Ferrari: The Passion and the Pain. Jane Nottage
explained that he had tested various new parts – a gearbox and suspension – at Monza and worked on improving the aerodynamics, all of which had promising results. However, as Ross Brawn was later to remark, ‘Change for change’s sake is not good for team progress.’ The most important thing is to make a change because you are absolutely 100 per cent sure it is an improvement.
Jean Todt was less than happy. Under pressure from the media he exclaimed, ‘I feel like I’m on trial in a court.’ It wasn’t an exaggeration. The media love scapegoats, and Todt and Barnard were in the front line – although both men remained supportive of each other and refused to attribute any blame for the team’s misfortunes on one person. Todt declared, ‘We are part of a team, it’s our fault as a team, not one person’s fault.’
After saying that the French Grand Prix was the blackest day of his life, Todt could not have imagined that things would get worse. They did.
Schumacher lasted three laps before suffering mechanical failure from a dry brake fitting. Irvine lasted only another two laps before he was forced to retire with a broken differential bearing. Schumacher was bemused rather than angry. ‘We did a race distance in the last two tests, running reliably on Friday and Saturday. And then we do just three laps today. There is just no logic to it at all.’
There were cries of sabotage and foul play. However, the truth was somewhat different. A combination of the pain of evolution as the team struggled to bring consistency to a car that was not only Late but also completely new, plus the dregs of problems that had begun in the past and not been completely resolved by the old guard, was to blame.
The technical debriefing meeting at Maranello the day after the Silverstone race was tense and lasted over three hours. Montezemolo needed to get to the bottom of the problems and one of his innovations was to make all the technicians responsible for their own jobs. This included sending a weekly report to Jean Todt giving details of what they had done and what they intended to do.
John Barnard was at the meeting and had come to his own conclusions. ‘Irvine’s differential bearing failure was a modification that hadn’t been done, as it wasn’t expected that this type of differential would be used again. We discussed ways to solve the problem as there was a titanium-steel bearing on the differential support which needed changing. It wasn’t done and so when the original differential turned up in a race, it caused a problem.
‘Schumacher’s hydraulic fitting was not tightened properly at Silverstone. There is no answer to this. It must have come loose in some way. It was something that had been run many times before and had never given us any problems. You simply have no answer to things like that.
‘In France, Irvine’s car had the wrong valve fitted. Due to the vibration problem there had been a problem with the gearbox moog valves. There was another valve which was of a special variety with specially strengthened parts inside to make it resistant to vibration. Apparently this wasn’t fitted; instead the standard valve was fitted. The control went on the gearbox and it was history.’
‘After Silverstone, the general feeling was, “How far down can we go?” and the general response was, “We can’t go any further”. Well, of course you can; you can fall out of the next race. The big thing after Silverstone was the total incomprehension about the loose hydraulic fitting on Schumacher’s car. Everyone who worked on it – from the guy at the factory who put it together to the gearbox mechanics at the track – insisted it had been tight. What can you do? It remains a mystery.’
The problems with the gearboxes were now reaching a crescendo. As John Barnard said at the time, ‘It seems that our problems had their roots in the era of the change from linear to metric measurements. Before the metric system was adopted, we used to buy our nuts, bolts and washers from the United States. They are very well organized in the States. There are books of selections of nuts, bolts, washers etc. which all adhere to NAS [National Aerospace Standard]. They are all designed from the highest grade of material available and easily accessible. As things went metric the British teams sorted themselves out with similar spec stuff, and everyone goes to the same places for high quality bolts, nuts etc. But this hasn’t happened at Ferrari.
‘Gradually, we had more problems with gearboxes cracking and studs cracking and so a lengthy investigation has been going on and it has revealed that the nuts have not been tightened correctly by using the prescribed torque settings. One of the reasons for this was that if you used the correct torque setting it squashed the washer out, as the washer was cheap and soft. The question is why use cheap washers? This is something that obviously pre-dates this new era, and probably occurred because no one said you can’t go round the corner to the local hardware store and buy cheap washers. I don’t know. Who knows? It is so basic that it is something you really don’t question. We only discovered this when David Teletti, the stress guy at Maranello, started an overall investigation when we had a lot of stud failures. We now use the correct aircraft quality washers. It was just a basic mistake that had been overlooked for years. You can’t lay the blame on anyone in particular. It is just so basic that it must have been missed.’
The pressure from the media was becoming intolerable. Everyone was writing about what they thought was happening and very few about what was really happening. The man who had to act as the buffer between Ferrari and the outside world was Ferrari press chief, Giancarlo Baccini.
When he became part of Ferrari, Baccini found that the reality was different from the legend. ‘I always believed what I read about Ferrari, but some journalists write what they want to write without verifying the information. This false information has never created a reaction from inside Ferrari. It was much more serene than I imagined and I discovered that there were more politics in newspapers than at Ferrari. People create stories around legends and many people had created this myth of skulduggery at Ferrari that wasn’t true. It is my job to make sure that people are informed correctly, and to try and prevent false things being written. This has been a difficult period, but the most important thing is that the team has remained united.’
FEELING THE FRUSTRATION
HOCKENHEIM WAS ANOTHER RACE TO FORGET
The world held its breath at Hockenheim for the 1996 German Grand Prix, Schumacher’s home race. Boris Becker turned up to lend his support to his fellow national, and Schumacher finished the race, even if it was a poor fourth. Irvine disappeared with a broken gearbox – yet another one. Montezemolo was relieved rather than pleased that at least Schumacher had finished the race. ‘We wanted to finish the race and we did. Before the end of the season we count on winning at least one more race.’ In the circumstances it was a brave statement. He is used to stress, but the intense pressure of the problems was beginning to get to even him.
The next race in Hungary produced more gearbox problems for Irvine, which resulted in an increase in the temperature of the oil in the gearbox so the team radioed him to stop. Schumacher had electronic problems which affected the accelerator and meant he had to switch the engine on and off on the steering wheel to go through the slow corners. Eventually it refused to fire up again and he, too, had to retire. It was another race to forget…
Irvine was frustrated but not as much as Barnard who was fuming back in England. ‘I fully admit that this year’s car is not as we wanted; it is not as good as I expected due to problems with the aerodynamics. I’m not covering any of that up, but we have worked to put that right. We have worked around the front wing and made a new diffuser. When I did the gearbox layout, I had in mind to do a new rear suspension and we did that. FDD did the suspension, Maranello did the diffuser. However, I informed the gearbox people at the beginning of the year that I didn’t think there was enough oil flow and I thought we had a gearbox cooling problem. This went on and on until eventually they found the pressure release valve was on the wrong setting, and had been for about three years.
‘At least we have discovered the problem, and it wasn’t down to bad checking, but probably the wrong specification was requested at the beginning. What I find frustrating is that you bang your head against a brick wall, saying “check this, check that”, and nothing happens until the