A brilliantly astute choice of tyres enabled Michael Schumacher to ram home his now legendary talent in soaking track conditions at the Belgian Grand Prix yesterday, to score one of the most emphatic victories of his Formula One career.
With Jacques Villeneuve trailing home sixth after a tactically disastrous race, Schumacher now leads the Drivers' World Championship by 12 points with five races and a maximum 50 points still up for grabs. Having qualified third in his Ferrari F310B, Schumacher was the last to complete his pre-start reconnaissance lap after the Spa circuit was drenched by a torrential cloudburst only 20 minutes before the scheduled starting time.
This allowed Schumacher to conclude that `intermediate' tyres were the correct choice for the conditions when all his rivals had opted for deeper grooved full wet tyres.
Although conditions were so bad that the race had to be started behind the safety car, when the pack was finally unleashed after three laps at reduced speed in grid formation, he took only a lap to despatch key rivals Villeneuve and Jean Alesi from their positions at the head of the pack.
Thereafter Schumacher's progress was simply breathtaking, the Ferrari team leader opening out a 16.9 second lead over Giancarlo Fisichella's Jordan-Peugeot after only six of the race's 44 laps.
"When I saw the sun coming out as I sat on the starting grid, I smiled to myself and thought I had made the right decision," said Schumacher. "I made some last minute adjustments to the wing settings on the grid, but I would certainly have been in trouble without those early laps behind the safety car before the track began to dry a little."
Such was the magnitude of his domination that Schumacher was able to make his two routine refuelling stops on laps 14 and 29 without ever relinquishing the lead. He eventually beat Fisichella by 26.7 seconds, the young Italian consolidating his reputation as one of Formula One's brightest young stars as the well deserved runner-up.
"We've still got to achieve our first win," said Fisichella's team chief Eddie Jordan, the man who gave Michael Schumacher his first Formula One chance in this same race six years ago. "But with Michael Schumacher on his current form, I don't know how we're going to do it. I think we would have been in with a real chance of winning had the track not dried out so quickly, but Giancarlo drove brilliantly and it was a fitting finish to a difficult weekend.
"But Michael has yet again proved beyond doubt that he is, dare I say it, probably the greatest racing driver of all time." Villeneuve's ill-fated decision to start on full wet tyres was compounded when he made a vastly premature first refuelling stop at the end of lap six, giving the Williams mechanics no warning at all over the radio. He immediately switched to intermediate rubber, but it was far too early in the race to add any more fuel, so he came back again on lap 10 when he switched to dry weather slicks and also topped up his tank.
This all resulted in Schumacher's championship rival dropping back to 10th place, effectively wiping him out of the competitive equation. He fought steadily back to finish sixth behind Mika Hakkinen's third placed McLaren-Mercedes, HeinzHarald Frentzen's Williams and Johnny Herbert's Sauber-Ferrari.
Hakkinen's run to his third topthree finish of the season was a fine reward for a troubled weekend which had seen him crash heavily at almost 200 m.p.h. during Saturday's free practice after his car's rear suspension suffered a major structural failure. Unfortunately the Finn was racing under the threat of disqualification, scrutineering after qualifying having thrown up an apparent discrepancy in the car's fuel specification. Hakkinen was initially put to the back of the grid, but McLaren appealed against the penalty and he was permitted to start from his original fifth place. The matter now goes to an FIA court of appeal.
