half a lap later smoke began billowing from the back of the car. Was it a coincidence that he had been gunning the engine at that time, or did the stop procedure itself perhaps trigger something, as happened several times with Honda a couple of years ago?

Whatever the case, the sight of Schumacher walking back to the pits was an unusual one. It happened an awful lot in his first Ferrari year, in 1996, but since he began collecting titles, mechanical reliability has been near bullet proof as far as his car had been concerned, and that finishing record has made a huge contribution to his assault on the record books. His luck finally ran out at the worst possible moment.

Nobody expects the Spanish inquisition

Half an hour after the race, I caught up with Ross Brawn in the Ferrari hospitality area. He was sitting quietly with wife Jean, who has joined him under the podium for the past couple of races, and shared two very different moods. He still seemed to be in a state of shock, but when I pointed out that this could be the second to last time I'd have to bother him post chequered flag, he did at least raise a smile.

"The race was tougher than I think a lot of people thought," he admitted. "But we know from past experience that even when it looks very strong in qualifying, it can move back in the race. And that was really the case. We didn't have a completely comfortable race, but Michael was holding the gap quite well; and when he needed to push, he was able to push.

"But we didn't have the comfort of Felipe there because he had a puncture, and we had to call him in because we saw the tyre pressure dropping. His whole race got compromised from then on, because he went back out in traffic and got stuck. So that was really a bit unfortunate.

Fernando Alonso (Renault R26) © Reuters

"The tyre situation was pretty much as expected. We had a big gap in qualifying, and it came back to a more even situation in the race, when the track rubbered in. I just think we had a more normal situation in the race. I think when the track was green, there was an abnormal situation in qualifying, but that was what we expected."

"Everything was going fine with Michael until we had a mechanical failure, but those things happen," Brawn continued. "You try and keep them as infrequent as possible, but they occasionally happen. From the data of the engine, it's some sort of top-end engine failure, but we don't know what it is."

Renault's director of engineering Pat Symonds had told me a few minutes earlier that he had expected Alonso to catch Schumacher, although he conceded that overtaking would be a different matter. But Brawn was adamant that his man still had pace in hand and the gap would not have closed.

"I think he would have caught him if we'd backed off! I don't think he would have caught us in a normal situation. Michael was able to increase his pace if he needed to, so as we started approaching pitstops we asked Michael to keep the gap, in case anything went wrong in the pitstop or we had some other glitch, and he was certainly able to respond. I think it's hard to speculate. Obviously the last stint would have been very short for both cars. I don't think it was an issue for us, anyway."

In effect, Brawn was admitting that the pressure from Alonso had forced Schumacher to take a little more out of the engine prior to that fateful pitstop, albeit within prescribed limits. Whether that made the difference or not is impossible to say, but forcing the opposition to push the limits is what this sport is all about, and Fernando and Renault reaped the rewards on Sunday.

The obvious question concerned whether the Suzuka failure was related to Massa's. Both had, after all, failed at their second races, although the mileages were different, and Michael's had run further. Brawn said it was too early for a definite conclusion.

"I think we need to wait and see," he said. "But we've had a lot of engines with those components and those designs, and they've gone race distances with no trouble at all, including some in Red Bull, some in Ferrari, but it's hard to correlate at this stage. You always try and keep the use of your engine down as best as you can, so it something we'll have to understand."

Expired and gone to meet its maker

The blown engine finally arrived back at Maranello on Wednesday morning, and the team spent the day examining it. It was badly mangled internally, but the initial conclusion was that it was not, after all, connected to the Chinese failure, even if valves were involved once again (as indeed they were back in Malaysia).

The first turn at Interlagos © LAT

"We checked the engine and what we found was we had a failure in the upper part of a valve," Ferrari spokesman Luca Colajanni told autosport.com on Wednesday evening. "It's the first time we had it, and it's nothing to do with what happened to Felipe's engine. We're still doing more analysis to understand why there was this failure, but it was nothing to do with the other one. That was in the same area, but it was a completely different thing.

"It was not a part that had been recently introduced, so this is why it's strange. It happened in Suzuka, but it could have happened in Hockenheim. It's the kind of thing that can always happen. It's just a shame that it happened when it did."

Meanwhile, the V8 with which Massa finished second in Suzuka automatically becomes the officially homologated engine that forms the basis for Ferrari's spec for 2007 and beyond, and as such has been sealed by the FIA.

The news that the failures were not related is good in the sense that the team's initial conclusion that there was no need to worry about Michael in Japan was correct. But on the other hand, there have been two apparently unrelated expensive failures at this critical period of the championship, and there are still a lot of unknowns.

Both drivers get a new engine for Brazil (as does Alonso), and they will be of the same spec. They only have to do one race weekend, and that means there's a lot more flexibility in terms of the high-rev laps.

"All the overrevs that you'd use over two races, you use over one race," said Brawn in Japan. "There's no real difference. It's just the usage of it; because it only has to last one race, you can just use it harder."

Ferrari had hoped to go into Brazil with this capacity to run the engines hard for a large proportion of the race, and the team will certainly need to do that if they are to secure either title. But the Suzuka failure may force the team to revise that strategy and perhaps be a little more cautious than planned. And that could play into Renault's hands.