Atlas F1 Correspondent
Anthony Davidson was enjoying a holiday in Finland when he got a phone call that changed his life. Just a few days later he had signed a two-race deal with the Minardi team and was set to make an unexpected Grand Prix debut to stand in for Malaysian Alex Yoong. Atlas F1's Will Gray followed the Briton's steps from the day he signed the contract to the end of the Hungarian Grand Prix, talking to the young driver, his team boss, and the man he replaced. This is Davidson's debut diary. Exclusive for Atlas F1
He became a Formula One test driver two years later, with British American Racing, but when he began that link-up with the Honda-powered team, his thoughts of a Grand Prix drive remained in the distant future. Then his rocket ship rise up the ladder of motorsport suddenly went into orbit with the help of a disillusioned rival.
Alex Yoong, the Malaysian who is in Formula One because his sponsors wanted him to become the country's first Grand Prix driver and Minardi were quite happy to take their money to do so, has struggled this year. He failed to qualify at the San Marino Grand Prix in April, finishing 2.5 seconds slower than teammate Mark Webber, and then missed the next race in Spain when team boss Paul Stoddart pulled both cars out of the event because of dangerous wing failures.
When Yoong returned to the track, a few days short of a month after his failure at Imola, he managed to qualify, finishing 0.5 seconds faster than the required time. He looked to be back on track. But in the following two races, Monaco and Canada, he made it onto the grid but was almost two seconds slower than Webber again and, after closing to within 1.2 seconds at the Nurburgring, failed to qualify again at Silverstone at the start of July.
His difficulties there, Stoddart said, were down to a power steering problem, but then at the following race in France, he was nearly two seconds off Webber again. And then came Germany...
After finishing 1.3 seconds within 107 percent of the fastest time in Friday practice, Yoong was two tenths slower in the morning practice session on Saturday and although he improved his time in the afternoon, he failed to qualify. Pole sitter Michael Schumacher had sliced 1.7 seconds off his Friday time but for Yoong, there were no grounds for appeal. He was a massive 1.779 seconds slower than teammate Webber and was dumped out of the race for the third time this season.
"I think it's fair to say - and Alex would probably back me up on this - that neither he, nor the team nor I know why he didn't qualify there," Stoddart said in the Hungaroring paddock. "There was no mathematical reason for it."
But however much it may have upset Stoddart, for Yoong it was devastating. Every time he took to the track he was losing confidence, outpaced by a teammate who has serious potential for the future, and outdriven by his own over-thinking. The failure hit home hard.
"I felt extreme disappointment," Yoong sighed, reflecting on recent events as he sat inside the Minardi motorhome in the Hungaroring paddock. "I thought I could've done well at Hockenheim. Friday went very well, my time was quite fast and I was looking quite good.
"At that stage I thought right, OK, try and outqualify Mark here. But then, come qualifying, I think I was fractionally quicker than Friday but that was it, only fractionally quicker. I don't know what happened really. It was a big shock."
After a night of heavy thought, Yoong was back in the Hockenheim paddock, braving the media questions whilst asking himself many searching ones of his own as he desperately tried to find an answer to his continued failure. The day was tough, but Yoong stuck it out until his teammate's retirement allowed him to go. "Then I left straight away," said Yoong.
There were no discussions with Stoddart on any subject, neither on his failure to qualify or his teammate's race performance, before he left. Yoong said his goodbyes before the race had even finished, jumped in a car with a friend, and headed for Frankfurt International Airport.
"It would have been completely wrong to go into any great lengths of discussion after Hockenheim," said Stoddart. "There was no question prior to Hockenheim about us changing Alex, none whatsoever. This changed things, but we were all not really thinking, so we left it to think over."
Having landed in his home town of Kuala Lumpur, Yoong headed into the city for some long reflection. He may not hit the headlines around most of the world, but the newspapers in Malaysia, of course, keep him under constant surveillance.
The gloss of Yoong being Malaysia's great Formula One hope had, by now, lost its shine, and the hype of positivity that greeted him when he visited the Sepang track next to the airport the last time he was there, had now disintegrated into derision and embarrassment over his failure to make the grade.
But he was not about to let it get him down. "I ignored the media completely," he said. "A lot of it is very tabloid over there and there is no balance to it. I didn't care what they were thinking or saying because they are generally quite irresponsible.
"I always knew that sitting these races out was a possibility straight away so I had time to come to terms with it." But he knew right there and then why his performance had deteriorated so rapidly.
"As the year has gone on, I'm just jumping in a car and trying to think my way through how to drive," he began. "You know, nothing's coming naturally for me. I'm having to think about everything and it's not feeling second nature at all. We haven't tested since the beginning of the year and when you do nothing for two weeks and then start with the car on Friday, it's 'ooh steering wheel, pedals, ooh, what does this button do, aaaah!' all over again."
While Yoong was thinking of his future, Stoddart was already preparing for the inevitable. He knew that the chances of Yoong finding out why he had failed to qualify were unlikely and, therefore, the chances of him having to find another driver was a priority.
"I didn't want to pre-empt the discussions with Alex but we were always going to try and check out our options," said Stoddart. "I knew that Alex would be thinking pretty much along the same lines as us. Unless he could have come back and said 'Look, I know what happened at Hockenheim exactly, it was X, Y and Z, and it's sorted' then it would have been irresponsible to put him back in the car in Hungary without doing some testing."
But it just so happened that Yoong's third failure to qualify came at exactly the wrong time. The German Grand Prix signalled the start of the sport's three-week 'summer holiday' gap, in which no testing is allowed. Minardi also had plenty to concentrate their minds on, with much of their time being taken up by their Thunder in the Park weekend, a three-day event at Donington Park where Stoddart's two-seater cars are run for sponsors, charities and special guests.
After a week of thought, Yoong had virtually made up his mind as he knew there was no chance to bring back his confidence without getting out on track to test. His personal website carried a story, without quotes from Yoong himself, pointing to his imminent exit.
"Alex is expecting to miss the Hungarian Grand Prix," it proclaimed. But right now there were some important matters to attend to in Malaysia, because it was his father's wedding, the reason he had returned to his homeland. The event, held in the centre of Kuala Lumpur, went well. But in all honesty, Yoong admitted he did not really want to be there. His mind was still riddled with reminders of his failure, and he admitted: "I would have liked to stay in England."
One week after commencing his search for Yoong's possible replacement, just in case, Stoddart selected Briton Justin Wilson and he was flown over to the team's Italian base to try out the car for size.
But the six feet three-and-a-half inch driver, who beat Minardi's Mark Webber to the Formula 3000 title last year, has always been plagued by his excessive height and despite the efforts of the team it prevented him from making it into Formula One yet again.
"We had him in on Monday and Tuesday, desperately trying to get him in there and it just didn't work," said Stoddart. "I was heartbroken for Justin. If we had had more time we would have got him in the car but we would have had to modify two chassis, in case he needed the T-car, and there just wasn't the time to do it.
"When I say modified, I mean really modified - basically make a mark two chassis - it was a six-week job. There was just not time to do it. The team's technical director came back from his holidays in Italy to try to get him in the car and he just couldn't do it."
Immediately after his father's wedding, Yoong had jumped on a plane headed for London Heathrow and was already back in his central city home, which is next to a park and a gym. He continued his training schedule, hoping to work out the gremlins. "I trained my bollocks off," he said.
Wilson failed to fit into Yoong's car and, because of the testing ban, Stoddart now had to find a driver capable of getting used to the PS02 machine in the two one-hour and two 45-minute sessions available before qualifying in Hungary.
The Australian team boss openly admits Wilson was his number one option, but Davidson said: "The reason they chose Justin over me first was that they thought I was tied up with BAR so they didn't think I was an option at all."
Still, forced into a re-think, Stoddart's plans moved to Davidson and he immediately got in contact with the driver's manager to discuss the possibility of getting him in the car.
"That narrowed the field down to existing test drivers, Formula One drivers out of a job and people who had an automatic right to a super-licence and the thing that swung it in Anthony's favour is the 12,000 kilometres testing he's done for BAR this year.
"We worked hard to get all the contracts sorted out because obviously he's under contract to BAR. We made it clear that it was a two-race deal, that Alex is back in from Monza and that was fine for them. They obviously wanted to give him exposure and they thought he could do the job."
Davidson admits that BAR could not have been more helpful in setting up the Minardi drive, with the Brackley-based team's top boss David Richards bending over backwards to get the deal secured.
With the testing break allowing him some time off, Davidson had gone with his Finnish girlfriend, Johanna, to her home in Helsinki. His aim was to take some time off. But he was soon to get a big surprise.
Atlas F1 contacted Davidson after hearing from a source that Minardi were lining him up to replace Yoong, but he had no knowledge of the plans and laughed off the suggestions as utter rubbish.
"Being in Finland I had no interest at all in looking up on the internet what was going on in the racing world," he said. "I just wanted a one-week break, with no talk of racing and it was a really nice holiday until you rang!"
But the call led him to contact his manager, who at the time was holidaying in Italy near Ferrari's Mugello test track, and the source was correct. The deal was almost secured, pending, of course, Yoong's imminent discussion with Stoddart.
Davidson explained his denial, adding: "I had told my manager not to ring me about racing unless it was good news. He respected that totally so he hadn't called because the deal had not been done yet and he didn't want to get my hopes up.
"The confusion came when you called me and I knew nothing of it but when I sent him a message, he was on the phone to the guys at Minardi trying to get the deal done."
Davidson, due back in England the following day, flew back to his home, and gathered his thoughts. "I was coming back anyway," he recalled. "So it made things quite interesting."
Yoong arrived at Donington to prepare for Thunder in the Park, in which he would be driving a two-seater car in the now annual event finale race. There, at the track, he met Stoddart for the first time since leaving the garage in Germany 11 days previously.
It didn't take long for the plans to rest Yoong for two races, the Hungarian and Belgian Grands Prix, to be tabled. The problems were discussed, but the outcome came as no surprise to Yoong.
"I had a good frank discussion with Paul when I got there and he felt it was the best way to go," he said. "We discussed it, but we just didn't want to make the announcement. Nothing was certain, we just wanted to make the plan."
The outcome of his frank chat with Yoong as well as the successful discussions between Minardi, Davidson's management and bosses at BAR, had left Stoddart "99 percent certain" that Davidson would be the man attempting to qualify the second PS02 car in Hungary.
"We've seen all kinds of different things this year, I mean we let Mark do a test for Jaguar, so I was not surprised that BAR let us have their test driver for two races," said Stoddart.
"I think it just shows that really at the end of the day we're all competitive but we're also very sensible as well and drivers have got to get their break sooner or later in life. In his head Anthony would've known, but I hadn't said yes at that point."
Davidson concurred, admitting that BAR boss David Richards had helped a great deal in the negotiations, which involved considerable contractual negotiations considering connected sponsors of each teams.
"I wouldn't have been doing the two Grands Prix without his help and the help of BAT and Honda," said Davidson. "The BRDC helped in the dealings as well. They have helped out a lot throughout my career."
Davidson began a weekend with Johanna, who had flown back from Finland two days after him, and they talked over his plans for the following week. He was keen to get her to Hungary for the race, if he was given his chance. "I have been with her for five years," he said. "She's been there since karting, so I really wanted her to be there on my debut."
Wilson took to the track in a Minardi, having been fitted for last year's PS01 car, for a demonstration run at the Thunder in the Park event, and his performance impressed team boss Stoddart.
"In the demo car we weren't running to full FIA specs," Stoddart explained. "We were able to use a non-extractable seat which puts him lower in the car but illegal. Even though we weren't testing and he was simply stringing together a number of laps that were done to please the crowd, you still get an idea of the driver's consistency and he certainly has got that."
But he and Stoddart decided that he should not compete in Hungary. His Australian boss recalled: "We both agreed that the best thing we could do was let him sit out the next two races, get him back into testing and try and build his confidence back up."
In truth, it was out of Yoong's hands because the Malaysian's contract stipulates he cannot fail to qualify in more than two races, and he had missed out in three. Stoddart negated the British Grand Prix failure because it was not Yoong's fault, but the German qualifying result left the team boss free to change his line-up.
But Stoddart was not about to make the decision without consulting Yoong. "People that know me know that contracts are not what I go on," he said. "I go on more the personal side of it. These clauses are in any driver's contract, but for me the contract was not an issue. We did not talk about his contract. It is simply a case of 'what can we do, Alex, to get you back up' and that is what we are doing."
Davidson, however, was surprised when told of Stoddart's claims that the decision to rest Yoong had been taken so late, and mused: "They couldn't say anything definitely to Alex before he had done the sponsors' thing at Donington."
After the Thunder in the Park event, as the team packed up at Donington and prepared to fly back to Faenza in one of Stoddart's European Aviation 737s, they were joined by a new member, with Davidson invited onto the flight.
"I met the whole team and shook everyone's hands," remembered Davidson. "I was just my normal self, just quiet and got on with my own thing. They were nice guys and, at the time I didn't know who he was, but Greg, my engineer, he was really comforting as well and welcoming. It was really good." But Davidson still had not signed the deal to race.
Davidson was driven to the team's headquarters, a small almost un-noticeable block building sitting on the outskirts of the Italian town of Faenza, where he was given a pleasant surprise.
"It was a lot like Jordan's factory, about the same size," he said. "Inside it is pretty nice. It's nowhere close to what BAR's factory is like, of course, but BAR's is one of the newest so I think I have been a bit spoiled really!"
The team already knew that, unlike Wilson, there would be no difficulty getting Davidson into the car - he is only about five foot three. But it left Stoddart and the team facing an amusing scenario.
In the middle of the seat fitting, once it was clear that Davidson would be okay to drive in Hungary, the deal was done. "I signed and sealed the deal during the seat fitting," Davidson revealed. "It was quite weird, but it still didn't hit because for me it was like, I was just there doing the seat fitting anyway."
No money changed hands and, according to Davidson there were no tie-ups and no small print involved. "I am not being paid," he said later. "It's basically to help Alex getting worked up about things and it is good to have someone else in the team with next year in mind."
For the rest of the day, Davidson spent time getting to know the team, his engineers, mechanics, and his new car. The Minardi PS02 in which he would race had not yet departed for Hungary, so he made sure he was familiar with all the controls ready for his practice debut on Friday.
"We went through a lot of things," he said. "We were looking at graphs, looking at the cockpit and stuff like that. All the controls, they weren't new to me, but it was just learning where the buttons were."
There was still a small matter of Davidson's race suit to sort out. Of course, he had to have the fully-liveried Minardi outfit to wear on his debut, but when Stoddart rang suit manufacturers Sparco, who conveniently are used both by Davidson and Minardi, their offices were shut.
"Out of all the times for this to happen," Stoddart recalls. "They were on absolute shutdown. We rang up and said 'look, is there any chance that somebody could come back down to the factory?' - but they couldn't do it and it was just lucky he fitted into one of the mechanics' ones."
With the cars headed off to Budapest in the transporters, Davidson had nothing to do but wait around with the mechanics in Italy, so he made the most of the summer sunshine to catch some rays in a get-to-know-you session on the beach.
"I went to the beach with some of the guys to get to know them," he said. "It was just really chilled out because once the trucks left with the cars we had nothing to do out here.
"For money reasons the guys can't go out to the track as early as the other teams, and having our own aeroplane we just try to fit as many guys on it as we can."
After flying from Minardi's Italian base to Budapest International Airport early in the morning, Davidson was faced with a very busy and tiring day, involving engineering discussions, sponsorship duties and press events.
He met Yoong, who was already at the track when he arrived, but the Malaysian driver revealed he didn't have much to say to his replacement. "I saw Anthony when we arrived and we did chat," he said. "I didn't want him to feel that I was sore or anything about it, just to let him know that I wasn't pissed off."
"I have played the Playstation for years and years so I knew the general layout of the circuit," said Davidson. "It tends to be one of the better ones on the Playstation actually.
"But the walk gave me a clue about the elevation of the track, which was impressive and amazing after doing it on computer and watching it on TV a lot. You can't get the undulation on the games and TV never really shows that up either, not even on-board cameras.
"A lot of the games companies do it by photos and video footage and only recently, I think, one or two companies have bought the rights to the GPS layouts of the circuits, which cost a lot of money, and now it is really starting to get quite good."
Sat at a small table in a corner of the Minardi motorhome, Davidson faced his first pressured moment of the weekend when he was confronted by the world's media for the first time as a Formula One driver.
To avoid constant disturbances throughout the day from journalists eager to find out about Davidson's story, the team scheduled a press conference but it did not faze him at all and he impressed everybody with his professional approach.
"Stuff like that doesn't pressure me. It's quite a good way to be. I get intense about the racing, but not about anything else. I don't let politics worry me, I leave that up to my manager."
After a hectic day off-track, perhaps one of the most difficult days of the weekend for a driver who has done 12,000km of testing for BAR but little work on the media side of the business, Davidson was spent.
"I was actually quite knackered just from talking and I didn't realise it," he recalls. "I was mentally tired, and my manager and my girlfriend both saw it and said I looked really down and I hadn't done any driving yet, so they told me to go to bed."
After a good night's sleep, Davidson woke up early because he was "eager to get up and get on with the day," but his excitement proved a little problematic when he set off for the first session of his debut Grand Prix weekend.
Just 13 seconds after the pitlane had opened, Davidson exceeded the pitlane speed limit of 60 km/h and, at the end of the session, was sent a bill from the FIA for $1,000. It was a great story, the quickest FIA speeding fine in the history of a driver's career, but although the British media greeted it with amusement and ran it in their papers the following day, Davidson was not so happy.
But it was funny, wasn't it? "Hilarious," he said sarcastically. So did he get a ticking off? "Not really, no. It was just a bit embarrassing really because it was the first time out in the car and it was a bit amateurish really.
"We had prepared everything but we still cocked it up. The wheel was still a bit new to me and I was concentrating on the bite of the clutch - it's like getting into a different road car, you are more interested in pulling away rather than putting the wipers on when it starts to rain.
"I was at the end of the pitlane and I thought okay, nice and chilled out, haven't got to do a launch start, out of the garage and onto the track, and let's do a nice chilled out one lap.
Stoddart wasn't too bothered - it was a bit more publicity for the team and any publicity is good publicity, as they say. "We will forgive him for the fine," Stoddart said in the FIA press conference later. "His effect on the team has really been a positive one."
But it has now become clear why Stoddart was happy to forgive Davidson for the fine. The Australian team boss, it appears, was not so amused by the incident as he publicly displayed, but the cash was not stumped up from his team's coffers.
"I think me and my manager had to pay it," said Davidson. "I think they were a little bit lenient on giving me a huge fine because it was my first time out, but when you have paid $1 million to get to where I am with my career at the moment, I am sure another $1,000 isn't going to hurt."
Davidson's opening session was made more difficult by his discomfort in the seat, which despite the fitting in Faenza still had significant tweaking (with foam and a saw) before it could be made comfortable. But, perhaps more concerning than comfort was the fact that Davidson, who is the shortest driver on the grid, could not actually see over the lip of his own cockpit very easily - and he was stuck with it for the whole weekend.
"It was too low," he said. "I only found it out after the first session and we were stuck with it right to the end. It was bloody tiring. Basically, being so low I was having to look up for all the corners and sort of tensing up to see where I was going."
The session finished with Michael Schumacher on top of the times and Webber 18th. Davidson was last, 0.921 seconds slower than his teammate. But he was already within the target he set on Thursday of getting within one second of Webber on the first day.
With a more comfortable seat but little else changed on the car, Davidson went out for his second timed practice and ended the session faster than World Champion Michael Schumacher - but only for 20 seconds.
When the times were re-shuffled, Davidson ended up in 19th spot, 0.036 seconds ahead of his teammate, on a time of 1:19.490. It was an impressive performance, but the BAR test driver believes his confidence in the team impressed them most.
"I never thought it could go so well, getting up quite high on the times," he said. "It was pretty good. Every lap I was doing was quicker because I was just getting used to the car. We hardly changed the set-up at all because the track just keeps getting quicker and quicker so we didn't fiddle around at all.
"It could have been dangerous. We could have gone totally the wrong way and still gone quicker. That's why we didn't touch the car. I am sure if I was a more big-headed driver and I said 'oh, I've come from a better team than you, this is what we do over there so do it now,' then it could have been a nightmare.
"I think the engineers were quite happy and impressed that I just let them get on with it and learned my way and trusted them more than saying 'this is what we should be doing, this is what is wrong, blah, blah, blah.'"
Meanwhile, Yoong, who had watched the sessions from the garage, was left to admit that Davidson was doing so well that he was not actually needed. "Anthony has driven a Formula One car before," he said. "He doesn't need to ask me anything."
Davidson, now getting into the groove, began to help his team develop the set-up in a bid to find some more time, which was clearly going to be needed, before the crucial qualifying session.
By the end of the first 45-minute morning practice, both Davidson and Webber were outside the 107 percent of pole time needed to get into the race. It did not bode well for qualifying, but by the end of the morning both were well inside the required time, with Davidson last, but just 0.157 seconds slower than Webber.
With his initial qualifying effort hardly much better than his earlier times, Davidson needed to find something more. But halfway through the hour-long session, he put in a lap that would see him finish comfortably within the required barrier.
He had arrived in Hungary stating "I just want to qualify," and he had now done so. The team were, understandably, delighted, but Yoong, sitting in the motorhome after the session, was becoming more and more angry at his previous difficulties.
"It's been very hard to be here and to not drive the car," he said. "I just wanted to show support for the team and I'm happy Anthony's doing a good job but I don't think I've benefited anything from being here.
"I don't need to look at his data to help me. I know what's in the data. I look at the data all the time. There's nothing more I can look at. I don't benefit shit from sitting out of the car, I mean, that is pretty damned obvious."
Davidson, meanwhile, completed his de-briefs, relaxed in the motorhome, and then made his only trip into Budapest city centre for a meal with his manager and his girlfriend before getting to bed and preparing for his big day.
After completing the warm-up session, last again but only 0.145 seconds slower than Webber, Davidson was shepherded to the long silver FIA lorry, on which the drivers gather to wave to the crowd and do interviews as they travel around the track.
He did a quick photo shoot with fellow British drivers Jenson Button and David Coulthard, then stepped up onto the open lorry and tried to find a friend. There, he was immediately struck by the cliquey nature of the Formula One gang.
"I noticed there were the little groups," he said. "There's Salo and Villeneuve, and Irvine and Villeneuve. They're like little gangs. Montoya and Barrichello, Ralf and Michael obviously...I spoke to Kimi (Raikkonen) a little bit, talked about qualifying and then I spent most of my time with Taku (Sato)."
"In fact, I remember when we got on at the start and all the fans were cheering, I said to him 'this is mad, it's like we won the race already' because the last time we had done that with each other was going round on the podium."
Davidson had, of course, already met all his rivals, and received a nice welcome from many, during the numerous drivers' briefings over the course of the weekend, but he remembered one encounter more than most.
"Coming out of one of them, as I was stumbling around journalists and stuff, I bumped into Michael. He was on his way out - and he said sorry to me! I was like 'oh, shit!'. And that's all he said to me all weekend."
At last, Davidson was on the grid, but it was only when he got into the car after taking his mind off the event with a couple of grid interviews, that the true enormity of the situation occurred to him.
"The moment it really hit me what was actually going on was seeing all the guys walk away from the cars on the grid with all the trolleys and wheels and everything," he said. "It's then that you feel that's it, it's just you and the grid, you and all the other drivers.
"That is when it hit me with such a bang that, 'Oh my God, I'm in a Formula One race!' That was quite an amazing feeling. You can hear the crowd outside the car, even with all the revving engines. It was absolutely incredible.
"Everything it looks like on TV it feels like in the car but in the car you are normally in your own little cocoon. But there, I could see it from the TV's point of view, still in my little world. I was thinking 'aah, I'm actually on that bloody grid, with everyone else. I'm in a start of a Formula One race!' It was an absolutely mind blowing experience."
Cruising around on the formation lap, Davidson remained calm, but he was soon to be plunged into a massive panic when he suddenly realised where he was actually lining up on the grid.
"I rocked up onto the grid and got into my position," he began. "But I am so used to being up towards the front of the grid and you just wait around for ages. Me being at the back of the grid, being the very last car, I have never started right at the back of a Formula race before, and I thought 'Oh, shit. I'm the one that everyone is waiting for.'
"When I heard Mark Webber clunk into first gear, as soon as I came to a standstill he was clunked into first gear, I though, 'huh, that's a bit stupid' then I suddenly heard the Toyota right in front of me whack it onto the limiter.
"I looked up and saw only three (of the five) red lights on and I thought 'oh shit!' I panicked, got the launch control system going and by the time I had engaged first gear they all started to bugger off! I totally missed the start!
Walking back from the side of the track after watching the final 16 laps of the race from the sidelines, Davidson was greeted with a mix of satisfaction and disappointment.
After catching back up with the pack following his surprise start, he managed to stay the pace until the leaders came around to lap him then slowly dropped back until a tiny mistake caught him out and he spun into the gravel trap.
"I really wanted to get to the end," he recalled. "I could so easily have done it, I mean, I only had 16 laps to go - that's a walk in the park after 60-odd laps, you know. It was my single mistake of the weekend and it cost me a finish in the race, which was a bit gutting. I took a different line, but I turned in a bit too late, got a wheel onto the marbles and the problem was I was still pushing hard.
Davidson had been about 30 seconds behind teammate Webber when he lost control of his Minardi, but he actually set a faster lap time than the Australian and he had lost all his time through being lapped.
"At the end of the race I was getting into the swing of things and I was starting to claw back some time on Mark," he said. "I set my fastest race lap, the 14th fastest race lap, and it was quicker than him, both Toyotas and both Jaguars.
"But I lost all of my time from getting lapped. It was so daunting. As soon as I saw a car in the mirror I just pulled over to the side of the track and came to a standstill. That's what I was doing at the start of the race, I was just being way too cautious.
"The Ferraris, which were in the lead of course, were actually easier to spot, and you get a lot of warning on the radio that the race leader is coming up to pass you, so you are looking out for these bright red cars.
"They are really easy to see and you just get out the way. It was quite a nice feeling actually, for him to overtake me and for me to slot back in behind him. It was mega, mega." A bit like the Playstation really. "Yeah," replied Davidson. "But in the Playstation I would have had him!"
After the post-race de-brief, the team packed up, cleared their garage, and the mechanics, with Davidson, headed for the airport to pick up Stoddart's plane and head back to Faenza.
The weekend had been a success, even though it finished in the gravel. Minardi had reached television coverage levels, at least in England, of enormous proportions, and Davidson had shown he could not just compete at the top level, but that he could even match Webber in his second and final race at Spa.
"He's been the media star," said Stoddart. "Somebody said to me we're on ITV all this weekend and it's like the Minardi show, so I'm happy to hear that. It's good for our sponsors.
"He's certainly proved to everybody that he's got a future in Formula One. It won't be just me and Dave clocking him this week, it'll also be every other team owner up and down this paddock and talent scouts. And he's done himself and the team and everyone else a very creditable job."
For Yoong, the future remains clouded yet frighteningly clear. "I know what I need to do and what needs to be done," he said disconsolately. "That's all that can be said really. I'm going to make the best of this break and get my head clear for the Monza test, which is after Spa, and develop a game plan, reset my goals of what I want to do. I am confident of doing what I set out to do."
"Four days' testing," said Stoddart succinctly. "He's going to be okay." So too, by all accounts, is Davidson.
Briton Anthony Davidson had been waiting for this moment for years - but when he finally got the call to become a fully fledged Formula One driver he hardly even had time to think.
The 23-year-old, born in Hemel Hempstead in England, developed his racing skills in karting but did not move into single seater car racing until he entered Formula Ford three and a half years ago.
Davidson headed back to the factory for a seat fitting before his next race at the challenging Spa-Francorchamps circuit in Belgium. Yoong, meanwhile, returned to his intensive training regime, to prepare for his is next challenge, a test in Monza at the start of September.
Yoong's difficulties left Stoddart both bemused and frustrated. The Australian team owner needs as much positive exposure as he can get for Minardi, with his budget for 2003 still, as yet, unclear and unconfirmed. Being too slow to get in the race was not exactly going to enhance the team's saleability.
"I don't read them because they just upset me. I don't mind being criticised but I can't stand criticism just for the heck of it. So I spent a little bit of time trying to forget and a little bit trying to figure out what I'm going to do next time I get in the car.
"We needed somebody to come to a track having never sat in the car so he had to have two things," said Stoddart. "First of all it had to be someone who had a super-licence, then we had to look at who had the best chance of getting in the car and being quick.
The event climaxed with the two-seater race, with Yoong back on track. Racing with a passenger behind him, and competing against a field including former World Champion Damon Hill, the Malaysian driver boosted his confidence with a third place finish to set up a podium celebration.
"The seat fitting was relatively painless," said Stoddart. "But it was quite comical because having just had the car ready for someone who literally had to be shoe-horned in there, suddenly we found a guy that almost needed a box to sit on! It was one extreme to the other."
Davidson then took time to walk around the track with his engineers, picking out the undulations and enhancing his already strong knowledge of the twisty circuit's numerous corners gained from playing the Playstation in his Brackley home.
"I was pretty cool about it really," he said. "It was the biggest amount of people in close proximity that I have ever had in my life, but I was laughing quite a bit. It was a bit weird. I can stand back from certain situations, like an out-of-body experience, and look down on the view and I always laugh at things like that.
"That's the way I went out. I trundled down the pitlane in first gear for a few metres but in testing you have a set procedure but you don't have to respect the rules of the pitlane limiter. Everyone's a bit less stressed out about getting out earlier and everything, so this was just me being a bit too eager."
After switching places with Webber at the bottom of the timesheets, a glitch in the computer system shot Davidson to the top as the chequered flag went out with a lap of 1:15.397, 1.029 seconds quicker than Schumacher.
Sato was Davidson's old teammate at Carlin motorsport during their Formula Three season last year. "It was really great to catch up with him again," Davidson said. "Basically I spent the whole ride round on the bus talking with him and it was weird waving at everybody when we hadn't even started the race yet.
"I can't believe it was like, race over, from one pretty simple mistake. But I took great pleasure in watching the race from where I was and I actually saw what a tricky corner it was. One thing had I missed, actually, was watching the race. It was really weird. I have watched Formula One races all my life and now I had been in it, it was a strange feeling to actually miss watching."
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Volume 8, Issue 34
Atlas F1 Exclusive
Davidson's Debut Diary
Ann Bradshaw: View from the Paddock
Hungarian GP Review
The 2002 Hungarian GP Review
Hungarian GP - Technical Review
The Two-Car Team
Those Pit Babes
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Qualifying Differentials
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