Despite arriving in Japan a day late, I managed to rearrange my schedule without too much difficulty. It helped that I felt completely at home in Tokyo. I really love going there. Having spent three great years racing in Japan and being based in the capital, each time I return, it seems like I’m reliving my childhood.
All the European or foreign drivers – there was usually about half a dozen of us – would stay in the President Hotel. It was home-from-home and so much more convenient than renting a tiny apartment. Everyone knows me there. I quickly fall into a familiar routine.
I will walk down to the Hard Rock Cafe for lunch, then amuse myself by playing Space Invaders or checking out the latest magazines. Then back to the hotel, perhaps for a snooze before dinner, and then on to the night clubs. I know my way around. I feel very comfortable in Tokyo and, in some ways, it is even better than being in Dublin. It feels more personal. I live near Dublin so I’m obviously in the city quite often. But it’s somehow special visiting Tokyo, a bit like returning every now and then to a favourite holiday haunt.
It is an appropriate description because this was the first time I had been able to relax for quite some time. I had arranged to share a flat in Bologna but I had been unable to find time to unwind as the team would regularly call me to Fiorano. It is a forty-minute run on average – I’ve done it in twenty-three minutes but it’s not healthy at that rate. I prefer just to plod along. Inevitably I would show up and a problem would have arisen. I would then return to Bologna, but being on call meant it was impossible to organise anything, and I couldn’t even go to the gym. It made life very difficult.
I had to be ready for action at all hours. The team was prepared to run until dark. Sometimes we would go beyond that. There were occasions when it was pitch black but we needed to take the car out, if only to discover what was going to go wrong next. Testing is very spectacular at night because the disc brakes glow bright orange and the row of little lights on the dashboard, indicating when it is time to change gear, flash back and forth. The exhaust pipes spit flames. It’s all very dramatic. Fantastic, actually.
It is all part of the atmosphere at Fiorano. The test track, which is owned by Ferrari, is on the edge of Maranello and there is always a sizeable crowd pressed against the fence. As a Ferrari driver, you are continually under the microscope. All the talk among the crowd is about lap times. It doesn’t matter that you might be trying various ideas out on the car and lap times are out of the question. In front of the tifosi,
When Fiorano was built in the early seventies it was way ahead of its time. In fact, Ferrari remains the only team with its own private test facility. It is extremely useful to be able to run the car whenever it suits the team rather than having to book a circuit and then travel to the track in question. Fiorano is so narrow that if you make the slightest error or deviation, it is exaggerated and shows immediately. The tifosi will
I was thinking about the pressure induced by all that attention while I was flying from Japan to Australia. Tokyo had made the perfect stopping place en route to Melbourne: eleven hours from London then ten hours to Sydney and a short hop from there. It was the perfect split. I had time to reflect on everything that had been going wrong.
I knew it was going to be very difficult for the team but, personally, I was not that concerned. If I am criticised, it usually goes straight over the top of my head. If I’m not doing a proper job, I am aware of it. I don’t need someone to tell me. I know when I am wrong and I know when I’m right, and I don’t care what anyone else thinks. On the other hand, the Italian temperament is quite soft. They are quite susceptible to criticism and I knew there would be a lot of that flying around in Melbourne.
I really thought the whole Ferrari team was about to be massively embarrassed.
I can sum up the Grand Prix in Australia like this: there were two girls in Melbourne whom I had previously got to know in Tokyo, and we had plans to meet. We spoke on the phone – and that was it. I never did get to see them. From the moment I stepped off the plane, I was flat out from start to finish. That’s how difficult it was!
I arrived on Wednesday morning and went straight to a press conference, then on to the circuit where I talked through everything with my engineers. I had dinner in the hotel that night with sporting director Jean Todt, then off to bed. Practice began the following morning, an extra day of testing having been thrown in because the track was new to everyone. Then more lengthy discussions with my engineers, back to the hotel, dinner and bed. This went on without let-up every single day. It was the least fun I had ever had at a Grand Prix! Needless to say, it was a bit of a shock after the more relaxed times at Jordan.
We were in a slightly confused state because the F310 had been reasonably quick from the word go, and yet it felt awful. There was bad oversteer (when the car tries to spin) going into the corners and then, as soon as I touched the throttle, nothing but understeer (when the car tries to plough straight on). And yet the lap times were pretty good. It was all very strange.
Setting-up the suspension and aerodynamics on the car had been a matter of guesswork. Initially I thought the car felt too ‘soft’, so on the Friday night I asked my engineer to set up the car with a very, very stiff front end. He did that, and the car felt a great deal better. Not perfect, mind you, just better. Since the lap times were reasonable enough, it encouraged the feeling that, if we could sort this car out, then we would be looking really good. As things stood, however, the Williams-Renaults were a second a lap faster. That gave a more immediate indication of our competitiveness.
Everyone was keen to see how I was getting on relative to Schumacher. My lap times had been edging closer to his and, at one point, when we went out together, I was a bit quicker, which was quite nice because I think everyone was expecting me to be blown away by the World Champion.
Overall, I was not as consistent as Michael although I felt I could muster a quick enough lap when it came to qualifying on the Saturday afternoon. I felt reasonably confident. Then an engine failed not long before the end of the final free practice before qualifying. I knew straight away that the time taken to change it would eat into the sixty-minute qualifying session.
The Jordan mechanics could change an engine very quickly – I think thirty-five minutes is the record. It took our guys two hours, which was understandable for a number of reasons. One noticeable difference was that in the Jordan car, the radiator came off with the engine, so whenever a new engine was being prepared, the radiator and engine would go into the car as one. In the F310, by contrast, the radiator is in the chassis, so it has to be disconnected first and the whole system bled.
Everything was new and unfamiliar: the car, the engine, the lot. The net result was that twenty-five minutes of qualifying had gone before I could get back into the car.
In some respects, that was not a total disaster because each driver is limited to twelve laps. But you need time for an exploratory lap before perhaps making some changes to the car to suit the latest conditions. This particular day, in fact,