The Interlagos circuit is run anti-clockwise and is a strange one; people who succeed in Brazil for some reason don’t do well anywhere else, and vice versa. I had not been helped by discovering that my car had sprung a fuel leak moments before qualifying was due to begin. I had to jump into the spare car, which didn’t have the latest differential and that made a big difference in slow corners.
I was very cautious during my first qualifying run and yet I was only one tenth of a second off Michael’s time at that stage. But my position on the grid gradually fell as others improved. I went out with another set of tyres and found a bit more time, which surprised me because I didn’t feel I had gone that much faster and yet it was a much better lap than the first one. I could only assume that the track conditions had improved.
I went out for a third time and Mika Hakkinen in the McLaren deliberately held me up by backing off in the middle of a fast right-hander, so I had to go off line. I could forget that lap. I waited for Hakkinen – if he thought he was being smart, then I could be smart as well – and I held him up on the start of his attack lap.
I had one lap left. I pushed really hard but, on the last corner, the back of the car stepped out of line and that cost three-tenths of a second – which made a big difference. Michael was on the second row and I was on the fifth row. There may have been just half a second between us, but it was night and day.
I couldn’t complain because I was in the spare car, I didn’t have the right set-up, and I had made a mistake. But that didn’t get away from the fact that I was tenth on the grid, which, on paper anyway, didn’t look that good.
We spent a lot of time discussing everything in great detail and I didn’t get back to the hotel until early evening. James Bowles, a friend with whom I occasionally stay when I am in Oxford, had come to Brazil. I left specific instructions with the front desk to let James into my room. He arrived at 8 am and, at 7 pm, he was still sitting outside the hotel because they wouldn’t let him into my room. He was not happy! Having James there made life a bit more fun than it had been in Australia. Unlike Melbourne, where the teams were in various hotels scattered across the city, everyone uses the Hotel Transamerica in Sao Paulo, mainly because it is comfortable and close to the track. It is a sociable place as a result; quite lively at night. Once again, I didn’t go out much in the evenings. The local speciality seems to be the Churrascaria, a popular type of restaurant where they serve as much meat as you can eat. They carve it off massive swords, straight onto your plate. Maybe once in a while is okay, but eating slabs and slabs of meat can’t be good for you. It didn’t appeal to me, so I usually ate in the hotel.
When I woke on race morning, I had a feeling that the day wasn’t going to work out. In fact, the feeling had persisted all weekend. Even before I went to Brazil, I was telling people not to bet on a good result at Interlagos. So far, I had been proved correct and I didn’t feel it was going to get any better.
The warm-up wasn’t bad – but neither was it good. The car felt okay, nothing more. I told myself not to take any chances in the race, just plod round, bring the car home and perhaps score a couple of points.
Then, just as we were about to go the grid, the heavens opened. It really poured, the track was flooded and the car was aquaplaning. I was thinking: ‘You don’t want to be tenth on the grid in these conditions.’ Just for good measure, the engine began to misfire and they couldn’t do much about it at that stage. I made a good start initially but then found I couldn’t control the throttle because I didn’t know how much power I was going to have at any given moment because of the misfire. People started to go past me as we went onto the straight in a cloud of spray.
I was really scared. I just couldn’t see a thing. I couldn’t see beside me, nor could I see in front or behind. When it’s like that, you just drive, hoping that you are going fast enough to avoid having someone go into the back of you, but not so fast that you are going to drive into the back of someone else.
Racing in wet weather is the most dangerous aspect of Formula 1. The worst place here on the Interlagos circuit was at the end of the long straight. Damon Hill was leading and, if he had spun in the middle of the track, no-one would have been able to see him. We would have cannoned into each other; it would have been carnage.
You think to yourself: ‘It’s time they did something about this.’ But the problem is, the officials are not sitting where we are. They are up high in every sense of the expression. They can see the cars, so they assume we can too. But if they checked the pictures from the in-car cameras, they would soon be aware just how dangerous it is. Nothing ever seems to be done until there’s a big problem. It was complete madness in Brazil and everyone was extremely lucky that nothing serious happened.
I was dropping back because of the misfire, but then the spray began to clear. I was really struggling just to stay on the track; the car didn’t seem to have any grip. I was running a one-stop strategy because that would give us better options to stay out longer if it looked like the track might dry. In fact, we came in three or four laps too soon because we thought the rain was going to continue. I had another set of wet tyres and no sooner had I rejoined than it stopped raining and the sun came out. That meant losing 45–50 seconds coming back in for slicks. The track was drying but we had a lot of downforce on the car in order to cope with what we anticipated would be a wet track. That meant I was very slow in the dry.
I was so embarrassed. Ferrari were doing badly and I was wondering what people were thinking. I tried to push, but as soon as I did that, the car would understeer and I’d be off the dry line, onto the wet line and I’d lose a lot of time. The last thing I needed this weekend was another trip onto the grass and into the crash barrier. It was one of those races where you would look a complete idiot if you spun off. Quite a few drivers had left the road. But I could not afford to be one of them.
It was only when the track had dried across most of its width that I could actually push hard enough to allow the car to drift out. I set my fastest laps near the end of the race, but they were a second and a half off the pace. That was unreal; absolutely unbelievable.
Damon Hill won his second race in succession for Williams. I came home in seventh place, very disappointed. But the team seemed happy enough. Michael had finished third. He did a bloody good job to get the car home in that position. Starting at the front had helped a huge amount, of course. But he was not very happy. He had been lapped and no one could remember the last time that had happened, if ever, to Michael Schumacher. The only consolation for me was that my fastest race lap was only two-tenths of a second slower than Michael’s best.
It was just as well, perhaps, that we were not in a hurry to leave the following day. I had a lie-in before sitting quietly by the pool and mulling over what had gone wrong during the weekend. I was a bit pissed off, to be honest. Melbourne had removed a lot of the pressure. Now it was back on again. What flag did I want on the rostrum, indeed. I should be so lucky.
Not many people know this, but I was almost called Stirling Moss Irvine. My father, Edmund, was a massive fan of motor sport. I remember seeing a picture of Stirling Moss after he had won a race – I think it was in North America, at Watkins Glen or Mosport – and there’s my Dad standing beside him with an arm around his shoulders. He was quite serious about naming me after his hero. You can hear it now: ‘Stirl Irv.’ My mother stopped him, thank God!
It was only natural that Dad and I should go to the races together. We regularly went to Kirkistown, our local circuit about twenty minutes away on the Ards Peninsula, and we would make frequent trips ‘across the water’ to Ingliston in Scotland and Croft in County Durham. The highlight each year would be the British Grand Prix; our summer holiday would revolve around that. We would visit my cousins in Durham and go ice skating, and then motor down to either Silverstone or Brands Hatch.