In his younger days, he was a very good driver who most of the time he out performed his team mate with Eddie Irvine being the exception in 1999.
When he joined Ferrari they were an average team and there is no doubt he worked hard to make them competitive. To me his weakness is that he did not know the line between being competitive, cheating and winning.
I think with his comeback, age had caught up with him and also the standard of driving and competitiveness had improved which meant that he was a few percent off being at the top.
Personally, at the moment I think the best all round driver is Alonso, even though I don't like the guy. Hamiliton is probably the fastest but makes too many mistakes and Vettel makes the best of having the fastest car with his consistency. Kimi is the dark horse, where he is very fast and more consistent than Hamiliton. If the Lotus is competitive and doesn't suffer from French reliability, it will be an interesting season.
His team mates werent allowed to outperform him Rod,as was blatantly obvious on many occassions.Ferraris return to the top wasnt that much to do with him imo.When he was at Benetton,they were cheating.They had traction control built into the software of their car when it was banned.At the start of the 94 season,when Senna had just moved to Williams,he told Williams at the first race that after having followed Scummy around the circuit he was absolutely certain that his car had TC.
Williams didnt protest as they didnt have proof,but it was an open secret in F1 that they were cheating.
After the murmurs got so loud that they couldnt be ignored,the FIA investigated the Benetton,but said that the software was too complicated for them to come to a definite conclusion.
When he moved to Ferrari all the key personell at Benneton went there with him and carried on ignoring the rules.It seems to be generally accepted that the FIA and Bernie knew Ferrari were building cars to their own set of rules,but turned a blind eye due to the fact that Ferrari had been on the point of withdrawing from F1 after not having had a drivers Champion since Jody Sheckter in 1979.
The powers that be considered FI without Ferrari to be unthinkable so let them get away with murder,as was borne out by the fact that after a protest against Irvines car it was found to be in breach of the rules on bodywork/aerodynamics,but there was little in the way of punishment dished out to Ferrari.Any other team would have had the book thrown at them.
The protest came from McClaren and started a behind the scenes war between them on one side and Ferrari and the powers that be on the other.The end result of this came quite a few years later,with the Ferrarigate scandal,which almost finished the McClaren team altogether.
That and the fact his team mates werent allowed to beat him coupled with the fact that his on track cheating and hideously dangerous driving went almost completely unpunished demonstrates to me that he was given special treatment,and that he could never be mentioned in the same breath as the greats of F1.
I dont buy the "he was getting on a bit when he came back" theory tbh.Niki Lauda retired from the sport for a few years and came back to a completely different era -1000bhp turbo cars as opposed to 600bhp cosworth v8. A completely different set of drivers to compete against,and Prost (who was the top man at the time) as a team mate - he settled himself in, and then won another world championship.
Imo Scummy came back to drive a car which was built to the same rules as the other cars,and a team mate who wasnt prohibited from beating him and thats when we genuinely saw his true level of abilty.
As you might have guessed.Im not really a fan of the bloke.
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Topic: f1 testing (Read 2743 times)