Reflections on 1998
	by Roger Horton, England

The dust has now well and truly settled on the 1998 Formula One season, a season that produced an absorbing and eventful 16 races. Drama, excitement, controversy, wheel to wheel racing - this year had it all and for the third time in a row, the drivers' Championship went to the last race on the calendar for a decision. The 1998 season is also significant in that it saw the departure of two of the best known names in Formula One - Goodyear and Tyrrell. Goodyear, like Renault before them, were caught in the trap of diminishing returns. Your successes are taken for granted, and only your failures are news. Spare a thought for Goodyear as the images of Michael Schumacher's tyre exploding were beamed around the world and just how many consumers realized that the failure was caused by circumstances outside their control. Goodyear at least had the satisfaction of leaving, if not on top, at least fighting all the way and in being competitive to the last. Tyrrell has not been a force in F1 for over a decade and in truth have been really "making up the numbers" now for too long. There is little room for sentimentality in the harsh competitive world of F1 and nor should there be. The Tyrrell name deserves its place in Formula One's rich history for the team's achievements in the late sixties and early seventies, but Tyrrell is no more and in its place we have British American Racing. Perhaps though, the most significant "off track" maneuver was the departure of Dave Richards from Benetton. For the first time since 1989 there was a change this season amongst the "big four" with Jordan entering at the expense of the Enstone based team. Benetton have now only won one race in the three seasons since Schumacher's departure at the end of 1995. Richards was brought in to arrest this decline and on the understanding from the Benetton family that they agree to a major restructuring programme. One of the key elements of this programme was the need to link up with a major technical partner and engine supplier, Ford being the most likely candidate. When this strategy was overruled, Richards quit. The message here though is very clear. Even a well run and commercially strong team like Benetton, cannot win again on a regular basis unless it is working in partnership with a major motor manufacturer. The successful examples of both McLaren and Williams are there for all to see. With the impending entry of Japanese giants Honda and Toyota, the writing is clearly on the wall for the likes of Jordan, Prost, Sauber and Arrows. Join them, or risk the gradual decline that only leads to one destination - to join Tyrrell in memory lane. No Formula One season would be complete without its share of controversy and 1998 was no different. In Brazil we had the McLaren "brake-steer" protest and the British Grand Prix ended in a shambles, with Schumacher taking the checkered flag driving down the pit lane, whilst on his way to serve his 10 second stop and go penalty for passing Wurz's Benetton under yellows. As both of these controversies ended up being settled in Ferrari's favour, it merely fueled the paranoia that is never very far from the surface in F1 in the nineties. McLaren hit back by threatening to protest the Ferrari team in Germany and when Schumacher came home in a distant 5th place there were many "nods and winks" up and down the pit lane. Certainly the subject of traction control is currently a pretty grey area, all the leading teams seemed to have perfected a "legal" way of achieving it, but at great expense. Either that or some drivers have perfected the art of getting 750+ horsepower cars off the line without a trace of wheel spin! The McLaren experience in Brazil, where Ferrari were successful in having their brake-steer system declared illegal by the stewards of the meeting, clearly shows up a flaw in the way these technical matters are handled. McLaren had at every stage consulted the FIA's technical delegate Charlie Whiting on the systems legality and had, one assumes, invested a great deal of money and time in perfecting it. To have it outlawed by three stewards, in the pressure cooker atmosphere of a Grand Prix weekend, does not seem the best way to set the technical guidelines necessary to police modern F1. The subject of "driver discipline" again made news throughout the year and for the first time in Canada we saw a penalty actually imposed during the race when Michael Schumacher was adjudged a ten second "stop and go" for forcing Frentzen off the road as the Ferrari driver emerged from the pits after his first stop. This instant punishment for various driver offences is a step forward, provided that the punishments meted out are consistent. F1 could learn something from Cart in this respect, where they have a permanent steward who travels to all the races and handles matters involving both on track and off track driver behavior. Interestingly, Cart have just suspended a driver from the first race of next season for incidents that occurred in the last race of this year! On the track, the center of attention was the year-long title struggle between Michael Schumacher and Mika Hakkinen and the sometimes bitter fight for supremacy between McLaren and Ferrari. In the end Hakkinen and McLaren triumphed and few would disagree that either title was not well deserved. Over the 16 race period they simply did a better job. Mika Hakkinen is a thoroughly deserving Champion, who won many of his races in a dominant fashion. Pole position on the grid, the lead at the first corner, building and holding a cushion throughout. If you are fortunate to have a car advantage, then that is the way to exploit it. We saw the same from Damon Hill in 1996. So at Suzuka Hakkinen was crowned as a popular Champion, one that will be a credit to Formula One. He had fully paid his Formula One dues and 1998 was his time to collect. Much has been written about Hakkinen's special relationship with McLaren's team chief Ron Dennis. There is no question that their relationship was strengthened by the events surrounding Hakkinen's 1995 Adelaide crash and the Finn's remarkable recovery. However I believe that much more of the answer lies in a quote I saw from Dennis some years earlier. Lamenting at the time the decision by Ayrton Senna to leave the then somewhat struggling McLaren team in favour of the dominant Williams outfit, he opined that he wished drivers could treat their relationship with their teams more like a marriage vow. In sickness and in health, for better or worse. Mika Hakkinen gave up a race deal with the Lotus team to be the McLaren team's test driver on Ron Dennis's assurance that if he was just patient, he would get his chance. When Michael Andretti's experiment with F1 was cut short after the 1993 Italian GP at Monza, Mika grabbed his chance by out-qualifying his team leader Senna in his debut race for McLaren in Portugal. The rest, as they say, is history. Mika Hakkinen has lived up to his "marriage vows" by faithfully sticking by McLaren during the difficult years of '93-'95 and the emerging year of 96. Put simply, it was pay back time for Ron Dennis. His opportunity to live up to his part of arrangement came in 1998 and this he duly did. In this context, the decisions by Dennis to insist on Mika Hakkinen being gifted his victories at Jerez the end of last season and at Melbourne in the beginning of this, make perfect sense. For David Coulthard, it was obviously a bitter pill to swallow, as his body language on the Jerez podium clearly showed. Unfortunately for Coulthard I can only predict more of the same. He (Coulthard) has had only a very average season this year, given the superiority of the equipment at his disposal. Coulthard has been quoted as stating his pleasure that Mika clinched his crown at Suzuka, and that next year would be "his turn". Given that Hakkinen is already talking about the possibility of "back to back" Championships, there promises to be perhaps more tension in the relationship between the two in the '99 season. Perhaps this might even favour Coulthard, who seems to lack that hard edge that sets all winners apart. Next year he will need to develop it, or be the continual number two. Sometimes the whole flavor of a season can be captured in one image, or series of connected images. For me the image of 1998 was the site of the three wheeled Ferrari of Michael Schumacher emerging from the spray after its collision with Coulthard's McLaren at Spa. In this race we saw the best and worse of Michael Schumacher. His in-car genius in judging the changing limits of the race track lap by lap and his confidence to exploit it. But there is a fine line between confidence and arrogance. Confidence, when harnessed and directed correctly, is an asset when performing at the top level. Indeed without it, no great sportsman in any field can dominate their rivals. But arrogance can also breed the feeling that victory is theirs by "right". That it is the automatic result of their participation. Defeat in this context then becomes unimaginable. The world saw this in the actions of Ayrton Senna at Suzuka in 1990 and we have seen it twice on the track from Schumacher in title deciding situations. At Spa it spilled over into the confrontation in the pitlane witnessed by millions on their TV screens around the world. This was a new side of Michael Schumacher on view to the world that day, for in the many years of observing him, his self control has always seemed to be uncanny. He has always seemed to be the master of his environment, his control total. Perhaps, in the minute or so it took him to guide his stricken Ferrari back to the pits, he had time to realize the enormity of the disaster that had just overtaken him. That his great goal of bringing Championship glory for himself and Ferrari was over for another year and that he was at least partly to blame. There are those who say that this year the cracks in Schumacher's aura of invincibility are beginning to show. With growing suggestions that he was at least partly to blame for stalling on the grid at Suzuka, it would bring to seven the number of mistakes his critics could claim he made during races in 1998. In Argentina and Hungary he survived off track excursions and still won, at Austria he survived but it cost him points, Monaco and Spa saw contact and retirement. At Silverstone he was just fortunate that the stewards erred and he was never effectively punished for passing under yellows. Against this, one has to remember that he was having to drive harder in every race to overcome a performance disadvantage and when you continually take it to the edge, sometimes you are bound to fall off. One sobering statistic for Schumacher to ponder, is that he has now been involved in five title deciding races (two in 1994, one in 1997 and another two in 1998). His record stands at two 2nd finishes (Japan of 1994 and Luxembourg of 1998) and three DNFs (Australia 1994, Jerez 1997 and Japan 1998). So he has never managed a win when the pressure is at its greatest. Even in 1995 the pressure was never really there, as he managed to wrap up the title with two rounds still to go. All the controversy surrounding the events at Spa overshadowed somewhat what was the most unlikely victory of the season, that of the Jordan's team, with their one-two result. The win was also refreshing in that it broke the McLaren-Ferrari monopoly of wins for 1998 and added a much needed injection of a surprise result, something of a rarity in modern F1. That Jordan triumphed at their 127th attempt will no doubt be a sobering reminder to all aspiring teams just how hard it is to win once, let alone challenge for the Championships. Optimism though is an essential ingredient to achieve anything worthwhile in any endeavor and you can be sure that there will be plenty of it to go around when the circus reconvenes in Australia, for the opening Grand Prix of 1999.

Roger Horton	© 1998 Atlas Formula One Journal.
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