and demanding with the awesome Eau Rouge corner to conquer, there is nothing quite like the sight of the sweeping, misty track to excite the senses of a Formula One driver. Nineteen-ninety six was no different. Spa holds mainly good memories for Schumacher. He made his Formula One debut here for Jordan in 1991 and won the race in 1992. In 1994 he won the Belgium Grand Prix again, only to be disqualified.
After an awful summer, Ferrari was in desperate need of victory. Jean Todt had suffered intolerable pressure both externally from the press and internally as the man at the top holding the ultimate responsibility. The saying ‘it’s tough at the top’ is never truer than at Ferrari, where there is a constant change in attitude and feelings towards people. These changes may be so slight as to be hardly perceptible, but you ignore them at your peril, for combined they constitute the political current of who is in and who is out. And against a background of change and the growing pains of leading a new era, it has to be said that Jean Todt performed miracles.
THE TIDE TURNS
JEAN TODT’S SMILING FACE SAID IT ALL
Spa was a watershed. Todt arrived in Belgium with his energy levels low, and prepared once more to go into the breach and fight to the end. It was to be a weekend he would remember for a long time. Despite the poor results, he had kept team morale up and ensured that it was a united, proud outfit that arrived in Belgium to compete in the 13th round of the 1996 FIA Formula One World Championship.
The team worked well; Schumacher qualified third and looked good for a podium finish, although the same was said at Monaco and France. But this time the tide was turning. In the race itself, Schumacher slipped into second place behind Villeneuve, after Hill had made a poor start. Having managed a timely pit stop when the pace car came out after Jos Verstappen crashed, Schumacher overtook Villeneuve a few laps later and destiny decreed that the World Champion would go on to win the race, his second as a Ferrari driver. Jean Todt’s smiling face said it all. The relief was enormous. Later he admitted, ‘Spa was the best win of the season. It was like a breath of fresh air after all the problems.’
After the race, an inspection of Schumacher’s car revealed that the gearbox casing was cracked. Although highly delighted by the win, John Barnard was once again anxious about the treatment of his ‘baby’. ‘The car was hitting the ground so hard at both ends that it completely cracked the gearbox cases. Even the bearings on the starter shafts were broken, and they don’t do anything except when you start the car. When I was watching the race on television I noticed that our car was the only one sparking heavily off the ground. It was the set-up again.’
A top designer cannot be neutral about his creation, and it was swiftly becoming apparent that it was not only the gearbox casing that was breaking but the entire relationship between Barnard and Ferrari, poisoned by acrimonious disputes between Ferrari Design and Development (FDD) in England and the technical team at Maranello.
Barnard was convinced that things were not as they should be. He thought that certain people at Maranello were determined to use FDD and Jean Todt as scapegoats. It was too easy to say the gearbox broke again, without giving an explanation.
Giorgio Ascanelli, the man in charge of set-up, had other ideas about the cracked gearbox. ‘We believe the cracking on the gearbox was due to the type of circuit that Spa is. In reality we had problems with the titanium casing cracking in Melbourne, and so had to test with the old gearbox until the middle of June, and our pattern of reliability with the new gearbox has never been constant.’
To compound the problems, when Barnard visited Maranello on 6 August 1997, Montezemolo informed him that he wanted to bring the aerodynamic development back to Italy and he wanted the FDD team to move to Maranello. It was the only way forward.
As well as affecting next year’s car, this announcement effectively made Barnard’s contract null and void. However, from Ferrari’s point of view they were finding that it was increasingly difficult to design a car long distance via phone and fax, and although it was clear that they, and especially Jean Todt, had great respect for Barnard and his team at FDD, they also needed to have the main design centre at Maranello. It would be Barnard’s decision. Ferrari would be happy to have him and his team in Italy, if not they would have to look elsewhere.
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