They've Got Previous

Acrimonious battles between Ferrari and McLaren are nothing new. just ask Niki Lauda. Or Alain Prost. Or Mika Hakkinen. Or Kimi Raikkonen... TONY DODGINS unravels a saga of strife

Whoever said that sport and politics don't mix? In Formula 1 they are inseparable. But the Ferrari/McLaren wrangle that has smouldered behind the scenes since the start of the year, and ignited properly in July, threatens to overshadow a truly absorbing season in which four men have a genuine chance of winning the world championship title.

This time, the dispute appears to have become personal between Jean Todt and Ron Dennis but, in essence, the concept is hardly new. Competition, 'needle', is most acute among the major players, whether it's Ferguson and Mourinho or Todt and Dennis. Ferrari and McLaren are most often at loggerheads because, over time, they are the ones with the records, the teams constantly in the thick of it.

This season could well go down as the most political in the 50-plus years of the world championship thanks to the fall-out from the recent spy scandal. But that will depend on what emerges in the coming weeks because, to date, 2007 still has a way to go to rival 1994 and 1976.

McLaren v Ferrari has a lot of previous.

The 1976 season was one of the sport's most memorable, and gave the lie to the notion that there is such a thing as bad publicity. At a time when promotion and media awareness of Formula 1 was still a good five to 10 years BC (pre-Bernard Charles), on and off-track fighting regularly took Formula 1 from the back pages to the front - for the first time without a fatality being involved.

It made household names of Niki Lauda and James Hunt in a championship battle that had everything. Lauda can see the similarities between then and now.

"It wasn't just a case of Ferrari versus McLaren," he says, "it was Ferrari versus everyone. Ferrari was very much the outsider. It was the British teams against Ferrari. It still is."

But, ever pragmatic, Lauda says of the current situation: "You can see where Ferrari is coming from, but you have to bear in mind that none of this would have happened if Mr Todt had his own house in order."

That is certainly a viewpoint, but it should be weighed against the fact that 'the Rat' never passes up the opportunity to take a shot at the Frenchman, having had an advisory role with his former team before Todt took up residence in Maranello some 14 years ago.

Hamilton admires Ferrari wing © XPB/LAT

The mid to late-seventies was the era of Luca di Montezemolo (as Ferrari team manager), Lauda and engineer Mauro Forghieri. There was a bit of a trailer to '76, when the nine-stone Luca squared up to a 16-stone clerk of the course at Watkins Glen in '75, when Clay Regazzoni's Ferrari was black-flagged at McLaren's behest. 'Regga' had been unashamedly holding up McLaren's Emerson Fittipaldi while Lauda made good his escape.

Post-'76, Ferrari and Lauda won back the title the following season and Jody Scheckter took the crown for Ferrari in 1979. As Scheckter retired, Ron Dennis was just taking over the reins at McLaren.

Four years later the Marlboro-backed team had become a formidable force and Ferrari was heading into decline, at the beginning of a long spell in the wilderness that would not be broken until Michael Schumacher finally won the championship in 2000, some 21 years after Scheckter! It is no surprise that, for the majority of this time, there was little acrimony - Ferrari simply wasn't competitive enough to make it worthwhile!

That changed briefly in 1990 when Alain Prost, unable to countenance another year at McLaren alongside Ayrton Senna, headed off to Ferrari to fight Ayrton from the outside. Armed with a John Barnard chassis (he'd won back-to-back titles with just such a thing for McLaren in 1985-86), Prost took the title battle down to the penultimate race in Suzuka, where Senna rammed him off the road at the first corner.

The high speed nature of the shunt, allied to the circumstances, made it the highest-profile Ferrari/McLaren spat to that point but, in fairness, it was rooted more in the enmity between the two men than in the culture of either team.

The atmosphere truly heated up in the late nineties, and had much to do with a new system of rule clarification from the governing body: the onus was suddenly on the teams to inform the FIA if they thought that a development route was in a grey area. The governing body would then rule on the matter and issue a 'clarification', without going into the specifics of any team's particular system.

Thus grew the culture of gleaning as much information as possible about a rival's modus operandi before seeking a clarification, or 'grassing them up', as some preferred to call it.

"The dispute appears to have become personal between Jean Todt and Ron Dennis, but the concept is hardly new" © XPB/LAT

When McLaren invested in an ingenious rear-braking system that got around the spirit of the regulations and greatly increased rear stability, Ferrari sought a clarification and the device was banned.

Then came the beryllium ban. An exotic material that was difficult to work with and could be carcinogenic in its production phase, it was used to strong effect by McLaren engine supplier Mercedes-Benz. Ferrari was believed to be strongly behind an eventual ban, a move which some reckoned cost McLaren as much as 40-50bhp.

It was at around this time that someone coined the tag 'Ferrari International Assistance' as a tongue-in-cheek reference to the governing body. Again, though, it has to be said that far from all FIA directions favour the reds. Cases in point were the eleventh-hour decision that cars had to qualify with race fuel in 2003, after a season of Ferrari domination in '02, and the 2005 control tyre regulations, which were instrumental in the previously dominant Maranello squad failing to win a race (Indianapolis shouldn't count!).

There was also disquiet about inconsistency of decision-making in race control and the stewards' room. Paranoia reached a high in 1998, when Michael Schumacher and Mika Hakkinen were embroiled in a highly competitive championship scrap.

Each individual decision is obviously decided on its own merits, but McLaren, having got the jump on Schumacher off the grid, was not happy to see the French Grand Prix stopped because Jos Verstappen had stalled on the grid when, three weeks before, the Canadian GP had been allowed to continue with Schumacher in front and Alexander Wurz upside down at the first corner.

To compound matters, Schumacher was then allowed to win the British GP in the pits without serving a penalty, thanks to a stewards' procedural cock-up after the Ferrari had passed Wurz before the start-finish line on a restart.

A year later, Schumacher crashed at Silverstone and the championship distilled into a battle between Ferrari team-mate Eddie Irvine and defending champion Hakkinen. Despite questions about quite how much Ferrari was behind an Irvine championship push in Michael's absence, Schumacher nevertheless came back in Malaysia and drove a brilliant spoiling race to ensure that Irvine got maximum points.

Brilliant, that is, unless you happened to be Hakkinen, who was messed around all afternoon by Schumacher, who was persistently slow into corners and late on the throttle out of them, to the point where there was a three-second variation in his lap times.

'Smug' Schumacher with drained Eddie Irvine and Mika Hakkinen on 1999 Malaysian GP podium © LAT

After 90 minutes of that in the Malaysian heat, Hakkinen was fraught, exhausted, riled and third. As Schumacher sat alongside him wearing a smug grin in the post-race press conference, Mika commendably managed to keep a lid on his feelings...

McLaren laughed louder post-race when the Ferrari barge boards were found to be outside the regulations and the red cars were thrown out, meaning that Hakkinen was champion again, pending Ferrari's appeal. To the surprise of not many, the appeal was successful, Ferrari got off on a technicality and the championship went down to the wire, with Irvine a point in front.

Again, to nobody's great surprise perhaps, poleman Schumacher was not quite able to match Hakkinen in the race, with the result that Mika retained his title and Michael himself had another chance to break Ferrari's drought the following year, which he did. "But what if Mika's car had broken?" a McLaren man said quietly.

On to 2003 and the Hungarian GP, in which Schumacher's Ferrari was the first Bridgestone-shod car home, a lap down. All of a sudden, following manoeuvring initiated by Ferrari and Bridgestone, the rules governing tyre measuring, which had been the same for years, were changed, so that technically Michelin's (and therefore McLaren's) contact patch was illegal under race conditions.

The Michelin teams were suddenly involved in a disruptive amount of revised tyre testing, and Schumacher and Ferrari went on to claim the remaining three races and both championships. Was the tyre issue truly influential? In terms of outright performance, probably not, but in terms of optimum preparation, definitely, was the McLaren verdict.

What about the current situation? The same applies.

But now, as then, the British and Italian positions are polar opposites. Italian journalists simply do not believe that McLaren has not gained advantage from Ferrari inside information. Their British counterparts, largely based on McLaren's reputation, are more inclined to accept the team's word.

The Italians see a slightly endearing naivety in that. Would we, they ask, have been so accepting of the position coming from mid-nineties Benetton? With glorious irony, considering that Ferrari was until very recently precisely that - mid-nineties Benetton.

Post-Hungary, Ron Dennis was seeking a private solution to the current issues with Ferrari. But you wonder if the personal positions are too entrenched. It's easy to suspect that this soap opera is far from run, and that some smellier episodes are yet to unfold.

Hunt tracked down Lauda in 1976 British GP at Brands to celebrate a win, but he lost his points © LAT

Truth stranger than fiction

The 1976 season featured rebellious British public-school glamour boy James Hunt pitched against reigning world champion Niki Lauda and Ferrari.

After taking his first grand prix win for Hesketh at Zandvoort the previous year, Hunt had jumped at a McLaren seat when Emerson Fittipaldi went off to drive for the Brazilian-backed Copersucar team.

Hunt was fast and took pole for the first two races, but Lauda won both. James finished second to the Ferrari in round two in South Africa but, amazingly, the six points he scored were to be supplemented by just two more before the end of June, so that the score was Lauda 55, Hunt 8.

But it should have been more... Lauda was formidable in the Ferrari, but less so on a tractor, which he managed to turn over on himself while building a house. He broke a rib in the process and drove round four at Jarama with the aid of painkillers and a surgical corset.

Hunt took pole, Niki beat him away, but James surprised him with a lunge up the inside mid-race. Lauda ran wide over a kerb and did his injured ribs a power of no good. But at post-race scrutineering the McLaren was found to be 1.8cm too wide. Hunt was disqualified.

The irony here was that McLaren's M23 was the widest car on the grid and had been used as the blueprint for the maximum width restriction, which had been measured across the rear track of the '75 car. Since then, however, Goodyear had manufactured some different rubber, allegedly at Ferrari's behest, which had softer sidewalls. The 'squash' made the McLaren illegal.

At Paul Ricard in early July, any hopes Hunt harboured of mounting a championship challenge seemed totally unrealistic when Lauda beat him away. But the Ferrari uncharacteristically blew an engine and Hunt took a maximum score. Two days later, Hunt heard that McLaren's appeal against his Spanish disqualification had been upheld. Lauda was knocked back to second and so, within 48 hours, there was a 21-point swing in Hunt's favour.

But still Niki was comfortable. Brands Hatch was next and the Ferraris filled the front row, but Niki and Clay Regazzoni collided at Paddock Bend, with Hunt's McLaren caught up in the melee. James returned to the pits via a short cut, and Ferrari argued that he should not be allowed to restart. That was technically correct, but the race organisers, fearing a riot as full beer cans were lobbed onto the track, allowed the McLaren back onto the grid. Lauda led, but Hunt passed him and won, much to the crowd's delight. Ferrari appealed.

Next came Nurburgring and Lauda's near-fatal accident. James won the restart. To all intents and purposes it was all over - Hunt would overhaul Lauda's points total over the balance of the season.

But that was counting without Lauda's bravery and determination. Having had the last rites administered, he missed just two races and, blood from blistered skin coating his balaclava, was back in the Ferrari just six weeks later at Monza, where he finished fourth.

But, for all Lauda's heroism, there was more bad feeling in Italy, when the stewards found that the McLarens' fuel had an illegally high octane rating in qualifying. The times of Hunt and team-mate Jochen Mass were disallowed - along with John Watson's Penske for good measure. Hunt, desperate to make up ground, collided with Tom Pryce and was jeered all the way back to the pits. All in all, the Italians had their revenge for Brands!

In the lead-up to the North American races, Hunt received the news that his British GP win had been overturned at appeal and he'd lost his points. Just as it should be, said Lauda, just to wind James up. But Ferrari, as only it could, was to brilliantly shoot itself in the foot during the run-up to Mosport and Watkins Glen. The team had signed Carlos Reutemann in case Lauda wasn't his old self.

When Niki made it clear that he intended to carry on leading the team, there suddenly wasn't a slot for Regazzoni, and a demotivated Clay did little to stop Hunt scoring 18 points in a week on the other side of the Atlantic.

Lauda, despite knocking on Hunt's hotel-room door early on race morning and announcing in his clipped tones, 'Today I win the championship!', managed just four points for third place at the Glen.

The showdown was at Mount Fuji in Japan, and Lauda travelled east with a lead of three points. Torrential rain delayed the race, and Fittipaldi was among those who thought conditions were too bad to start. When the race went ahead Lauda did one lap and then retired, saying that staying alive was more important than the world championship.

After what he'd been through at the 'Ring, nobody could blame him. With his eyelids badly burned, he was still awaiting an operation allowing him to blink tears from his eyes. He could cope with it in the dry, but in the spray it was madness.

As the track dried, Hunt recovered from a late pitstop to replace his shredded Goodyears to take third place. After all the drama, intrigue and acrimony, the title was his by a single point.