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The Rough Guide to Formula 1 (Rough Guide Sports/Pop Culture)
The Rough Guide to Formula 1 - Rough Guide Sports/Pop Culture Author:Rough Guides STARTING WORDS The increasing dominance of Ferrari since the turn of the century has hogged the headlines in every F1 magazine, on every F1 website and no doubt in every column inch dedicated to F1 anywhere in the world. Yet, it was only in the autumn of 2000 that the headlines were very different, albeit still about the Prancing Horse. At that... more » point Ferrari, thanks to Michael Schumacher, had just won their first Drivers' Championship in 21 years. And it was only the year before that they had achieved their first Constructors' Cup triumph in the same period. So, in just three years the team from Maranello went from the sport's biggest under-achievers to one perceived as being so dominant that the governing body has gone to great lengths to rewrite the rulebook in the lead-up to the 2003 season. The fact is that the sport, in fact any sport, is littered with dominating teams. Ferrari is just the next in the line to take over from the likes of McLaren and Williams before them. The cycle does and will continue - it is just a question of who will get their act together first to allow Montoya or Raikkonen to break the current mould. But then again it may well be Barrichello! That said, the dominance of Schumacher and Ferrari have effected some changes which probably would have not otherwise come about and they should certainly throw the odd spanner in the works, if not totally change the order of those crossing the finish line. The changes are given in a bit more detail below but it is safe to say that the most significant are associated with qualifying and team orders. The Starting Grid is all-important in F1. Not many drivers win a race unless they are somewhere near the front of it. So anything that can be done to mix this up has to be good. It can be no coincidence that races where the starting grid gets a bit mixed up, perhaps due to bad weather in qualifying, are quite often the best, as a better driver stranded near the back of the grid has to fight his way up the running order as the laps count down. The new format for qualifying throws a big element of chance into it - a sudden downpour or a single error will now be very telling. Team Orders - where the team gives preference to one driver over another, often by asking one to move aside for the other - will no longer be tolerated. During the 2002 season Ferrari twice `ordered' Rubens Barrichello to allow Michael Schumacher through to blatantly take victory in a race. From now on this will no longer be tolerated and teams found guilty of doing it will be punished. Just how easy this will be to police remains to be seen.« less