Chronicle of a Debacle Foretold
From the moment Toyota's Ralf Schumacher hit the wall during Friday practice for the US Grand Prix, and until 14 Michelin-shod cars pulled into the pits at the end of the formation lap for the race, you just had to believe that somehow everything will work out in the end. It usually does, after all. In hindsight, the Indianapolis weekend was a powder keg ignited, and Adam Cooper was at the scene, watching it inevitably explode. He brings a detailed account of how it all went wrong
When Ralf Schumacher hit the wall on Friday at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, none of the journalists there realised quite what the implications would be, even when it emerged that his teammate Ricardo Zonta had also suffered a left rear failure. I can remember us all getting excited after the first session in Bahrain last year, when there was a series of spectacular punctures on Michelin cars - all traced back to a dodgy kerb, which was subsequently sorted.
Last weekend, the problem seemed slow to gather momentum. Only gradually did we learn that teams other than Toyota had suffered signs of imminent problems with the heavily loaded left rear. What was worrying was that they seemed to involve third cars that had run a lot of laps.
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