Sunday March 3rd, 2002

By Alan Baldwin

First start of the season, first corner, first crash and first controversy all hit Formula One in a matter of seconds on Sunday.

The in-car footage of Ralf Schumacher's Williams ploughing into the rear of Rubens Barrichello's scarlet Ferrari, speeding skywards before crash landing and plunging into the barriers will be rerun endlessly.

So will the debate about whether, with eight of the 22 cars written off at the first corner, the Australian Grand Prix should have been restarted instead of being allowed to continue behind the safety car.

"From my point of view it should have been red-flagged and the race started again," said Michael Schumacher, Ferrari's race winner for the third year in a row and older brother of the uninjured Ralf. "There is a certain rule and they (race officials) followed the rule, but maybe you can argue the rule should be changed."

Jordan's engineering head Gary Anderson, with Italian Giancarlo Fisichella out of the race, was adamant that the International Automobile Federation (FIA) was at fault.

"The decision not to stop the race by FIA is absolutely absurd," he said, speaking from the pit lane wall during the heat of battle.

Others disagreed, not always depending on whether or not they were victims, and many fans will have left Albert Park delighted with a race that saw new faces score points.

Schumacher himself was involved in a similarly dramatic crash at Hockenheim last year when Brazilian Luciano Burti flew over his Ferrari. On that occasion, the race was stopped for safety reasons because of the debris on track but Schumacher said there was far less wreckage this time.

Certain Rule

"In Hockenheim, I remember the whole straight was covered in pieces," he said. "Here there was room to avoid the pieces. There is a certain rule and they follow the rule."

McLaren's David Coulthard, who failed to finish but escaped the mayhem, said a re-start would not have helped him but would have been good for his rivals.

"From a racing point of view, I've always felt that to deprive the spectators of a number of cars from the race in a first corner incident isn't really good for the business. But this isn't Hollywood, you don't cut out the bits you don't like.

"As long as it's consistent. If a driver's not hurt, they'll throw the safety car and, if a driver's stuck in the car, they will stop the race."

British American Racing (BAR) boss David Richards rued a missed opportunity after seeing both his drivers fail to finish but was not unhappy with the race continuing.

"You've got to remember that the role of the race director is to manage safety and he has to decide whether the track is safe to continue driving on under a safety car as it happened," he said. "Clearly there were no incidents after that so his decision was correct. If you make the decision from an entertainment point of view, you look at it on a completely different basis.

"That's not his role. Whether we would have got a better show out of it had we restarted, well that's clearly a matter of conjecture. You certainly wouldn't have had an Australian hero in Mark Webber tonight."

Webber, in his first Grand Prix, finished fifth for Minardi's first points since 1999. The crowd loved it and he was feted around the paddock.

Published at 08:27:53 GMT