San Marino Grand Prix Review

The return to the racetracks of Europe has made little difference; this weekend had a familiar ring to it. Now that free practice is treated with conservatism, before qualifying there were hopes, based on educated guesses looking at the recorded times, that perhaps this was the meeting where the Ferrari steamroller might end. For a brief change the optimism extended into race day, after Schumi was knocked off pole position for the first time this season.

But come race day - guess what? - there had been rain overnight, the track was green, the spring temperatures were, well, temperate not hot, and the Bridgestones on the Ferraris were the things to have. It's getting repetitive, but Michelin don't have an excuse if they don't have an advantage simply because the weather doesn't get hot enough. And with Schumi at one with his car and seemingly on another plane of existence in 2004, everyone else has no excuse for just not being good enough.

But even if the battle for the lead was in effect a no-contest, that is not to say that the race was processional and boring; there were certainly other talking points. The most obvious of which was undoubtedly Button's superb weekend, capped off by his and BAR's first pole position and a relatively strong run to 2nd place, again the best result for the Briton and his team. Even if Schumi was on track to take pole until his error, that is not to deny Button's wonderful third sector and gloriously neat and fast lap overall.

Clearly, in race trim Jenson was the only one apart from Schumi able to get his car "hooked up" (in Martin Brundle's words) to the unique kerb-hopping characteristics of Imola, and his BAR was the only car within light years of Michael's pace. This enabled him to pull clear of the rest of the non-Michael field, but once Schumi took track position away from him the truth is that the German built an almost-30s lead, which goes to show just how much work everyone else has to do.

The point is that, if we were to suggest that the BAR really is the second best combo in F1 at present, most of us would probably shudder and think, "Is this really the best that the non-Ferrari teams can produce?" True, BAR have displaced McLaren from the 'big four' (or should that be the 'chasing three'?) this year but, for example, their less-than-brilliant pit work that lost Button the lead, plus the team in general, still do not have the air of a top team. Perhaps time will tell if their form truly represents a coming-of-age seachange.

But even if BAR really are leading the pursuing pack by default because they are doing the least average job, a word of praise for Button's driving is much deserved. He has stepped up to the role of team leader with aplomb, his driving is consistent, and he is showing no mean turn of speed. It should be remembered that in his stunning debut season in 2000 for Williams, and then in his woeful 2001 for Benetton, Imola was a bogey track for him, which made his performance this weekend even more impressive.

Aggression is one thing, aggression plus brains is another. Neither JPM nor Ralf showed much of the latter on the first lap. After being given the one-move by Schumi on the way to the Villeneuve chicane, how Juan-Pablo seriously thought he could take Michael around the outside of Tosa is beyond me. OK, so he says he believed he was doing a repeat of the Nurburgring from last year. For one thing, a wily character like Michael is not caught napping twice. Also, the Tosa and the Dunlop Kurve are very different corners.

Finally, the Williams-BMW-Michelin combination was the thing to have at the Nurburgring last year, whereas the Ferrari was the lamb for the slaughter. Not only was it quite the opposite here, but with Michael hungry to get the job done and to take the ten points, which is nothing less than what he would expect given the quality of the machinery underneath him, would he tolerate having the inevitable hindered by the pesky Colombian? I think not; there was no way Michael was not coming out of Tosa in front.

Ralf later got his just deserts for his Bahrain indiscretions by being punted by a charging Fernando Alonso in a 50-50 incident, while JPM seemed to spend his whole race dreaming up ways of confronting Michael later over their first lap clash. He made angry gestures at the World Champion on the slowing-down lap, confronted the German on the way to the post-race press conference, and then had a very public whinge in the conference itself. But if that cast a bad light on anyone, it was on Montoya himself.

Not only did it show that he was unable to put behind him an incident that occurred 62 laps ago, it was also in total denial of the fact that even if Montoya had got past the Ferrari and held him up for the first eight laps, Michael would still have passed both JPM and Button in the pits and romped away to an easy victory. It made no difference to the race result. Plus it unnecessarily took the gloss off what had been a terrific drive by Schumi, the greatest driver of his age, at the absolute peak of his powers.

The Renaults of Fernando Alonso and Jarno Trulli finished 4th and 5th, Trulli making up places during the first round of stops, and Alonso doing so in the third, but more was expected of both the blue and yellow cars. Like Williams, more was expected of them by others and by themselves after off-season testing, but at least they currently seem to have the team spirit to do something about it, unlike their Grove counterparts, although engine power remains their greatest hurdle.

It was not exactly a breathtaking effort from either driver though. Alonso has been comparatively quiet this year, and it took until the last third of the race before he seemed to come to life. Trulli, meanwhile, looked positively heroic after the first stops, when he showed that he can in fact up the ante when needed in a race situation and make hay while the sun shines - only to retreat back into his much-maligned shell when the second and third stops came around. The Italian remains an enigma on Sundays.

REJECT OF THE RACE
Juan Pablo Montoya
Spat the dummy with a post-race boo-hoo!

The other man for whom the pit stop dice rolled unkindly was, of course, Rubens Barrichello. But although Imola is a difficult track to pass on, the Brazilian wasn't exactly crawling all over the back of either Ralf or Trulli. Some are noticing a certain dejection in Rubens at the moment, showing that Michael's supremacy is not just about the car or the tyres. In the driving department, Schumi is at the top of his game; that's putting Rubens off his, and he's not getting what he should out of the car as a result.

Outside of the top four teams - yes, outside the top four thank you very much Ron Dennis - McLaren actually managed to get both cars to the finish for the first time this year, Kimi Raikkonen scoring his first point for 8th after his zillionth engine problem this year forced another change and another drop to the back of the grid. Both he and David Coulthard effectively ran two-stop strategies, although DC had to recover from hitting Alonso on the first lap, but the two-stop plan as opposed to the three-stopper was never the most effective.

Jaguar wasn't quite as competitive as they might hope to have been, although Mark Webber did qualify 8th and probably could have pipped Raikkonen to the last point had his R5 not suffered an intermittent electrical problem. How he copes with Button's current success will be worth watching in the upcoming events, though. Whatever contractual ties they have, remembering that no contract in F1 can't be bought out, it's little secret that Button and Webber are at the top of Williams' hit list for 2005.

For the 'new generation' consists most notably of Montoya, Alonso and Raikkonen, two Latins and the ice cool Finn, but also the two Anglo-Saxon hopes, Button and Webber, neither of whom are perceived as being as naturally talented as the other three, but both nonetheless supremely capable of stringing together the consistent performances to win a championship. Jenson has a car to get excellent results right now; Mark does not. He must keep showing that he's extracting the maximum out of his machinery.

In fact, Sauber's entire weekend at Imola was typically quiet and unobtrusive, except for the one flourish when Giancarlo Fisichella went 4th fastest in pre-qualifying on low fuel, only to fail to come out for his second run. With Bridgestone tyres and the same spec Ferrari engines as the red cars, it doesn't take a brain surgeon to what out what element is lacking. It's one thing to copy Ferrari's aerodynamics; it's another thing to integrate it into a package that works.

As long as Toyota maintain this strategy of pitting out of sync with everyone else (read "earlier") they are never going to get anywhere, but we've been saying that ad nauseam for the last 18 months. It doesn't help that currently the TF104 cannot lift the team above the lower midfield quagmire. Like McLaren, they are hoping for improvements in the second half of the season. Also like McLaren, in the meantime it's just a case of hanging on and hoping for the best.

The good news for Toyota is that, however dismal their package may be right now, they will always have the wood on poor Jordan and Minardi. Jordan was the only team to double-DNF at Imola. It appears as though their sponsorship from the Bahrain GP will continue for the rest of the season, with a different humanitarian message at each race. Nice to see the Senna tribute, and throughout the weekend, Roland Ratzenberger was not completely forgotten. You can read our Ratzenberger tribute here.

It was a shame that Giorgio's race was curtailed early on by an hydraulics problem, because up to that point he had had his first impressive weekend. There's something about the Imola paddock that always raises rumours that one of the rookies or someone under-performing is under pressure and about to get the chop. It was Johnny Herbert 'on the bubble' in 2000, Luciano Burti and Gaston Mazzacane in 2001, and Antonio Pizzonia last year.

This year, rumour had it that Pantano was about to be bundled out in favour of Jordan test driver Timo Glock. Glock then went out and demolished his Jordan on Friday, whilst Pantano, on a track he knew, out-qualified and temporarily out-raced his team-mate. Well done, Giorgio. Even if he's a little mercurial, Pantano has served his apprenticeship with three seasons in F3000 in which he's recorded wins, and he deserves his F1 chance - and he deserves for it to last longer than just four races.

Finally Minardi, in what is their home race, again made up the numbers, Bruni and Zsolt Baumgartner recording hideously slow times. Reliability is not there for them, and even if it is, the low number of retirements means that the most they can hope for is around 14th or 15th. Yippee. More than ever, Minardi are simply making up the numbers without so much as a hope of mixing it with the midfielders, and frankly the pointlessness of their performances is getting painful to watch. Their only hope is to hang on until 2008 and pray Max Mosely's pipe dream of regulation overhaul comes true!