Well, finally all the waiting is over and
the 1996 FIA World Championship is underway. The new track at
Albert Park in Melbourne is a good one and, for once, the opening
race has not been marked by controversy.
The Pace Lap
As the cars pulled away on the pace lap, Damon Hill overtook his team mate and polesitter, Jacques Villeneuve but quickly let him pull back in front. Heinz-Harald Frentzen, 9th on the grid, pulled his Sauber-Ford over to the side of the track before turn 3 and retired with an unknown problem. Pedro Lamy who had a software problem in the gearbox of his Minardi-Ford in the morning warm-up was forced to start from the pitlane, but as he qualified 17th this wasn't much of a loss to the young Portuguese driver.
The Race
The start showed the F1 world a new starting system, and I for one find it incomprehensible that the new system is viewed to be more simple than the old one. For those who didn't notice or didn't see the Grand Prix the usual red-to-green system has been abandoned in favour of five red lights that come on one by one. When they are all red, there is the usual pause (up to six seconds) and then they are all extinguished signifying the start of the race.
All this nonsense aside, when the lights turned green, sorry, when the lights went out (just doesn't have the same feel does it) the season was truly underway. Villeneuve made a superb start and had several car lengths on Hill by the first corner and Irvine and Schumacher held onto 3rd and 4th respectively. Ukyo Katayama managed to carry his poor luck into the race by stalling on the grid as the field moved off. After turning into turn two Damon Hill got a bit of oversteer and let the two Ferrari's through in the blink of an eye, but luckily for Damon, he got a second crack of the whip after Martin Brundle's Jordan left the track in spectacular fashion at turn 3 and caused the race to be stopped. David Coulthard's McLaren-Mercedes fishtailed after being hit by Oliver Panis and he drove across the bows of Johnny Herbert's Sauber who in turn was hit by the Jordan. The contact launched Brundle into the air at high speed, he bounced off a wall and into a gravel trap with the chassis coming to rest on it's rollbar. For a moment it looked like he might be injured but a few seconds after the dust cleared, Martin was out of the wrecked Jordan looking a bit dazed but in good health. Unfortunately, all three cars involved in the shunt were damaged beyond immediate repair and both Coulthard and Herbert headed back to the pit's for their spare cars.
As the grid reformed and the teams congregated around the cars, Herbert was given the bad news that team-leader Frentzen would have use of the T-car for the restart, meaning that Johnny would have to sit out the rest of the afternoon. Coulthard returned to the McLaren pit and waited while the mechanics changed the settings on the T-car from Mika Hakkinen's setup to David's. While all this was happening Martin Brundle was raising cheers from the grandstands and the pitlane by running up and down the pit straight looking for Professor Sid Watkins, the FIA medical delegate, so that he could take the restart. The resilience of Brundle amazed everyone who saw him climb back into the Jordan, mere minutes after a heavy crash.
At 1:25 local time, the 2nd parade lap started and finished without incident and the cars formed up for the second start, albeit without Herbert and with Brundle and Coulthard starting from the pits. This time, the field made it out of the first part of the track without incident and in more or less the same positions as the starting order. This remained the case until Brundle spun when he tried to pass the Ligier of Pedro Diniz and stalled his car. Shortly after this, Irvine appeared to let Schumacher through to allow the double World Champion to chase the two Williams.
For the next eight laps, all was quiet with Villeneuve leading from Hill, Schumacher, Irvine, Alesi, Hakkinen, Berger, Barrichello and Salo. Hakkinen in fact appeared to be holding up the cars behind him to the tune of a second a lap but nobody could pass him. Coming into turn 3 on the 9th lap, Jean Alesi tried to squeeze his Benetton-Renault past the Ferrari of Irvine when there was no gap to get through. Alesi hit Irvine and ripped his left sidepod apart but for a change the innocent party managed to get away unscathed. Jean drove the rest of the lap and into the pits for the second retirement of the race. Jean was followed into retirement by Jos Verstappen whose Arrows broke down on lap 15.
On lap 16 the first round of pitstops started with Mika Salo bringing his Tyrrell in for the first of two stops. The whole of the group that Mika was running with came in around this time along with Schumacher and Irvine. On lap 24, Coulthard repeated his feat of messing up pitlane entry (admittedly he had a sticking throttle), flying off the track instead of turning in. Although he got going again, David decided to call it a day and handed the keys of his McLaren back to the mechanics. All this time, Damon Hill and Jacques Villeneuve were lapping faster than anyone else and Hill was never more than a second behind his new team mate.
On lap 29, both Villeneuve and Barrichello entered the pitlane, the former for his scheduled stop, the latter to retire the remaining Jordan-Peugeot. Lap 30 saw the Hill in the pits and although his stop took a second longer than Villeneuve he managed to make it out just in front of the Indycar champion. This wasn't the order for long however as Jacques, on warm tyres, took Hill on the run-up to turn 3 despite Damon's best attempts to hold him off on his cold tyres. 3 laps later Schumacher came into the pits for a brake problem that required the removal of the Ferrari's nose and even though they managed to get him out again, he put it into a sand trap during his out lap and then drove it into the pits for an early bath. Schumacher was closely followed by new-boy Fisichella whose Minardi retired without any apparent reason (or so you'd think watching the coverage).
At around this point I noticed that Hill's car was becoming increasingly dirty at a rate faster than that of any other car on the track. 2 laps later, Villeneuve showed that he was human after all, understeering off the road at the first corner but managing to get the car back onto the track without losing a place to Hill. After watching the incident 3 times in total it does appear that Jacques chopped his team mate. Hill, unwilling to force the point and risk a collision, backed off until lap 46 when an oil leak, that I'd managed to see as early as lap 30, started to show up on television as a faint cloud of smoke. Villeneuve managed to ignore the smoke for another 7 laps until, finally, Renault engineers seemed to agree with Murray Walker and told Jacques to slow down, effectively handing the race win to Hill. The only thing that could stop Damon equalling the 14 win record of his father was a mechanical breakdown.
5 laps later, it was all over. Damon had taken the chequered flag in a decidedly filthy Williams-Renault, Villeneuve crossed the line next followed 30 seconds later by Irvine.
Analysis
Looking back on the race, a couple of things spring to mind as being very important: