RIVALRIES
Juan Fangio vs. Giuseppe Farina
Mike Hawthorn vs. Stirling Moss
Emerson Fittipaldi vs. Clay Regazzoni
Alan Jones vs. Carlos Reutemann
Gilles Villeneuve vs. Didier Pironi
Nigel Mansell vs. Nelson Piquet
Damon Hill vs. Michael Schumacher
Mika Häkkinen vs. Michael Schumacher
Michael Schumacher vs. Fernando Alonso
Fernando Alonso vs. Lewis Hamilton
Mark Webber vs. Sebastian Vettel
Lewis Hamilton vs. Nico Rosberg
Why Teammates Are Often
The Best of Enemies
RIVALRIES
JUAN FANGIO vs. GIUSEPPE FARINA
A Hollywood movie producer might be tempted to recast the first great rivalry of the Formula 1 World Championship as a tale of a young buck knocking the established figure off his perch, but incumbent star Giuseppe Farina was closing in on his forty-fourth birthday when he clinched the inaugural world title in September 1950, and Juan Manuel Fangio was hardly in the first flush of youth.
Argentine ace Fangio was just five years Farina’s junior and hadn’t competed on European soil until his thirty-seventh birthday. World War II had cost both men the years when they should have hit peak racing form, though Fangio had kept himself sharp in regional events in South America. Both men hit the scene hard, as motorsport gradually wound back into gear during the late 1940s.
Fangio’s sharp-edged competitive streak came wrapped in a comforting shroud of affability and genteel good manners. Farina hailed from more privileged stock, was sure of his place in the world, and bore himself with suitable aristocratic hauteur when in the company of social inferiors.
Their skill sets were also poles apart. What Farina lacked in driving finesse, compared with natural talents such as Fangio, he compensated for with a bravery that verged on the suicidal. Enzo Ferrari once said, “He was like a high-strung thoroughbred, capable of committing the most astonishing follies. As a consequence, he was a regular inmate of the hospital wards.”
Farina was Fangio’s team leader at Alfa Romeo in 1950 and 1951, and they won three races each. Farina lifted the title by finishing fourth in Belgium, while Fangio failed to score in the rounds Farina won. But Fangio was clearly the faster driver, and he ceased to defer to his team leader when he exerted his authority on the track throughout 1951.
For all the on-track animus, this was a polite rivalry, based on respect: when Fangio was at death’s door after a crash in Italy in 1952, Farina visited him in hospital and gave him the winner’s laurel wreath.
RIVALRIES
MIKE HAWTHORN vs. STIRLING MOSS
In 1958, a small island was gripped by Formula 1 as two of its sons grappled with one another to claim the world title. Fittingly, since the island in question was Great Britain, they acted out the drama in an utterly gentlemanly fashion, thus both thrilling the nation and reinforcing its favored national stereotype.
Stirling Craufurd Moss and John Michael “Mike” Hawthorn epitomized dashing, homegrown heroes: both were from respectable backgrounds and plummily well-spoken, but had earned underdog credentials as they worked their way up from the junior formulae on merit. For a long time, in fact, Hawthorn had raced while wearing a bow tie.
They were very different characters, though. Moss took a hard-bitten professional attitude to his racing, and, though he was happy to have fun and womanize off track, he had no taste for alcohol. Hawthorn was an altogether more rebellious figure who raced hard and played hard.
There was no rancor in their rivalry. In 1958, Hawthorn was driving for Ferrari, Moss for Vanwall, and, although Moss won four races to Hawthorn’s one, a better record of points finishes dropped the title in Hawthorn’s lap. Second place to Moss in the final round was enough to seal the deal. Famously, Moss turned down the opportunity to lodge a protest against Hawthorn, when his rival drove against the flow of traffic to rejoin the circuit after a spin in Portugal; in fact, he actively lobbied on Hawthorn’s behalf.
“The sportsmanship and friendly spirit that Moss and Hawthorn have shown to the other throughout the season has been a pleasure to watch,” purred the report in Autocar, “and should settle once and for all any suggestion that motor racing is a cut-throat business in which there is little room for finer feelings and good sportsmanship.”
The new world champion had already decided to quit, though, after the death of his great friend and teammate Peter Collins some months earlier.
RIVALRIES
JIM CLARK vs. GRAHAM HILL
For not many reasons that were good, 1961 saw the capping of F1 engines at 1.5 liters. Ferrari already had a competitive Formula 2 engine that would suit, the other manufacturers—mostly British—less so. Ferrari’s dominance that year didn’t promise classic racing in the seasons to come.
And yet the following years proved to be remarkable, as the sharpest teams found inventive means of getting around the lack of power and new driving talents came to the fore. In 1962, Lotus produced the 25, F1’s first monocoque chassis design, while British Racing Motors (BRM)—for many years a laughingstock—finally came good by pairing the tidy P57 car with a decently powerful V-8 engine.
To this interesting machinery, add two fascinating characters. Former Royal Navy engineer Graham Hill hadn’t passed his driving test until the age of twenty-four, at which point he discovered a taste for racing—after talking his way into a job as a racing instructor. It was Hill who instigated the turnaround at BRM after he and his then-teammate Dan Gurney had threatened to go on strike unless a competent engineer was put in charge.
Hill’s opponent, Jim Clark, had grown up on a sheep farm on the Scottish border but was a remarkable talent behind the wheel, and his performances in sports cars caught the eye of Lotus founder Colin Chapman.
The 1962 championship went down to the wire. Each driver had won three races as they arrived at the final round, in South Africa, on December 29. Clark started on pole and led throughout, until an oil leak forced him to stop, handing the title to Hill.
In 1963, the momentum went to Clark as BRM’s new monocoque-chassis P61 proved not up to scratch. The following year brought a three-way contest in which Hill and Clark were mugged by Ferrari’s John Surtees at the final round.
The competition was fierce. After Clark nursed his car home with a sickly engine in the 1965 British Grand Prix, he said, “I would have been prepared to risk ‘blowing up’ rather than seeing Graham pass me.”
RIVALRIES
JACKIE STEWART vs. JIM CLARK
It’s a sign of how highly regarded Clark was that even his rivals—those still with us to tell the tale, that is—regard themselves as having been in his shadow. In 1965, Jackie Stewart was the hot new talent on the scene. He was Hill’s teammate at BRM, but he performed very much on terms with him on pace. For three Grands Prix that summer, Stewart finished second to Clark, until he finally put one over on him at Monza—and then only after Clark had dropped out with a broken fuel pump.
“We were like Batman and Robin,” said Stewart of his friend and fellow Scot. “And there was no doubt who was Batman and who was Robin.”
Considering Stewart’s sublime talent—he would go on to become world champion three times—this is quite a statement.
Clark and Stewart differed in personality. Clark was charismatic but never lost an edge of shyness, which drove him to shield himself from his increasing fame. At heart he was still a boy from a sheep farm. Stewart had grown up with dyslexia at a time when the condition wasn’t fully understood; as a consequence, he had been treated poorly by the British education system. As is the way with such things, his personality had worked around the problem like a river finding its natural course. He had star quality and embraced fame.
Circumstances prevented their rivalry from blossoming into something truly epic on track. When Lotus were at their peak, Clark was utterly dominant.
Still, this was a rivalry to savor. Stewart loves to tell the story about the time his throttle stuck open at Monza during practice, and it took every ounce of his skill to make it round the Curva Grande corner. After listening to Stewart regale his fellow drivers about the moment, Clark piped up: “Are you saying, Jackie, that you normally lift off there?”
RIVALRIES
EMERSON FITTIPALDI vs. CLAY REGAZZONI
From the moment he touched down on European soil, Brazilian Emerson Fittipaldi was on the fast-track to greatness. In 1969 he was queuing up for Graham Hill’s autograph; a year later he was the third driver for Lotus in F1, then rapidly promoted to team leader after the death of Jochen Rindt; and in 1972 he became the sport’s youngest ever world champion at the age of twenty-five, a record that would stand until 2006.
From that point on, Fittipaldi’s outlook changed. He continued to have a good turn of speed, but he preferred to play the percentages and win through guile rather than pushing the performance envelope of his cars. Clay Regazzoni had no such qualms. Enzo Ferrari described the dashing Swiss as a “dancer, viveur, playboy, and a driver in his spare time.” He was perhaps not as quick as Fittipaldi, but his aggression behind the wheel put him in the same drawer as Giuseppe Farina. After an on-track encounter at Monza in 1970, Jackie Stewart described his driving as “unethical, unsporting, and dangerous.”
In 1974 they both had similarly competitive machinery at the same time, Fittipaldi in a McLaren M23 and Regazzoni in a Ferrari 312B3. It had been a competitive season with seven different winners, but Fittipaldi came to the final round at Watkins Glen ahead in the title battle—by just a single point from “Regga.”
They qualified eighth and ninth but Regazzoni got ahead at the start, then swerved while trying to pass Fittipaldi, forcing the Brazilian off the track. This time, rather than back off and play the percentages, Fittipaldi held his nerve, bounced back onto the track, banged wheels with his rival, and forced his way past.
“He was never expecting to get this reaction from me,” said the new world champion.
RIVALRIES
NIKI LAUDA vs. JAMES HUNT
The tale of the showdown for the 1976 world championship sounds like the plot of a Hollywood movie. Eventually it eventually became one: Rush, 2013.
Niki Lauda’s wealthy family disowned his racing activities, and the Austrian had to take out a bank loan to fund his early career. Even then, he was viewed as a no-mark pay driver until he gained a reputation for being focused, no-nonsense, very fast, and excellent at developing cars to make them better. After joining Ferrari during one of the team’s periodic dips in form, he played a key role in turning things around.
James Hunt was a far more mercurial character, and from a far less financially privileged background than his immaculate public-school accent would suggest. Nerves often got the better of him before races, and in the junior formulae he earned the nickname “Hunt the Shunt” after a series of crashes. He initially made it to F1 with the Hesketh team, run by a bunch of aristocratic good-time boys.
In 1976 Lauda was the sitting world champion and Hunt had only remained in the sport by good fortune—Hesketh had closed down, but McLaren needed a driver at short notice after Emerson Fittipaldi quit. Lauda and Hunt enjoyed relatively cordial relations, but their teams were almost implacable enemies. Ferrari schemed to have Hunt disqualified on a small technicality from a race he’d won, and he was only reinstated months later after an appeal.
Lauda had a horrific accident at the Nürbrurging, suffering life-threatening burns that scarred him for life. Yet by sheer force of will he returned to the cockpit at the Italian Grand Prix and reached the final race of the season, in Japan, three points ahead of Hunt.
Torrential rain on race day should have been sufficient grounds to delay or cancel, but the TV cameras were rolling and the race went ahead. On the second lap Lauda decided it was too dangerous and quit the race. Hunt finished in third place, which was enough to win the title.
RIVALRIES
ALAN JONES vs. CARLOS REUTEMANN
Sometimes teammates clash because their personalities are similar. Other times they quarrel because their characters are so entirely removed that they were always destined to mix like oil and water. And so it was with tough, hard-charging, frank-speaking Australian Alan Jones and the gifted but enigmatic Argentine Carlos Reutemann.
Reutemann’s career is an enduring mystery. Fast and deft behind the wheel, he frustrated team owners who could never be sure which Reutemann would be arriving for work on any given day: the unbeatable one, or the distracted and unmotivated one whose head simply wasn’t in the zone. When he arrived at Williams in 1980 he was eight years into a career in which he’d had competitive cars at Brabham and Ferrari but failed to comprehensively outshine his teammates.
“Carlos needed more psychological support than most drivers,” said team owner Frank Williams years later. “We probably didn’t appreciate that sufficiently at the time.”
Williams wasn’t a team in which drivers were mollycoddled. The no-nonsense Jones was precisely the kind of driver Williams and his business partner, the well-respected engineer Patrick Head, preferred to employ. And Jones was explicitly the team’s number one driver, winning the world title in 1980.
The relationship between the two men, never warm, hit the irreconcilable differences stage at the beginning of 1981. Feeling that his role in supporting Jones had gone unacknowledged, Reutemann sullenly clung to the lead of the Brazilian Grand Prix in spite of explicit orders to hand it over to his teammate. By the end of the fractious and uncomfortable year it was Reutemann in contention for the title rather than Jones, but after setting pole for the season finale in Las Vegas he went backwards in the race and it slipped from his grasp.
When Reutemann approached Jones to suggest they bury the hatchet, Jones replied, “Yeah—in the back of your bloody head, mate.”
RIVALRIES
GILLES VILLENEUVE vs. DIDIER PIRONI
Perhaps no other rivalry in the history of Formula 1 has had such devastating consequences as the bust-up between Ferrari teammates Gilles Villeneuve and Didier Pironi in 1982.
They were friends—close enough for Pironi to name his twin sons Didier and Gilles—but both men had a burning desire to win.
“Gilles was maybe the biggest talent around and he would just invent a way of driving a corner—very spontaneous, very creative,” recalled Ferrari’s then sporting director, Marco Piccinini. “Didier, though, would assess the risk in a very cool manner, build himself up and start the lap with the sure intention of staying flat through a corner.”
Villeneuve’s bravura made him the darling of both Enzo Ferrari and the team’s legion of fans. Pironi had arrived in the sport via a French racing scholarship program, and had gradually been getting over a reputation for being brave and fast but crash-prone at other teams when he arrived at Ferrari in 1981. The car that year, Ferrari’s first with a turbocharged engine, wasn’t good, but while Villeneuve outshone Pironi on track, the newcomer was building political alliances within the team.
At first, the apolitical Villeneuve chose to ignore this. For 1982, though, the car was better, and Villeneuve was leading Pironi in the San Marino Grand Prix when the team hung out the “slow” sign with eight laps to go, a prearranged procedure that signaled both drivers to back off and preserve their cars to the finish. Villeneuve obeyed, and Pironi made a spur-of-the-moment decision to overtake him and win the race.
The incident threw Villeneuve into personal turmoil. His immediate feelings of betrayal soured into outright paranoia. And it was in this state of mind, still raging, that he suffered a fatal accident during qualifying for the next Grand Prix.
The anguished Pironi never found peace. While leading the championship standings later in the season he smashed both legs in an accident, ending his driving career.
RIVALRIES
ALAIN PROST vs. NIKI LAUDA
In the early 1980s McLaren was a team on the move again after falling into a deep competitive trough in the late 1970s. Title sponsor Marlboro had become twitchy at the lack of success and engineered a merger between McLaren and the up-and-coming Formula 2 team Project Four, led by former Brabham mechanic Ron Dennis.
After a decade of struggling to find the cash to break into F1, Dennis was a man on a mission. The old team management did not stick around for long. Within a few months McLaren had unveiled the first F1 car to be made principally from carbon fiber, while behind the scenes Dennis was sourcing fresh investment from Techniques d’Avant Garde (at that point the TAG in TAG Heuer watches) to buy out his partners and underwrite the development of a new turbocharged 1.5-liter V-6 engine. There was also the question of getting the best drivers.
Dennis charmed double world champion Niki Lauda out of retirement for 1982, and Lauda proved to be competitive, defying expectations and winning one Grand Prix. But the package wasn’t complete until ’84, when the TAG turbo arrived along with a bespoke new chassis—and Alain Prost.
The French ace had been a talented rookie when he quit McLaren in a funk in 1980. Now he was at the height of his powers and had a point to prove after being fired by his previous team, Renault, for criticizing his car.
Prost played his car like a piano, delicately and with great economy of motion. He rarely looked like he was trying, and yet he would light up the timing screens. More than once, in qualifying, Lauda would exclaim, “Shit! How does he do that?”
Lauda was on the back foot, winning five races (of which four came through Prost having car trouble while ahead). Prost won seven, but by scoring more consistently Lauda beat him to the title by half a point.
Prost was dominant again in 1985 and had better reliability. By season’s end Lauda knew he was well beaten, and that it was time to retire for the second and last time.
RIVALRIES
NIGEL MANSELL vs. NELSON PIQUET
What Formula 1 needed to really join the spirit of the 1980s was to have two rivals publicly spitting at one another in the style of the shoulder-pad-wearing “superbitches” from the TV soaps popular at the time. Nigel Mansell and Nelson Piquet might not have ended up fighting in a lily pond in their party frocks like Dynasty’s Alexis Colby and Krystle Carrington, but their mutual loathing was on par for entertainment value and sheer destructiveness.
What made this among the greatest rivalries in F1 history was not just that the action took place both on- and off-track, and in the full glare of the world’s media, but also that each driver cost the other a world title. Piquet, arguably, should have clinched it in 1986, and Mansell in 1987. Fortunately for their Williams team, Piquet took the honors in ’87; the previous year, Alain Prost had snatched the trophy in the final round.
During those two seasons Williams overtook McLaren as the most competitive outfit, largely on account of the prodigious power output of the new Honda V-6 engine. Piquet was a double world champion when Williams hired him in 1986 and he believed himself to be the team’s number one driver. But he’d reckoned without the grit of Mansell, a bull of a man who had mortgaged his house to fund his early career and survived a broken neck.
Mansell’s speed gave Piquet a fright and he hit back by targeting Mansell’s weak spot: his thin skin. No mind game tactic was off the table so far as Piquet was concerned; he even insulted Mansell’s wife in an interview.
They took lumps out of each other on-track, too, such that 1986 ended with neither of them winning the title. In 1987 Mansell had Piquet (who was suffering blurred vision after a crash in San Marino) beaten for speed, then injured himself in Japan and missed the last two rounds, enabling his slower teammate to collect the prize.
RIVALRIES
ALAIN PROST vs. AYRTON SENNA
Having the two best drivers in Formula 1 on the same team, with the best car, must have seemed like a great idea at the time. Unfortunately for McLaren boss Ron Dennis, pairing Brazilian Ayrton Senna with Frenchman Alain Prost for the 1988 season ignited one of the most toxic rivalries of all time.
McLaren had by far the best car, and the drivers were promised equal equipment and equal status. Between them, Senna and Prost won all but one of the sixteen races in that season, and Senna won the drivers’ championship with one round still to go.
The brooding, ultra-competitive Senna had a burning desire to test himself against the very best—and defeat them. Prost, who felt that having won two world titles with McLaren entitled him to number one status, was unsettled by Senna’s intensity.
In 1989 McLaren again had the best car and the best engine, but the two drivers declared war on each other after an argument over racing etiquette at the San Marino Grand Prix. Each suspected that the other was getting better equipment, so they fell to such pettiness as insisting that engine selection was decided by the flip of a coin.
The title was decided in Prost’s favor when the two collided on track during the season finale in Japan. Prost was out on the spot, while Senna got going again and won the race, but was then disqualified.
Prost left to join Ferrari, but that wasn’t the end of the war. The Japanese Grand Prix was the theater of conflict again in 1990 as Senna deliberately drove into Prost as they braked from 170 miles per hour for the first corner, a move that could have killed them both.
When Prost was fired by Ferrari for criticizing his car in 1991, and then took the following year as sabbatical, the two were no longer fighting for the same space on the road. Senna found himself missing his rival, and when Prost retired for good after making a championship-winning comeback in 1993, Senna pleaded with him to change his mind.
RIVALRIES
NIGEL MANSELL vs. ALAIN PROST
The indomitable Nigel Mansell landed at Ferrari for 1989, tempted by a bold new car designed by ex-McLaren technical director John Barnard, launching himself into the chaos left by marque founder Enzo Ferrari’s death the previous autumn. Against the odds—the car was unreliable at first—Mansell seized two improbable victories that year.
Added to that, his combative style sent the team’s fans into a state of rapture. They named him Il Leone—“the lion.”
Imagine Mansell’s disquiet, then, when Alain Prost arrived from McLaren for 1990 as sitting world champion, also importing one of McLaren’s senior engineers, Steve Nichols. Their driving styles were at opposite ends of the scale: Mansell liked to show a car who was boss, driving around any problems, while Prost preferred to perfect his mechanical setup to make his car sing. Mansell dismissed him as “a chauffeur.”
But Prost was also politically sophisticated, and, having moved to Ferrari to get away from Senna, he was ill-disposed toward butting heads with his teammate. No cross words were spoken, but an idea formed in Mansell’s head—slowly at first, but then growing and hardening into certainty as each race weekend brought supporting “evidence”—that Prost was pushing team management to throw their weight behind him as the most likely Ferrari driver to win the championship.
Three retirements and just two podium finishes in the first seven races convinced Mansell that he was being given inferior equipment. He has claimed as much in interviews and in his autobiography. At the British Grand Prix, he says, he discovered that his chassis—in which he’d qualified on pole for the preceding race—had been swapped for Prost’s without his knowledge, at Prost’s request.
So when Mansell’s engine failed—again—he got out of the car, somewhat theatrically threw his gloves into the crowd, and announced his retirement from motor racing. It didn’t last long. A few months later, he announced his return to Williams for 1991.
RIVALRIES
DAMON HILL vs. MICHAEL SCHUMACHER
Ayrton Senna’s fatal accident at San Marino in 1994 thrust his teammate, Damon Hill, into the spotlight as the man who now would lead the title fight against Michael Schumacher. In a year sorely overshadowed by Senna’s death—and by suspicions that Schumacher’s Benetton team were cheating with illegal electronic systems—Formula 1 needed a stirring narrative. “Senna versus Schumacher” had been prematurely snuffed out. Now, the beleaguered sport’s box office was resting on “Hill versus Schumacher.”
Hill’s father Graham had been twice a world champion. After he crashed his Piper Aztec plane in 1975, killing all aboard, it brought more than just emotional turmoil: subsequent legal action by relatives of the victims cost the Hill family their home. Damon, more thoughtful and less extroverted than his father, had worked as a motorcycle courier before entering the world of motor racing, relatively late in life. He was thirty when Williams employed him as a Formula 1 test driver in 1991.
Schumacher was a young hotshot. He was promoted quickly through the junior formulae with Mercedes patronage, breaking into F1 at the age of twenty-one while Hill was still working behind the scenes at Williams.
When Hill took on the mantle of team leader in May 1994, it set off an extraordinary battle that raged over the remainder of that season and the following two. Hill’s grit and quiet dignity in the aftermath of Senna’s death, combined with revelations that Benetton’s software did indeed contain suspect code—and that they had illegally modified their refueling rigs—set the plucky-Brit-versus-dastardly-German narrative in concrete, at least as far as fans were concerned.
There was mass outrage when Schumacher appeared to deliberately put Hill in the wall at the season-closing Australian Grand Prix, winning the title by a point. But then, poor reliability held Hill back in 1995, and the media began to write him off as a hopeless case. When he beat both Schumacher and his own new teammate, Jacques Villeneuve, to the title in 1996, Hill laid many ghosts to rest.
RIVALRIES
MIKA HÄKKINEN vs. MICHAEL SCHUMACHER
Over the course of four seasons around the turn of the century, the career trajectories of Mika Häkkinen and Michael Schumacher became intertwined to great dramatic effect. Schumacher, twice world champion at Benetton in 1994 and 1995, moved to a Ferrari team that was in one of its competitive slumps. Along with other new personnel—including ex-Benetton engineers Ross Brawn and Rory Byrne—Schumacher was part of a money-is-no-object push to bring Ferrari back to the top.
They began to reach that point just as Häkkinen finally got the car his talent deserved. Like Ferrari, McLaren had been in the doldrums throughout the 1990s, until they recruited the inventive designer Adrian Newey from the Williams team. After six seasons in middling machinery, Häkkinen had a launch pad. Newey came up with the best solution to new technical rules for the 1998 season, and McLaren were dominant over the opening races.
Ferrari came back strongly, though, and Schumacher pushed Häkkinen all the way to the final round. But then he made an uncharacteristic mistake and stalled on the grid. Häkkinen won the race and the championship.
In the following season, McLaren and Ferrari started off more evenly matched, and the outcome might have been different had Schumacher not crashed and broken his leg at Silverstone. While Häkkinen had been racking up pole positions, he wasn’t always converting them into victories; car failures and his own small but costly errors at critical moments kept him from winning. He was under pressure, something that was underlined when he spun off at Monza, walked behind a tree, and wept uncontrollably. Still, he put the world title to bed as Schumacher’s teammate Eddie Irvine proved inadequate to the challenge.
Poor engine reliability in 2000 cost Häkkinen dearly, but he completed the overtake of the season at Belgium, a heart-stopping move at 200 miles per hour that put Schumacher in his place. It wasn’t enough to win the title and, throughout 2001, Häkkinen showed signs of mental exhaustion. At the end of the season, he announced a sabbatical from which he never returned.
RIVALRIES
MICHAEL SCHUMACHER vs. FERNANDO ALONSO
Having unseated Mika Häkkinen from the World Championship in 2000—and destroying him psychologically along the way—Michael Schumacher went on a victory roll that lasted half a decade. His success delighted fans in his native Germany as well as those who appreciated consistent excellence, but floating voters began to grow a little weary as the tide rose.
There was no stopping Schumacher from 2001 to 2004, either. With the exception of 2003, when the governing body resorted to changing the points system in an effort to close things up, he slam-dunked the drivers’ title with several rounds to go. TV viewing figures began to slide and consensus grew that things had to change.
For 2005, the governing body introduced several new rules, most significantly a ban on mid-race tire changes. Ferrari’s supplier, Bridgestone, adapted much less well than Michelin, and Schumacher spent the year in the virtual wilderness.
Of the many Michelin-supplied drivers vying for supremacy, Renault’s Fernando Alonso came to the fore. The team had been consistently on the up since 2003, when Alonso broke Bruce McLaren’s longstanding (since 1959) record for being the youngest Grand Prix winner. Intense, brooding, and hypercompetitive, Alonso won the title with two rounds to go.
In 2006, the no-tire-changes rule was dropped on safety grounds and the season developed into a brutal tussle between Alonso and Schumacher, Renault, and Ferrari—on and off the track. At Monaco, Schumacher was castigated for “accidentally” spinning and blocking the track during qualifying, forcing Alonso to abort his lap. Renault were forced to remove a trick suspension system that gave them an advantage, leading to churlish mutterings that Ferrari were being given favorable treatment by the governing body.
The two drivers won seven races each. Although it seemed as if everything was stacked against him, Alonso had scored more consistently and claimed the title. The Michael Schumacher era was definitively over.
RIVALRIES
FERNANDO ALONSO vs. LEWIS HAMILTON
Combining the hottest established talent with a promising rookie that McLaren had been grooming for over a decade ought to have created a winning combination. Instead, the partnership of Fernando Alonso and Lewis Hamilton in 2007 resulted in unprecedented rancor, magnifying the impact of a damaging scandal that left the team $100 million poorer. It could not have gone more wrong.
Alonso had been managed by Renault team principal Flavio Briatore, but he wanted to control his own destiny. As such, at the end of the 2005 season—having just won the world title for the first time with Renault—he privately concluded a deal with McLaren’s Ron Dennis to jump ship for 2007. At the same time, Hamilton was on the fast-track to F1 stardom. He had been under McLaren’s wing ever since he cheekily introduced himself to Dennis at an awards ceremony, at the age of ten, in 1995.
Within weeks of the 2007 season start, the cozy arrangement was falling apart. Dennis had led Alonso to believe that he would be the number one driver; instead, the world champion found himself partnered with an ambitious rookie who was thoroughly embedded in the McLaren world and expecting—and receiving—equal treatment. Hamilton was also fast enough to give Alonso a fright, finishing closely behind him in the first two races and then ahead in the following two.
A situation similar to that between Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost developed, one so dysfunctional that the two drivers actively sought to sabotage one another. In public, it came to a head during qualifying for the Hungarian Grand Prix when Alonso spoiled Hamilton’s final run.
Alonso also threatened to approach the FIA with damaging information relating to the growing “Spygate” scandal, in which a McLaren designer had illicitly obtained Ferrari designs. This forced Dennis to contact the FIA and begin to backtrack on earlier denials, opening the door to further action.
Fittingly, perhaps, with each having damaged the other’s prospects, neither Alonso nor Hamilton won the world title that season.
RIVALRIES
MARK WEBBER vs. SEBASTIAN VETTEL
Australian Mark Webber had overcome many obstacles during his career, from lack of finance early on to the persistent trouble of fitting his tall frame into the tight space of a single-seater race car. But when he finally got himself into race-winning machinery, he faced the toughest challenge of all: being partnered with his team’s favorite son.
Red Bull had been involved in Formula 1 for several years as a sponsor when they finally took the plunge and bought a team outright in 2005. Webber came on board in 2007, and results gradually began to improve as the team’s technical offering matured, thanks to another key signing, design genius Adrian Newey.
The angst began in 2009, when Webber was joined by Sebastian Vettel, one of the latest prodigies from Red Bull’s young driver program. Unlike many of his predecessors, the twenty-one-year-old German was no slouch, and already a Grand Prix winner. Webber, now well into his thirties, was used to psychologically intimidating his younger teammates; none of his tricks worked on Vettel, though.
Red Bull were competitive in 2009, and Vettel finished second in the drivers’ standings. But for the following season—and the three after that—they had by far the best car. That was when relations between the drivers really went south, as the idea lodged in Webber’s head that he was seen as second best.
The conflict soon went public. In 2010, they took each other out of the race in Turkey while running first and second, then raged at each other afterwards. At Silverstone, Red Bull had newly redesigned front wings for both cars. Vettel damaged his, so the team replaced it with the one from Webber’s car. After winning the race, Webber vented his anger on the radio: “Not bad for a number two driver . . . .”
Imposing team orders didn’t help: Vettel ignored them, passing Webber during the 2013 Malaysian Grand Prix. He escaped with a slapped wrist. Webber retired at the end of the season.
RIVALRIES
LEWIS HAMILTON vs. NICO ROSBERG
Nico Rosberg, son of the 1982 world champion, was born into a privileged Monaco lifestyle, and was bright and well educated. Meanwhile, Lewis Hamilton’s father worked two jobs to fund his son’s karting career. They were teammates during those karting years, and, if Lewis was usually the more successful of the two, that didn’t seem to get in the way of their friendship.
Being teammates in the best outfit in Formula 1 did.
Mercedes had built relentlessly toward the 2014 season and for the next three seasons the team enjoyed a supremacy that almost defied belief.
The relationship between Hamilton and Rosberg could not survive it.
The first tremors had been felt in 2013, when Rosberg grudgingly respected a team order not to pass Hamilton during the Malaysian Grand Prix when he felt he was much faster.
At Monaco in 2014, Rosberg made a “mistake” in qualifying and went down an escape road, spoiling Hamilton’s lap. Rosberg duly started on pole and won. The two pointedly didn’t shake hands or acknowledge one another afterward. This was the first public show of ill will, but it later emerged that each driver had used unauthorized engine modes for a power boost to hold off the other in previous races.
The team struggled to contain the situation. In Belgium, Rosberg and Hamilton collided on the second lap, and now team boss Toto Wolff said there would be “consequences.”
Hamilton won the title in 2014 and 2015, but some poor reliability—which he hinted on social media was caused by Mercedes favoring his teammate—swung the balance Rosberg’s way in 2016. The stress and effort of these years had worn heavily on the new champion, and he decided to quit while he was ahead, announcing his retirement just before collecting his trophy.
GLOSSARY
PERALTADA
This very fast and dangerous corner at the Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez in Mexico City is taken at great speed. Home hero Ricardo Rodriguez was killed there in 1962 when his car’s suspension failed, and Ayrton Senna flipped his McLaren in 1991, narrowly escaping serious injury. It has been partially bypassed since the track returned to the F1 calendar in 2015.
‘SPYGATE’
In 2007, it was revealed that McLaren chief designer Mike Coughlan had received stolen intellectual property from a disgruntled Ferrari employee, Nigel Stepney. They appear have planned to approach another team for work and use the stolen designs to enhance their credibility once in the job.
Over the course of several months, McLaren were attacked from all sides as the FIA probed who knew what and when they knew it. Although it could not be proven that the data had influenced McLaren’s designs, the FIA fined the team $100 million and struck off their constructors’ championship points. They also forensically examined the design of the 2008 car for traces of Ferrari intellectual property. Nothing was found.
TEAM ORDERS
A controversial subject, team orders have even been banned (between 2002 and 2010) for having a stifling effect on competition. In effect, the team makes a call to their drivers—either before or during the race—to behave in a certain way. During the 1950s, it was common for a team’s lead driver to take over a teammate’s car if their own had suffered a technical failure.
There is a rich history of drivers defying such orders—even when in their favor. At the British Grand Prix in 1951, for instance, José Froilán González was leading for Ferrari when he pulled into the pits to let team leader Alberto Ascari take over. Ascari told him he was doing a great job and waved him back out again.
Team orders were theoretically banned after a furor at the Austrian Grand Prix in 2002 when Rubens Barrichello was ordered to move over and let his Ferrari teammate Michael Schumacher win. Arguably, it was Barrichello’s grudging and theatrical execution—he waited until the finishing line was in sight—that caused the ruckus.
Ultimately, the FIA had to lift the ban when it proved impossible to police. In 2010, Ferrari—again—used the not-very-coded radio message “Fernando is faster than you” to instruct Felipe Massa to give way to Fernando Alonso.