[Race] The GROAT - Round 1 - 2005 Suzuka vs 2010 Montreal vs 1996 Catalunya

[crmalcolm]

Another 3-way, all race descriptions from Wikipedia.

2005 Suzuka
The 2005 Japanese Grand Prix was the eighteenth race of the 2005 Formula One season. A wet qualifying led Toyota's Ralf Schumacher to qualify on pole, which would be the last pole position of his career. Meanwhile, the typical frontrunners qualified further down the grid.

The race started off with Ralf Schumacher leading and Fisichella getting ahead of Button while Takuma Sato and Rubens Barrichello went off the track and collided resulting in the Brazilian suffering a left rear puncture. Meanwhile, Fernando Alonso, Michael Schumacher and both McLaren drivers were making quick progress through the field. Towards the end of lap 1, a safety car was deployed when Juan Montoya's car went off track at the beginning of the pit straight. He tried to go around the outside of Villeneuve, who pushed him off, resulting in a 25 sec penalty at the end of the race for the Canadian. Montoya's crash affected the Constructors' Championship as it meant that only Räikkönen could score points for McLaren.

After the safety car, the remaining favourites that had started from the back continued to make progress. Alonso tried to pass Christian Klien into the final chicane but went off, coming back to the track ahead of him. He gave the position back only to repass Klien back immediately by getting back into his slipstream. Race stewards came on to the radio telling the Renault team to let Klien back past again, so Alonso did. By this time he was four and a half seconds behind Michael Schumacher, but he closed that gap with ease, while Räikkönen got right behind them too.

In the first round of pitstops, Ralf Schumacher pitted very early and went down to eighth position while Giancarlo Fisichella took a comfortable lead. Well behind Fisichella, Alonso and Räikkönen were putting pressure on Michael Schumacher. Alonso, with the lightest car of the trio, went around the outside of Schumacher through 130R corner on lap 20, but needed to pit briefly after making the pass. Michael Schumacher and Kimi Räikkönen continued scrapping for a couple more laps before their pitstops, both of them rejoining the track ahead of Coulthard and Alonso. Laps later Räikkönen passed Schumacher and closed in on Button and Webber. Alonso passed Schumacher for the second time and by this point he started to close in on Räikkönen, who was stuck behind Webber and Button. Fisichella still looked favourite to win the grand prix, as he was 20 seconds ahead of the chasing pack. Alonso, running lighter again, needed to pit earlier than the rest of this pack. Fisichella pitted next and rejoined right behind Button, Webber and Räikkönen.

Button and Webber pitted, Webber got out ahead of Button and they both got out ahead of Fernando Alonso. Räikkönen, finally with a clear track ahead, set a series of fastest laps, the best being a 1:31.540, and then pitted. By then he was only 5 seconds behind Fisichella and was closing on the Renault. Meanwhile, Alonso had got past Button who was slipping back to Coulthard and Michael Schumacher. Alonso then passed Webber for third. Up the road, Räikkönen was now right on the tail of race leader Fisichella. With 3 laps to go, Fisichella went defensive under braking at the Casio Triangle, which allowed Räikkönen to get a tow on the pit straight. Fisichella defended but the story repeated next lap, and this time Räikkönen was able to get past around the outside of turn 1 of the final lap.

Räikkönen won the race, taking his final victory for McLaren and the team's 6th win in a row, ahead of Fisichella, Alonso, Webber, Button, Coulthard, Michael Schumacher, and Ralf Schumacher. Post-race saw the disqualification of Takuma Sato after an earlier collision with Jarno Trulli.


2010 Montreal
The race was the first of the season in which all twenty-four cars started on the grid; prior to the Montreal race, at least one car—usually from Virgin, Lotus or Hispania—was forced to start from the pit lane with a mechanical issue of some kind. Mark Webber was demoted from second place on the grid to seventh after Red Bull found iron filings in a sample of oil taken from the gearbox used in Webber's car during qualifying. This finding, which suggested damage to the internals of the gearbox and necessitated a gearbox change under parc ferme conditions, resulted in the five-place grid penalty.

The opening lap saw drama unfold before the field had even cleared the start gantry. While Lewis Hamilton won the drag race to the first corner, in the middle of the pack, Vitaly Petrov jumped the start and was forced onto the grassy verge as he attempted to go around the outside. This resulted in a spin that forced Pedro de la Rosa to take evasive action; Petrov earned two drive-through penalties in the space of one hundred metres for his efforts and spent the rest of the race fighting with the new teams. Felipe Massa and Vitantonio Liuzzi made contact three times in one corner, with the Italian getting spun around in the process and sliding down the order. As Hamilton, Vettel and Alonso established the running order, Kamui Kobayashi and Nico Hülkenberg tangled on the run into the final corners. While the Williams driver cut the chicane to avoid further contact, Kobayashi was not as lucky and he became the Wall of Champions' 2010 victim. He retired a lap later with accident damage. After avoiding the spinning Petrov at the start, Kobayashi's Sauber teammate Pedro de la Rosa joined him on the sidelines shortly thereafter and gave the team the unenviable record of eleven retirements from sixteen starts.

The predicted early round of stops passed without incident, although Red Bull elected to run their drivers on separate strategies; Mark Webber ran the harder prime compound back-to-back with a finish on the softer options, while Vettel ran the options in his middle stint and picked up the primes for the run to the finish. Every other driver except Robert Kubica had qualified on and subsequently started the race with the softer options. The tyre lottery produced an unlikely winner with Toro Rosso's Sébastien Buemi inheriting the lead for a lap before his stop, the first time a Toro Rosso had led a race since Sébastien Bourdais led three laps at the 2008 Japanese Grand Prix. Elsewhere in the field, Hülkenberg proved to be his own worst enemy when he over-extended himself under brakes while attempting to pass Nico Rosberg at l'Epingle and damaging his front wing in the process. He was then flagged for speeding in the pit lane when he pitted to replace the wing, robbing himself of a potential points place as he was forced to serve a drive-through penalty.

An accident between Michael Schumacher and Robert Kubica was narrowly avoided as Schumacher emerged from the first of his scheduled stops. Schumacher refused to yield on the approach to the fourth corner and the two took a short trip across the grassy verge. The altercation damaged Kubica's undertray while the incident was investigated by the stewards. It was the first of many incidents involving Schumacher, with the Mercedes driver later tangling with Adrian Sutil and Felipe Massa. Massa's race was marked by a perpetual battle with the Force India drivers including several near-misses in the second corner, the scene of his first-lap tangle with Liuzzi. Massa would later force his way past Sutil as the two closed in on the Lotus of Heikki Kovalainen, the cars running three-abreast into turn six. His late altercation with former Ferrari teammate Schumacher required him to pit for a replacement front wing and, like Hülkenberg before him, the Brazilian driver was cited for speeding in the pit lane. Twenty seconds were added to his time after the race as punishment.

Webber's tyre strategy initially paid off but, as the race wore on, his tyres began to deteriorate rapidly. Hamilton, running second at the time, quickly reduced the Australian's lead and caught him with twenty laps to go, dragging the Ferrari of Alonso through in the process. Webber eventually pitted, emerging behind teammate Vettel in fifth place as Vettel struggled with an unspecified but serious problem that he had to nurse to the finish; the team later clarified this as being related to the gearbox. As Hamilton settled back into the lead, reigning World Champion Jenson Button took Alonso by surprise, passing him around the back half of the circuit and positioning McLaren for their second consecutive one-two finish. Button briefly attempted a run at his teammate, narrowing Hamilton's lead to just two seconds with ten laps to go, but Hamilton responded with a fast lap that dissuaded Button from making further attempts. The top five — Hamilton, Button, Alonso, Vettel and Webber — would remain in place until the very end with Vettel stopping on the circuit just after he crossed the finish line at the end of the race. Nico Rosberg fended off a late surge from Kubica to claim sixth while Buemi finished eighth and a lap down. Liuzzi and Sutil both found their way past Schumacher on the final lap — in Sutil's case this was in the final corner — as the Mercedes driver struggled with tyres that were almost completely out of grip and leaving the seven-time World Champion scoreless in what BBC commentator Martin Brundle later described as the German's "worst weekend of his career". Kovalainen was the best of the new teams, two laps down and fighting off Petrov for the final phase of the race, while Karun Chandhok and Lucas di Grassi were the final cars home, four and five laps down respectively.

The race was notably short of attrition compared to previous races at the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve, which have seen the safety car deployed so often that teams factor an accident into their strategies. However, the 2010 race was so short of retirements that it boasted the greatest number of finishers in the season to date with nineteen classified drivers. In addition to the dual retirements for BMW Sauber, Bruno Senna was once again the victim of a gearbox problem while Jarno Trulli stopped in the pit entry on lap forty-seven with terminal brake problems. Timo Glock retired due to a steering rack leak that crippled his VR-01 on lap fifty-five.

The final result meant that Hamilton leapfrogged both Button and Webber in the championship standings with six points covering the top three drivers. With McLaren claiming the lead of the constructors' championship from Red Bull in Turkey, their maximum points score in Montreal placed them a further twenty points clear of the Austrian team. The race was also the first time since the 1991 United States Grand Prix that three former drivers' champions stood on the podium and the last 1–2 finish for the McLaren team until the 2021 Italian Grand Prix.



1996 Catalunya
This race, Michael Schumacher's first Ferrari victory, is generally regarded as one of his finest. In the torrential rain, he produced a stunning drive, and is a prime example of why he earned the nickname "Regenmeister" ("Rainmaster"), despite his early and unforced crash at a wet Monaco Grand Prix two weeks earlier.

At the start, Schumacher lost several positions due to a clutch problem, which indirectly resulted in several clashes in the main straight involving 5 cars. Giancarlo Fisichella emerged from the carnage with a blown left front and a missing rear wing, while Olivier Panis escaped with suspension damage. Both pulled into the pits and retired a lap later.

Mika Salo was disqualified for the second time this season, for changing cars after the field was under starter's orders.

Damon Hill had started the race from pole position, but dropped to 8th after spinning twice in the opening laps, before another spin into the pit wall on lap 12 ended his race. Schumacher recovered from a poor start to take the lead from Villeneuve on lap 13, and from then on he dominated the race, lapping over three seconds a lap faster than the remainder of the field.

Rubens Barrichello was running a competitive race, getting as high as 2nd place after Jacques Villeneuve and Alesi made their pit stops. After his own scheduled (lengthy) pitstop he was sent back to the race but forced to retire from third place with 20 laps to go after a clutch problem caused his engine to fade out. On the previous lap, Gerhard Berger had spun his Benetton out of fourth place while trying to lap the Ligier of Pedro Diniz. Alesi and Villeneuve switched places on their own pitstops, Alesi taking his only one some 6 laps before Villeneuve.

After an uneventful race on his part, Heinz-Harald Frentzen finished in fourth, while Mika Häkkinen took fifth after surviving a spin off the track in the closing stages of the race. Jos Verstappen, running fifth after the retirements of Barrichello and Berger, crashed into the tyre barrier with 12 laps left, guaranteeing Diniz his first Formula One point as by this time only six drivers were left in the race. With no further retirements, Diniz brought his car home in sixth, after driving at a more cautious pace that saw him fall two laps adrift of the front runners by the end.

[S griffin]

2005 Japan for me