Europe: Another Pointless Day

By Jamie Makin
May 29 2005

Team SAUBER PETRONAS were hopeful of a strong points-scoring finish in today's European Grand Prix at the Nurburgring to make up for the disappointment at last weekend's Monaco Grand Prix.

Both Villeneuve and Massa made strong starts from their 15th and 11th place grid positions. A multi-car incident in turn one forced Villeneuve to lose ground. Massa fared better and ran solidly in the points for most of the race. It looked promising until a problem with his front left tyre unraveled his hopes.

"Several laps after I made my second stop on the 44th lap, I started to experience vibrations from the front tyres," Massa explained. "I hadn't flat spotted either of them, but when I got to Turn 5 on lap 51 I just couldn't stop the car and slid off into the gravel. I got back on to the track but after that the left front was vibrating really badly and then the tread began to break up and damaged my front wing endplate, so I had to make a stop for a new front left tyre and a new wing."

The extra stop put him down to 14th place where he finished, well outside of the points he could have otherwise scored. "That was such a shame because my car was fantastic in the race and I was easily keeping ahead of Michael and Montoya until that final stop," rued Massa.

Teammate Jacques Villeneuve got the short end of the stick in turn one when he had to go very wide to avoid hitting several cars. "I was level with Felipe going into the first corner, but then I got caught up in the incident there," Villeneuve said. The ground he lost put him behind the Jordans and effectively took away his chance to fight for points.

"Unfortunately for me that put me behind Karthikeyan, and he was fighting me like we were in a 10-lap kart race," Villeneuve explained. "Okay, have fun and let’s race, I’m not saying don’t try to resist the challenge, but relax. He could see I was a lot quicker but whenever I got my nose inside him he just blocked me. That cost me 40 seconds and ruined my strategy, and that’s really the story of what was for me a pretty boring race." Villeneuve ultimately finished in 13th place.

Technical director Willy Rampf knows they must work with partner Michelin to avoid a repeat of Felipe's problems. "We had a disappointing ending to what had been a great race for us," said Rampf. "Felipe was able to steer clear of the first-corner incident and drove with strong pace and the chance to score points for sixth place until he encountered a problem. We have yet to examine the tyres, and while we await a report from Michelin we will also carry out our own analysis of all our car data from the race. As for Jacques, his strategy was compromised by the first-corner collisions and he was never in a position thereafter to be able to recover the lost ground."

The team will have a three day test to sort out these problems in Monza from 1 to 3 June before flying to North America for back-to-back races in Montreal and Indianapolis.