Ferrari expects another battle with McLaren

Salvatore Zanca

Thursday, Oct. 26, 2000 | 5:38 a.m.

The spray of champagne covered Michael Schumacher so often that Mika Hakkinen knew something had to be done.

"I got tired of seeing him in the middle of the podium," Hakkinen said, recalling ceremonies from early in the Formula One season. "After that, I started to push a bit more."

He sure did, staging a midseason run that coincided with an improbable slump by Schumacher, who in consecutive races in July crashed out without finishing a lap in Austria and Germany.

On Aug. 13, Hakkinen won the Hungarian Grand Prix to take a two-point lead over Schumacher, who by winning five of the first eight races had built a 24-point advantage.

Two weeks later, Hakkinen passed Schumacher late in the race to win the Belgian Grand Prix. It began to look as if McLaren would take another driver's title, that Schumacher would again fail to give Ferrari its first championship in 21 years.

But the German driver, who had opened the season with three wins, remained patient, refusing to succumb to his slump. Instead, he finished even better than he started, winning the last four races and the title going away.

"It has taken five years at Ferrari to be competitive from the first race until the last," Schumacher said. "Now that we have it, it is nice to be there and we have to take advantage of the situation."

So Schumacher, who won his first two titles for Benetton, will enter the 2001 season trying to become only the second driver to win more than three championships. Alan Prost has four and Juan Fangio five.

"That's something which everybody on the team deserves," Schumacher said.

But he knows it won't be easy when the racing resumes next March 4 with the Australian Grand Prix. Again, he'll have to beat Hakkinen, who won the title the previous two seasons.

He'd like another.

"I think I had a season that was very good," Hakkinen said of 2000, when he won four times. "You have to have confidence. I cannot wait until Melbourne. I'm really looking forward to it."

So is his McLaren teammate, David Coulthard, third in the points race for the third time in the last four years.

"I take a lot of confidence from this season into next year," Coulthard said. "I will be much stronger and more focused. I am still getting better as a driver."

Coulthard won three times this season. The other victory was the first in the career of Schumacher teammate Rubens Barrichello, giving Ferrari 10 wins and McLaren seven.

No other team won, and Ferrari team chief Jean Todt expects more of the same next season.

"The McLarens will still be our main rivals," he said. "I don't see anybody else challenging Ferrari for both the driver's and constructor's titles."

Ferrari won the constructor's championship for the second year in a row after a drought of 16 seasons. Now, with Schumacher ending the dry spell of champion drivers that began after Jody Scheckter won for Ferrari in 1979, failure is no longer an issue for the Italian team.

Perhaps assessing Schumacher's place in history will be hot topic in coming seasons. But the 31-year-old driver, overcome with tears after winning the Italian Grand Prix to take the points lead on Sept. 10, will try to keep his emotions under control.

He'll try to match Prost's four series championships, and eight victories would put Schumacher at 52 - one more than the Frenchman and No. 1 on the Formula One career list. Schumacher feels no sense or urgency about reaching either of those milestones, however.

"I'm still young," he said with a shrug. "I enjoy racing."