Michael Schumacher flashed the brilliance that makes him the best race driver alive for only a moment.
That was all he needed as he breezed to victory Sunday in the first U.S. Grand Prix in nine years, before the largest paid attendance in the history of Formula One.
A sellout crowd of more than 225,000 turned out on a bleak, often drizzly, day at Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
Six laps into the race they saw why the rest of the world celebrates Schumacher as the best–der Uberflieger, in his native German.
He already had had enough pestering from Scotland’s David Coulthard, who led illegally and was about to be penalized for jumping the standing start, but was intentionally holding up Schumacher on Indy’s new and serpentine 2.6-mile road circuit.
Annoyed that race officials hadn’t already brought Coulthard into the pits for a 10-second stop-and-go penalty, Schumacher seized the situation himself as the seventh lap began.
His red Ferrari caught Coulthard’s black McLaren at about 220 m.p.h. on the part of the course that utilizes the front stretch of Indy’s traditional oval track. But from there the two drivers had to cut their speed almost in half for the hard right-hand dive into the flat, narrow, twisting infield portion of the circuit.
Schumacher laid off his brakes an instant longer. Coulthard darted right to block as they went into the first infield turn. Schumacher shot left. Coulthard drifted left a bit and the cars touched.
But Schumacher, with his patented split-second of apparently superhuman car control, slipped into the lead and wasn’t challenged again.
“He tried to push me a bit too wide,” Schumacher said. “He was doing it for his team and I’m not sure it should be done that way.”
Schumacher alleged tag-team efforts by Coulthard for his McLaren teammate, Mika Hakkinen, who came into the race leading Schumacher by two points in the world championship standings.
“Any way we beat those guys,” Schumacher said. “And we beat them fair and square.”
Hakkinen fell out on the 26th of the 73 laps with a blown engine and now trails Schumacher by a formidable eight points with two races left in the Grand Prix season, in Japan and Malaysia.
Rubens Barrichello made it a one-two finish for Ferrari but was more than 12 seconds behind Schumacher–and the finish was that close only because Schumacher had spun himself with five laps to go, awakening the crowd, himself and his team before recovering and continuing.
“I wasn’t concentrating anymore,” he admitted. “I had such a big gap that I was just cruising. I ran over a patch of grass [just off the edge of the pavement] that was still damp and it spun me around.”
In the pits Ferrari technical director Ross Brawn “asked me on the radio to try to keep my concentration, and I said, `Don’t worry, I’m awake now!'” Schumacher said.
Schumacher started on the pole with Coulthard alongside on the front row. Coulthard took the lead into the first corner–but it was because he had rolled off the grid a split-second before the starting light.
Coulthard was sure to get a stop-and-go, but officials delayed exacting the penalty until eight laps into the race–two laps after Schumacher had taken the lead on his own.
“Is it correct to keep somebody out on the track that long if you’re sure he has done something wrong?” Schumacher asked.
But since that was the case, Schumacher didn’t complain about Coulthard’s slowing down through the infield to delay Schumacher for the first few laps in hopes that Hakkinen, then running third, could catch up.
“David did hold me up in the infield, but that’s natural–he works for McLaren, not Ferrari,” said Schumacher.
The victory was Schumacher’s seventh of the season and his second straight–he had dominated the Italian Grand Prix at Monza on Sept. 10–and continued his blitzing turnaround of the world championship standings.
Schumacher can clinch his third world championship, the first for a Ferrari driver since Jody Scheckter in 1979, with a victory in the Japanese Grand Prix on Oct. 8.
With his 42nd career victory, Schumacher surpassed the total of the late Ayrton Senna, his early mentor among drivers, for second on the all-time list behind Alain Prost’s 52.
Schumacher, who was running just behind Senna at Monza, Italy, in 1994 when Senna crashed and was killed, wasn’t celebrating the milestone.
“To some degree I’m glad I’m able to [reach the mark],” said Schumacher. “But all of us know that Ayrton’s career stopped too early. None of us know how many races he could have won. So I don’t think this number is a fair comparison.”
Somewhat surprisingly, it was the first victory for the storied carmaker Ferrari at storied Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Previously the best finish by a Ferrari driver at Indy was Alberto Ascari’s 31st in the 1952 Indy 500.
The overflow crowd of American fans–about 100,000 of Indy’s 300,000 permanent seats were not opened because of the road course’s configuration–gave Schumacher an Italian-style celebration, pouring onto the front stretch in front of the winners’ podium, with a sea of red Ferrari flags waving there and throughout the massive grandstands.
“This is something really, really nice,” Schumacher said. “None of us expected such a great welcome from American fans. To see so many of them cheering a one-two Ferrari finish here at Indianapolis is–yeah–this is the best.”
