Motor racing: Ferrari find the edge

Much effort is going into a typically brilliant Schumacher title charge, says David Tremayne

MCLAREN are the team whohave built a two-seater Formula One car, but in Hungary on Sunday it was Michael Schumacher who drove as if he had help in his Ferrari.

In perhaps the greatest of his 32 victories, the German tore apart McLaren's domination of qualifying and blew open the battle for the World Championship by delivering the sort of beating that he regularly used to dish out to Williams and Damon Hill during his championship-winning years with Benetton. "You dream about the ideal result," Schumacher said, "and closing the gap so much on Mika Hakkinen was one of the dreams I had. But coming here I thought it would have to stay a dream. The most I hoped for was second place."

His hands punched the air in triumph as he crossed the line, and on the victory rostrum his face wore the expression of a man who cannot quite believe what his own awesome talent has won him. Hungary seemed a race he should not have won, one that McLaren should have been able to dominate.

But Hakkinen's challenge was blunted by suspension problems, while his team-mate David Coulthard was found wanting when it really mattered. Troubled at one stage by mismatched tyre pressures, the Scot looked afterwards like a man unable to come to terms with an unconvincing performance from both himself and his team.

As long as races have pit stops, Michael Schumacher will always be in with a chance. It is a lesson so few of his rivals appear able to grasp. He is the master of pushing his car to the maximum in the laps before a stop; of keeping his foot buried in the throttle right up until the line that marks the start of the pit-lane speed limit; of lining his car up perfectly to facilitate refuelling and the tyre change; of getting back up to speed immediately he leaves the speed- limit zone.

When Coulthard made his pit stop on lap 46, he was 23.5 seconds ahead of Schumacher, yet he had lost the lead to the Ferrari by the time he regained the track.

Conversely, Schumacher led by 24.2 seconds when he made his final pit stop on the 62nd lap, yet he was back out even before Coulthard had come into sight on the pit straight. Variations in strategy accounted for some of the deficit, for Schumacher required less fuel, but it was another indication of his astonishing ability to extract the maximum from any situation.

It was during that stint that Schumacher performed the miracle task set him by Ferrari's technical director Ross Brawn, his partner in their remarkable win. The fortysomething Briton, once the architect of his successes with Benetton, appeared to have made a tactical blunder going for three stops against McLaren's two, especially as Schumacher was at one stage as low as fourth place behind Jacques Villeneuve's Williams.

But Ferrari's Goodyear tyres had the edge over McLaren's Bridgestones, and when Brawn told Schumacher after his second stop that he had 19 laps in which to open the 25sec lead that would allow him to make that lightning third stop, he was equal to the extraordinary task.

"I said to Ross, 'thank you, I will try my best'," he said, and it was more than good enough, even if he was obliged to drive the majority of the race close to qualifying speed.

Schumacher did not even realise initially that he had taken the lead. Now he is a menacing seven points behind Hakkinen, at a time when a suspension breakage in the Finn's car, together with McLaren's tactical ineptitude, will inevitably have an effect on their confidence.

This weekend, the circus moves to Spa-Francorchamps in Belgium where Schumacher is poised for a record fifth victory on the greatest modern circuit of them all. Unless McLaren hit back immediately, then Hungary may have started a slide that another Schumacher victory could render unstoppable.