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Of
the hundreds of Grands Prix contested since Formula One
was established in 1950, a handful stand out as classics.
Whether by virtue of spectacular individual achievements,
competitive drama, technical wizardry or their impact
on the development of the sport, the races profiled here
offer some of the defining moments in the history of F1
motor racing. |
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Grand
Prix racing in its first three seasons had been dominated
by the Continental drivers and teams Alfa Roméo,
Ferrari and Maserati but the winds of change
were sown at the Reims triangle, the 4th race of 1953.
With Alberto Ascari (who had won every GP in 1952) on
pole, joined by newcomer teammate Mike Hawthorn of Great
Britain, the race by half-distance became a slipstreaming
battle among Ascari, Giuseppe ("Nino") Farina,
Juan Manuel Fangio, Froilan Gonzalez and Hawthorn. After
Gonzalez pitted, Hawthorn and Fangio engaged in a thrilling,
side-by-side duel on the long Reims straights, the drivers
signaling to each other and clearly enjoying every moment.
Going into the final lap Hawthorn inched ahead after
the two blasted past the pits in a dead heat, kept the
lead in the critical last turn at the Thillois hairpin,
and beat Fangio whose Maserati had lost first
gear to the line by 1.0s, with Gonzalez just
0.4s behind and a whisker ahead of Ascari in 4th place.
It was the first Grand Prix win by a Briton, a prelude
of many more to come.
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Juan
Manuel Fangio 46 years old and already a four-time
world champion arrived at the Nürburging's
14.2 mile Nordeschlifer ("North Ring") in 1957
under a blazing August sky fresh off Stirling Moss's British
GP victory at Aintree for Vanwall, the first-ever GP win
by a British constructor. Starting on half-tanks in his
gorgeous Maserati 250F, Fangio judged he could build up
a sufficient lead over the Ferraris of Hawthorn and Peter
Collins to stop for fuel and retain the lead.
But Maserati were not the best organized of teams, and
Fangio's lap 11 pit stop lasted an agonizing 53s, allowing
Hawthorn to take the lead by more than a minute when Fangio
finally rejoined the race. "The Maestro" proceeded
to unleash the most spectacular pursuit of his career.
He broke and re-broke the Ring lap record by an amazing
12 seconds on three consecutive laps eventually
bettering his pole time by fully eight seconds
and when the Ferraris realized the danger, he was already
in their mirrors. As the cars thundered past the South
Curve, Fangio closed right up to Collins' gearbox, and
swept by with a wheel on the grass, peppering Collins
with stones. It was the Argentine's 24th and final Grand
Prix victory, and also his greatest. As Fangio said later,
"On that day in 1957 I finally managed to master
the Nürburgring. It was as if I had screwed all the
secrets out of it and got to know it once and for all.
. . . Even now, I can feel fear when I think of that race.
I'd never driven like that before, and I knew I never
would again." |
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The
Grand Prix of Argentina, the opening race of the 1958
Formula One season, will not be remembered as a classic
duel, but rather because it saw the first glimpse of a
radical change in F1 car design. The Cooper T43, fitted
with a Coventry 2.0 litre engine, gave away 500cc of displacement
to the more powerful Ferraris and Maseratis. But John
Cooper had
developed a mid-engine design that placed the engine behind
the driver, allowing better weight distribution and superior
handling. Driving a customer Cooper for Rob Walker's private
team, Stirling Moss qualified just 7th, a full two seconds
behind Fangio's pole position. Nonetheless, amid general
amazement Moss won the race in the small English car,
staring a coup d'état that would soon
overthrow the existing scale of values in the small society
of Formula One. Taking advantage of rule changes that
outlawed aviation petrol and that limited races from 310
miles (500km) to 186 miles (300km), the Cooper recognized
that reduced fuel consumption and shorter races inevitably
led to lighter cars, with less generous proportions, as
the cars had less weight to support and did not have to
last so long. The "Cooper revolution" was in
full sway by 1959, when Jack Brabham won the championship
with a Cooper T51, and in 1961 all the cars lined up for
the opening Grand Prix of the season at Monaco were built
with the design that just three years earlier, only Cooper
were using. |
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If
the Sixties had a single turning point, it was the 1967
Dutch Grand Prix at Zandvoort. While earlier technical
innovations like the monocoque chassis and use
of the engine as a stressed member of the suspension
were perhaps more important, Zandvoort witnessed the debut
of the Ford Cosworth DFV 3.0 V8 engine, the power plant
that would go on to dominate Formula One for nearly two
decades. Born of a partnership between Team Lotus and
Ford, the Cosworth DFV brought two-time F1 World Champion
Jim Clark just his second Grand Prix victory since his
dominant 1965 season, where Clark led every lap of every
race he finished. With minor trouble with wheel bearings
hampering his qualifying performance, Clark started well
back in 8th on the grid behind team mate Graham Hill's
pole position (4.2s faster than the lap record). After
11 laps Hill was out, handing the lead to Jack Brabham,
followed by Jochen Rindt, but just five laps later Clark
had passed both, taking a lead which he held to the end,
eventually winning by 23.6s. By the end of 1967 the Lotus
49s were so dominant that Hill and Clark would toss a
coin to see who should win, with only unreliability denying
Clark a third World Championship. Although Team Lotus'
exclusive use of the DFV ended in 1968's season-opening
South African GP Clark's final F1 win before his
tragic death at Hockenheim in April 1968 the Cosworth
would go on to win more than 150 Grands Prix, competing
successfully through 1983. |
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The
daunting Nürburgring was at its most capricious
in August 1968, with mist and torrential rain rendering
the track treacherous and visibility virtually non-existent.
Driving with a broken wrist, Jackie Stewart set his
Matra-Ford in 6th on the starting grid, but moved past
pole sitter Jackie Ickx's Ferrari and into an 8s lead
by the end of the first 14-mile, 187-turn lap. After
another lap he led by 25s, and nearly a minute after
five laps. At the finish, Stewart won by an amazing
4m 3.2s, giving him time to to climb out of the car
and accept congratulations before the others even came
into sight. Stewart thought it was not his greatest
race which he believed was the 1973 Italian Grand
Prix at Monza, where
Stewart unlapped himself on the entire field
saying later that "I can't remember doing more
than one balls-out lap of the 'Ring than I had to. It
gave you amazing satisfaction, but anyone who says he
loved it is either a liar or wasn't going fast enough!"
But like Fangio's drive 11 years earlier, Stewart's
1968 performance at Nürburgring proved that this
devilishly difficult circuit brought out the best in
the best Formula One drivers of all time.
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Silverstone,
the birthplace of the modern Formula One era in 1950,
is a circuit that has witnessed many fantastic duels,
and the 1973 Grand Prix of Great Britain was one for the
ages. With a nine-car
shunt on the opening lap at the ultra-fast Woodcote corner
which red-flagged the race and led to the first
of the chicanes that have now blighted this tremendous
track the British GP was transformed into an epic
battle among pole-sitter Ronnie Peterson in the Lotus
72D, McLaren drivers Deny Hulme and Peter Revson, and
first-year F1 newcomer James ("Hunt the Shunt")
Hunt in a private March. Revson stalked defending World
Champion Emerson Fittipaldi and Peterson until mid-race,
where with a light rain starting to fall he took the lead.
After Fittipaldi dropped out with transmission failure
with 30 laps to go, the Peterson-Hulme-Hunt trio moved
as one. At the finish, the three were separated by just
0.6s, with Revson taking the checkered flag and
his only GP win before being killed in practice at Kyalami
in March 1974 just 2.8s ahead. |
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The
1976 season was all about the artistry and courage of
Niki Lauda, and in the end revealed James Hunt as the
World Champion, Britain's last for the next 16 years.
Lauda had won six of the first nine races to start the
season, but at the German Grand Prix on 1 August, Lauda
crashed his Ferrari at Bergwerk, a 150 mph
section of the Nürburgring, in a massive, flaming
accident that still brings shivers when viewed to this
day. Suffering severe facial burns and inhaling toxic
fumes from the car's burning bodywork, Lauda was expected
to die and received the Last Rites in the hospital. In
a rare display of sheer determination, he made a near-miraculous
recovery to return to the cockpit just six weeks later
for the Italian GP. Fuji was drawn in another dimension:
a widespread disbelief that Lauda was actually alive,
never mind driving his Ferrari. Coming into this final
race, Hunt needed to finish four points ahead of Lauda,
and dominated the first-half of the race run in
atrociously bad weather with a fantastic start.
When Lauda withdrew after three laps, it seemed Hunt had
everything wrapped up, yet as the track dried his rain
tires began to shred. Pitting from a safe 3rd place, Hunt
rejoined in 5th with just five laps to go. Ferrari began
celebrating Lauda's title, but they were counting out
an inspired Hunt, who quickly passed Alan Jones and Clay
Regazzoni to retake 3rd. Still, Hunt was unable to communicate
with his pits, which meant he did not know what position
he was in, and kept pushing for his life to catch Patrick
Depailler. At the end, Hunt crossed the line unable to
see the track, not knowing where he had placed or whether
he had won the title. As he berated his crew for terrible
pit signals, it was only the grinning face of McLaren
team manager Teddy Meyer that told Hunt he had won the
World Championship. And, on that treacherous day at the
foot of Mt. Fuji, he truly deserved it. |
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Turbocharged
engines were not new to Grand Prix racing superchargers
were used as early as the 1930s but the
turbo era of modern Formula One began slowly. With Renault
leading the way, the turbo finally
overcame its acceleration lag and unreliability to take
its first win at the 1979 French GP at Dijon. Yet
Jean-Pierre Jabouille's victory was overshadowed, in
the most dramatic way possible, by a tremendous duel
between Gilles Villeneuve and René Arnoux for
2nd place. With Jabouille safely in the lead, Villeneuve's
Ferrari and Arnoux's Renault bounced, squirted and banged
wheels corner after corner on the closing laps, never
more than a car length apart. Known as a pure racer
who gave everything regardless of consequences, Villeneuve
would not be denied on this July day, taking the lead
for good with three corners left after a fantastic,
full-wheel lock outside line pass and then the checkered
flag 0.3s ahead. Dijon was also one of the first Formula
One races televised by Britain's BBC, for whom famous
commentator Murray Walker recapped: "This is incredible!
In this historic French Grand Prix, the oldest of them
all, there has never been a battle for position as dramatic
as this. Villeneuve is incredible!"
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Nigel
Mansell could have won it. Ayrton Senna, in only his 7th
GP, probably would have, but when the race was red-flagged
Alain Prost had hung on to victory in one of the wildest
races ever run in the principality of Monaco. Prost had
pole position, but Mansell's JPS Lotus took the lead on
lap 10 and pulled away. His first-ever Grand Prix lead
lasted all of five laps. Going up the hill to Casino Square,
Mansell lost it in the biggest possible way when he hit
the painted white line on the road with the power
on, got wheel spin, and his car flicked into the Armco
barrier, destroying the rear suspension. The race, though,
was far from over. Within two laps, Senna (who started
13th for Toleman) had moved past Lauda's McLaren and them
closed to 7s behind Prost by lap 31, shaving 27s off of
Prost's lead in just 11 laps. Senna passed Prost for the
lead on the next lap and believed he had won, but by then
the race had abruptly been halted due to rain, leaving
the classifications where they had been at the last pass
of the start-finish line. Head-strong and opinionated
in his early years (some would say for his entire career),
Senna blamed the F1 establishment for robbing him of victory,
but after reflecting realized "I probably got more
publicity out of the way the thing developed than if I
had won." Nonetheless, the perception of Ayrton Senna
from this moment was altered. He had thrust himself upon
the big stage and would, very soon, take his own place
atop the podium. |
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Ayrton
Senna scored his maiden Grand Prix victory in the most
dominant of style in weather so bad it had caused a driver
of Alain Prost's sublime ability to crash but weather
in which, throughout his career, Senna was time and time
again to put the crowning touch on his stature as the
greatest driver of his era. In the torrential rains that
hit Estoril in April 1985, Senna's effortless progress
through the pack, as his rivals slithered and crashed
behind his gleaming black Lotus with that soon-to-be
famous fluorescent yellow helmet visible even through
the clouds of spray seemed guided around the track
as if by an invisible hand. Senna was on pole after one
example of what would become his trademark: a blinding
qualifying lap, all drama and breathtaking beauty. After
holding first place at the start, he pulled out a lead
that soon became impregnable, finishing more than a minute
ahead of Michele Alboreto's Ferrari and lapping the entire
balance of the field. Portugal was a sign of things to
come in Formula One. Senna led more laps than anyone else
in 1985, but he only won once more, as the Lotus-Renault
was a mere shadow of the great Team Lotus machines of
the 1960s and 70s. It would not be Senna's season, but
other years would of course be different. |
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Collecting
his first Grand Prix win, after many frustrating failures,
at the 1985 European Grand Prix at Brands Hatch, Nigel
Mansell was on the verge of the World Championship the
next season. Winning in 1986 at Spa-Francorchamps, Estoril,
Montréal and Le Castellet together with
the British GP, taking that race in Nelson Piquet's spare
car after Frank Williams refused to impose team orders
for Mansell to give way Mansell approached the
season's finale
at Adelaide leading Alain Prost by six points and Piquet
by seven. All he had to do to win the World Championship
was to keep going round and round the agreeable contours
of the Australian street circuit, making sure he didn't
hit the walls. Putting his Williams-Honda turbo on pole,
Mansell took the lead at the green light and settled into
4th place, allowing the race to find its pattern. Prost
pitted with a puncture and Mansell passed Senna and Piquet
for 2nd place, 25s behind Keke Rosberg's McLaren. Then
Rosberg's right rear tire failed, and on lap 64 of 82,
as the Goodyear technicians tried feverishly to inform
the other Goodyear teams (including Williams), Mansell
powered down the long High Street straight at 180 mph
on full throttle when his own left rear tire exploded,
flinging up a fountain of yellow, molten sparks as his
car bucked from side to side in a frenzy. With fantastic
agility, Mansell got the Williams under control and ebbed
to a stop up the escape road safe. He held his
arms aloft in the cockpit, a motion of great despair and
grief, as the World Championship slipped away. Prost went
by to win the title, and only later did Mansell learn
that if he had crashed into the wall on the straight,
the race would have been red-flagged and he would have
been World Champion. "Oh my God" was all he
could say when told how close he had really come. |
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Moving
from Lotus to McLaren after the 1987 season, Ayrton Senna
joined Alain Prost to form the most dominant 1-2 team
ever seen in Formula One, together winning 15 of that
year's 16 races. And although Senna edged Prost for his
first title, it was also a season of many lessons for
the young Brazilian. Chief among these was Monaco
a race Senna would eventually
win a record six times where Senna learned patience
the hard way. And it was perhaps the 1988 event that best
demonstrated the specific pitiless nature of this incomparable
street circuit. With Senna on pole, Prost made a bad start
and found himself blocked by Gerhard Berger, allowing
Senna to pull out a full 54s lead. When the Frenchman
moved into second, Senna at first allowed him to close
up, but on lap 66 suddenly panicked, forced the pace and
made an elementary mistake, losing control of his McLaren
and crashing into the barrier at Portier, when he had
the race won. Senna was so ashamed he went straight to
his Monte Carlo apartment and would not speak to the press.
Senna said, "I changed a lot my strategy as far as
driving was concerned from that day on, and it was all
a consequence of the mistake at Monaco. It was a difficult
day, not such a good result, but a necessary result, perhaps,
that gave me so much success after it." A highly
religious man, Senna later commented that "I think
I was going through a period of adjustment, of discovery,
of some important aspect of life, which is God" |
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In
1991, driving a plainly inferior McLaren-Honda MP4/6,
Ayrton Senna started the season by recording four pole
positions and four wins in the first four races. No one
had ever started a Formula One World Championship campaign
with four straight victories, and for the rest it was
more than demoralizing. The only challenge to Senna was
Team Williams. Designed by Patrick Head, the revolutionary
Williams-Renault FW14 of Nigel Mansell was the first F1
car combining a semi-automatic gearbox with traction control,
but broke the old dictum that "To finish first, first
you have to finish." The Williams began to improve
at Monaco, where Mansell took second to Senna, and at
the Canadian GP on 2 June it looked like Williams were
finally ready to make their move. Mansell qualified 2nd,
took the lead in the first corner, held it all the way
and ended the penultimate lap with a commanding lead of
more than a minute. Waving to the crowd, Mansell turned
into the final hairpin, and the engine cut dead, the car
coasting to a slow stop, a victim of electronic, "black
box" gremlins. Nelson Piquet pushed forward to take
the checkered flag for Benetton for what would
be his last F1 win. The balance of the 1991 season would
see a fruitless quest by Mansell and Williams to catch
Senna, including a disqualification while leading at Estoril
after a wheel fell off in the middle of pit road. Mansell
won three in a row in France, England and Germany, and
came into Suzuka needing two more victories (and no more
than a 4th from Senna) to take the title. But Mansell
went off into the sand chasing the Brazilian on lap 10,
and Aryton Senna had clinched his 3rd Formula One championship
in four years. |
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Nigel
Mansell finally got his World Championship in 1992,
with the "active" Williams overcoming its
reliability problems and easily dominating the rest
of the F1 field. Mansell's single season record of nine
wins in 16 races, combined with 14 poles and five consecutive
GP victories, tying Jim Clark, set a standard of excellence
that may never be matched. In this coronation season,
the race that stands out for "Red 5" is the
British Grand Prix at Silverstone. Qualifying on pole
by a full 2s from team mate Ricardo Patrese, Mansell
led from green light
to checkered flag losing the lead only momentarily
at the start on the long run down to Copse thrilling
his legions of British fans. Right from that first corner
his determination was enormous, and while others fought
over lesser placings, Mansell made absolutely certain
no one else should even think of coming close to him.
Mansell was invincible and he knew it. His dominance
was so enormous that he gained nearly 3s a lap on team
mate Patrese, led by 10s after just four laps, and spent
the entire race all driving all alone and absolutely
out of sight. When the checkered flag fell, even before
the backmarkers had crossed the start-finish line, Mansell's
Williams FW14B was engulfed in a sea of adoring humanity
that rivaled anything ever displayed by the Tifosi at
Monza forcing him to abandon his car on the circuit
and press through a wall of flesh to the podium. It
was not Mansell's first British GP victory (that was
in 1986), and not his the most dramatic of his four
career wins (that was in 1987, overtaking Nelson Piquet),
but certainly his most rewarding. Mansell credited it
to "people power" rather than horsepower,
saying that "I've never experienced anything like
that, anywhere in the world, in my career." The
win was Nigel's 28th career GP victory, moving him past
Jackie Stewart as the all-time leading British F1 driver.
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The
1993 Formula One season was not a good one for Ayrton
Senna, as Honda had pulled out of F1 and the McLaren MP
4/8, powered by a customer Ford engine, was underpowered
and ill-handling. But in characteristic style, the aggressive
Brazilian won five Grands Prix, including the European
GP at a restored Donington Park circuit in England
where Auto Union and Mercedes had dueled in the late 1930s
in one of the most memorable drives of his career.
Qualifying for the 3rd race of the season was dry, putting
Senna 5th behind Prost, Damon Hill, Schumacher and Karl
Wendlinger. But race day dawned cold and wet, weather
in which Senna had excelled for a decade. Indeed, despite
the fact that all the top teams (except Benetton) had
automatic traction control (now banned in F1), it was
Senna that was McLaren's secret weapon, as his dynamic
opening lap so dramatically demonstrated. At the start,
ignoring Schumacher's efforts to squeeze him off the circuit
on the run down to Redgate, Senna sliced inside the Benetton
at the 1st corner. Then he picked of Wendlinger's Sauber
to take 3d place as the rains continued and the cars plunged
down the hill. Next on the bill was Hill's 2nd-place Williams,
which succumbed at the next corner. Barely 45 seconds
into the race, Senna was suddenly right up on Prost's
gearbox as they came through the S-bends to the new loop.
Hard under braking for the hairpin, Senna thrust his McLaren
into the lead, driving as if the track were bone dry and
asserting his wet weather supremacy with major assurance.
Having passed five cars to move into the lead before the
first lap was half over, Senna cruised to an easy win
as the rest of the field spun and shunted themselves out
of contention. Not the least of these was Prost, who stalled
in the pits and then compounded his embarrassment by being
overtaken by Hill. Senna finished 1m 23s in front, having
taken two of the first three races of a season, once again,
in a car that should not have been winning. |
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Nestled
in the Ardennes forest, Spa-Francorchamps has always
been a mercurial circuit, with ever-changing weather
and a layout so challenging Martin Brundle once said,
"If you don't hold onto your heart at Spa, it will
come out of your throat." In the 1995 World Championship
battle between Michael Schumacher, then driving for
Benetton, and Damon Hill at Williams, the Belgian Grand
Prix proved to be all of that and more perhaps
one of the best, and most competitive, races of the
decade. With Schumacher demolishing his monocoque in
a Saturday practice crash, the German was stranded 16th
on the grid. Gerhard Berger's put his Ferrari on pole,
but the Austrian got wheel spin at the start, allowing
team mate Jean Alesi and Johnny Herbert, in the 2nd
Benetton, to move side-by-side at full speed through
the fabled left-right Eau Rouge corner. Herbert took
the lead at Les Combs with an amazing outside pass under
braking, Hakkinen spun his McLaren at the La Source
hairpin on lap 2, and Alesi
regained the lead at Radillon. But by then, Schumacher
had already moved up to 10th, leaving Herbert and David
Coulthard to battle for the lead after Alesi dropped
out on lap 3 with a broken rear suspension. After two
spins by Herbert, Coulthard was leading from Hill, moving
Schumacher up to 5th, 12s back. By lap 15, however,
as Coulthard lost his gearbox and Berger and Hill refueled,
Schumacher took the lead. Then, in a superb display
of car control and aggression, Schumacher stayed on
slicks as the rains began. Schumacher and Hill (the
latter now on wets) battled nose-to-tail and then side-by
side for three laps, with Schumacher refusing to give
way, a tremendous bit of defensive driving. On lap 23,
Hill finally managed to get by on the Kemmel straight,
but the rain ended, and as his tires began to go away
on the drying track, Hill lost the lead to Schumi two
laps later. Hill returned to the pits for slicks, but
then the rains started again, the safety car was called
out, and when Hill went back in for a 3rd tire change
on lap 32 he was assessed a 10-second stop-and-go penalty
for pit lane speeding, effectively ending the race.
Having majestically overtaken virtually the entire field,
Schumacher won easily from there, posting his 16th GP
win to move into a tie with Sterling Moss for all-time
Formula One career victories. Some observers feel Schumacher's
1995 European GP win at the Nürburgring was a better
drive, but the Spa-Francorchamps race in August of that
season takes the laurels hands down for high-speed drama,
courage and exciting tactical duels.
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Arriving
in Formula One straight off of an IndyCar championship
and Indianapolis 500 victory, Jacques Villeneuve, son
of the legendary Gilles, took on the second seat at Williams-Renault.
But the 1996 season's opening race, at Melbourne's restored
Albert Park circuit, proved that Jacques was anything
but a second-place driver even though that
is where the Canadian eventually finished. Villeneuve
toasted Williams team mate Damon Hill in qualifying to
take pole position by 0.138s. He led the field at the
start down the straight to the sharp right-hand first
corner where, far down in the pack, Martin Brundle's Jordan
collided with Johnny Herbert's Sauber and then cartwheeled,
broke in half and landed heavily in the sand trap in one
of the more dramatic shunts in years (from which Brundle
walked away unhurt). Villeneuve led again at the re-start
and held first place through a lap 29 pit stop, trading
fastest laps with Michael Schumacher (with the German
in his first drive for Scuderia Ferrari). Second to Hill
after rejoining, Villeneuve got past on lap 31 when, three
laps later under, he fought off a hard challenge by Hill
with an amazing move, sliding across the grass, flicking
out from understeer and holding the inside line. It appeared
that Jacques would win his very first GP start, but a
short 10 laps later vapor began to leak from the rear
of his Williams. With five laps left, holding a 1.5s lead,
Jacques was given the "slow down" sign by the
Williams pits, as telemetry revealed a potentially fatal
oil pressure problem. Villeneuve had posted pole, fastest
lap and six World Championship points in his maiden F1
race a clear sign of the striking form that
would take him to the Formula One title in 1997. |
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After
two years of molding the Scuderia Ferrari around himself,
Michael Schumacher felt that 1998 was going to be his
year to finally bring the World Championship to the
prancing horse of Maranello. At the Belgian Grand Prix
at Spa, Ferrari's historic 600th GP, Schumacher came
into the race a mere two points behind Mika Hakkinen,
who had taken over as McLaren team leader with the departure
of Ayrton Senna in 1994. Schumacher was 4th in qualifying,
with the silver McLaren-Mercedes of Hakkinen and David
Coulthard occupying the front row as they had much of
the season. Then came absolute carnage. At the start
in heavy rains, Coulthard spun his McLaren just after
La Source, ricocheting from one wall to another, collecting
several other cars and setting off a massive chain reaction.
All told, 11 cars were involved in the huge shunt, which
left the track littered with wheels, carbon
fibre and naked monocoque tubs but no injuries.
The race was red-flagged and re-started 50 minutes later.
At the restart, Hakkinen spun at the same spot, bringing
on the safety car and leaving nine cars, including the
Finn's, out of the race (four drivers did not have spares
and five were lost on the second crash). This put Schumacher
into the lead and in fantastic shape to take over the
World Championship battle. He was lapping 3s faster
than anyone else, leading from Hill, Jean Alesi and
Heinz-Harald Frentzen, when just past half way he came
up on David Coulthard in 8th a full 2m 13s behind
to put the Scott a lap down. Just as John
Watson commented on television that he hoped Coulthard
"doesn't do anything too rash to stop Michael from
going by and getting those points," Coulthard suddenly
backed off to let Schumacher overtake. But Coulthard
kept his McLaren right in the racing line, and blinded
by the spray from Coulthard's tires, Schumacher plowed
into the back of the McLaren at full speed, ripping
off the front right suspension to transform his Ferrari
into a three-wheeled monster. After a thrilling drive,
Schumacher was suddenly out, losing a great opportunity
to take control of the season at a crucial point in
the Formula One championship. The German tore off his
helmet in the pits and stormed over to the McLaren garage,
roaring to fight, only to be restrained by his crew.
In the anticlimactic end, Damon Hill inherited the lead,
scoring Team Jordan's first-ever GP win after eight
years and more nearly 130 races.
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