If there was ever a doubt that a racing driver’s first priority is to beat his teammate, it was dispelled one March afternoon at Melbourne’s Albert Park. The 1996 Australian Grand Prix was half done when Jacques Villeneuve came out of the pits just behind the race leader, Damon Hill.
“There he is,” said the voice on Villeneuve’s radio. “Go and get him!”
It was the first race of the season, and two sons of great drivers had been paired in the Williams team, whose cars were reckoned to be a shoo-in for the championship. Hill had missed chances to win the title in the two previous years, and the abrasive Canadian newcomer was widely expected to outshine him. In this, his first grand prix, Villeneuve had started from pole position and led the first half of the race. The message from the pit wall left no doubt of the intention to beat Hill and lay down a marker for the rest of the season.
That’s not quite how it turned out. Villeneuve took only a handful of corners to overtake his teammate, putting himself in position to become only the second man in history to win on his grand prix debut. But a leak from his engine was soon covering the other Williams with oil, and he was told to slow down and let Hill past. It took him several laps to comply, allowing Hill to take the first of the eight victories that would give him the title.
The initial radio instruction to attack Hill had come from Jock Clear, his young race engineer, whose aggressive approach was a match for Villeneuve’s own. Their championship victory would come the following season, after Hill had left the team.
Twenty-three years on, Clear is now the race engineer of Charles Leclerc, the young star of the Ferrari team, whose brilliant wins from pole position at Spa and Monza last month reversed the tide of the first half of the season, in which the Mercedes of Lewis Hamilton and Valtteri Bottas had won 10 of the 12 races. Suddenly Formula One had a 21-year-old who appeared to be giving the sport’s most famous team a realistic hope of its first world title in a dozen years – if not this season, then certainly in 2020. Full of talent, charm, and promise, Leclerc looked capable of succeeding where Fernando Alonso, who joined the Scuderia in 2010 after winning two world championships with Renault, and Sebastian Vettel, previously a four-time champion with Red Bull, had failed.
Leclerc was on pole for the next race, too, in Singapore, and was leading when a strategy call and a couple of safety-car periods handed Vettel an unexpected victory ahead of the other Ferrari, taken with an alacrity that stifled the team’s thoughts of ordering a reversal of the finishing order. “Floodlight robbery!” was the headline on the cover of that week’s Autosport magazine.
In Sochi a week later the internecine warfare intensified when Ferrari’s management again out-thought themselves, this time with a more comprehensively disastrous outcome. With Leclerc again on pole, alongside Hamilton and ahead of Vettel, the team cooked up a scheme for Vettel to slipstream Leclerc off the line, using the extra speed to hold off any challenge from the Mercedes. In the event Vettel took advantage of the tow to grab the lead at the first corner, resisting radio entreaties to let Leclerc regain the position with the claim that he had earned the right to maintain his lead by being faster on the track. The argument ended when further confusion in Ferrari’s pit-stop strategy preceded Vettel’s retirement with power-unit failure, a disappointing third place for Leclerc behind the two Mercedes, and a post-race atmosphere of mutual distrust.
Bad feeling between teammates is an occasional feature of grand prix racing, going back to the late 1930s, when the two senior drivers of the dominant Mercedes team, Rudolf Caracciola and Manfred von Brauchitsch, tried using sulks, tantrums and internal machinations to thwart the challenge from their younger and faster teammates, the former mechanic Hermann Lang and the British ace Richard Seaman.
More recently, outright dislike between Nigel Mansell and Nelson Piquet at Williams in 1986 enabled Alain Prost to squeeze his McLaren between the two favourites and snatch the title. By contrast, the lurid incidents provoked by Prost’s bitter rivalry with Ayrton Senna at McLaren in 1988 and 1989 helped to raise the sport’s profile. In the present decade, Vettel’s falling-out with Mark Webber at Red Bull and Hamilton’s altercations with Alonso at McLaren and Nico Rosberg and Bottas at Mercedes have provided headlines that should have been generated by actual racing.
Vettel’s refusal to yield the lead to the younger man in Sochi seems to have its origin in an incident last month at Monza, an ultra-fast track where teammates are expected to assist each other during qualifying by providing an aerodynamic tow. During a chaotic final session Leclerc was unable to put himself in a position to give Vettel the expected assistance to set a fast time. Or perhaps he was unwilling. Such things are not forgotten and tend to fester.
Just as George Bernard Shaw is supposed to have said that the English and the Americans are two nations divided by a common language, so Leclerc and Vettel are two racing drivers divided by a common machine: the Ferrari SF90, now the fastest in the field. With the 2019 drivers’ and constructors’ titles virtually settled in favour of Hamilton and Mercedes, many eyes at Suzuka this weekend will be on the struggle for supremacy in the Scuderia’s garage, with all its implications for campaigns to come.
