1) David Coulthard's pass, Brazil 2001.
Ask Rubens Barrichello, Buzz Aldrin or Ron Jeremy, and they'll all tell you that it's not quite as fun when you come second, nor is it quite as memorable. And in the field of overtaking moves, DC's lunge for the lead into the Senna S at Interlagos, where he and Michael Schumacher dived either side of the hapless Minardi of Tarso Marques in the process, came second after the similar move by Mika Hakkinen on the German driver at Spa in 2000. But while the Hakkinen move clogs up discussions on "TEH BEST PASS EVAH!" like matted hair in a plughole, the Coulthard pass is often overlooked, perhaps simply because of it's lack of novelty value. After all, Hakkinen did do it first.
Which is unfortunate, because when you objectively compare the two moves, Coulthard's effort was the better of the pair, for some of the following reasons: He made the pass on Schumacher and Marques into a braking zone, rather than on a straight, leaving himself open to the wayward Minardi turning in on him, the rapidly worsening track conditions was making visibility treacherous, with Coulthard dealing with the spray from the back of two cars rather than just one, and, y'know, it just looks better. It's a picture book dive down into the blind chicane of Interlagos, rather than just a flat-out blast down a straight followed by a casual shoulder-charge to ward off any efforts by Schumacher to try anything into the corner. Plus, above all of those reasons, this move was pulled off by, of all people, David Coulthard. And if that doesn't make a successful overtaking manoeuvre special, then I don't know what does.
Watch DC's move-that-was-maybe-a-bit-better-than-Hakkinen's here.
2) Hakkinen's strategic jump, Nurburgring 1998.
The tactical move of the hard-fought 1998 title race is obvious. Surely Michael Schumacher's sensational leapfrogging of the McLaren pair of Hakkinen and Coulthard at the Hungarian Grand Prix was a masterpiece of driving, not only for that season, but of all time. And indeed it was, but what is often forgotten is that Hakkinen had his revenge for that humiliation later in the season at the charmingly-misleading Luxembourg Grand Prix, and at a far more crucial stage of the season as well.
Hakkinen and Schumacher came into the race locked together on 80 points after a disastrous couple of rounds for Hakkinen at Spa and Monza, and with only one race to go after the Nurburgring, and the Ferrari duo of Schumacher and Eddie Irvine locking out the front row like a greedy pair of Italian stallions, the stage seemed set for Schumie to take a massive advantage to Suzuka for the season finale. But Hakkinen was having none of it. Schumacher got past a fast-starting Irvine without too many issues, and then the lachrymose Irishman made it as difficult as his talent would manage for Hakkinen to get past (i.e. not an awful lot). But by then, Schumie had an imposing lead.
Hakkinen, though, reeled him in inexorably, and Schumacher pitted first, allowing Hakkinen to bang in some quick laps at the end of his stint, and successfully leapfrog the impotent German driver during his own stop. While Schumacher's efforts at the Hungaroring may well have been more impressive to watch, it was Hakkinen's move at the Nurburgring that was the real turning point of the title race. The McLaren man went to the final round in Japan four points ahead, and an under-pressure Schumacher threw away any chance he had of the title with a stall at the start of the Suzuka race.
Watch the race unfold, and brush up on your French at the same time here.
3) Montoya's knife through butter, Brazil 2003.
Mention the greatest opening lap in F1 history to anyone, even people who have never watched a grand prix before, and chances are they'll start frothing gently at the mouth, crossing their legs and hurriedly pontificating about that lap from Ayrton Senna at Donington in 1993, where he stormed from fifth to first in the best part of half a lap around a sodden track. But extend that starting premise slightly from "opening lap" to "first couple of racing laps following a safety car start", and you can simply ram Juan Montoya's start to the great carton of mentalness that was the 2003 Brazilian GP back down their confused gullets.
On a track that was more moist than treacherous, though no less tricky to negotiate for it, the portly hero in the Williams was 9th when the safety car finally peeled in at the start of lap 9. By the second corner of lap 11, Montoya was second. Second! Dealing with Fisichella's Jordan across the start line, Montoya drove through the spray to pick off the Schumacher brothers and Jarno Trulli through the ninth lap, dealt with Webber and Barrichello on the next tour, and wrapped the whole thing up with an incomparably stunning move around the outside of David Coulthard at turn three.
Alas, as with all good "JPM does good" starts to a story, it is followed by a miserable few chapters of tyre graining, dropping back down the field and eventual retirement after spinning off on the river created in that same turn three by an overflowing drain. Still, for two-and-a-bit laps, it was the stuff of dreams.
Watch Montoya's progress, including that move on DC, all bemusingly set to the soppy warbling of Savage Garden, here.
4) Lotus's coin toss, Watkins Glen 1967.
Team orders reached their nadir at Austria in 2002, as every irate anti-Ferrari moaner knows. But, anyone with even a modicum of a hint of a glimpse of the history of F1 also knew that Ferrari's last-second switcheroo was really just the culmination of a long and proud tradition of teams imposing their own pre-determined order on things, playing God, in a depressingly minor way, from behind the scenes. Many people cite the 1956 Italian Grand Prix as an example of the longevity and history of team orders, when Peter Collins gave up his Lancia Ferrari to his team mate Juan Manuel Fangio to let the Argentine secure his fourth F1 title, despite the fact that Collins himself would have won the championship had he stayed in the car. However, that wasn't really the story, in fact Luigi Musso, in another Ferrari, had been asked to cede to Fangio but had refused, and Collins gave his own car up out of nothing more than respect for his great team mate.
So perhaps one of the first proper uses of team orders came in the closing stages of the 1967 season, and ironically had absolutely nothing to do with the title. Graham Hill and Jim Clark had arguably the best car in the field in the new Lotus 49, but the reliability of the typically flimsy Colin Chapman design was nothing short of shambolic. So, with Ford executives watching their new DFV-powered car from the stands at the Glen, it was decided to take things easy and not have the team mates battle. So, they tossed a coin, with the winner allowed to stay ahead in the US race, and in return, the loser given the same courtesy in the season finale in Mexico.
Fortunately for anyone desperate to uphold the misguided theory that team orders began when Jean Todt and Michael Schumacher decided to start being evil, and could in no way have stemmed from a decision taken between two British drivers in a British team, the ploy never really came to fruition, as Hill won the right to the victory in the US race, only for his grotesquely unreliable car to break a clutch cable, and have to cede the win to Clark, who went on to wrap up his promised win in the final race of the season as well. So for all intents and purposes, this can all be glossed over, and moaning about Austria 2002 can continue.
Watch a brief review of the race, which manages to entirely ignore the team orders angle, here.
5) Ratzenberger's death, Imola 1994.
In the modern era, it is difficult for any death at the wheel of an F1 car to be 'overlooked'. It is long ago now that we had the rather grisly phase of F1's past, when ending a race with less living people than you started it was tragically regular, and as such was treated with sadness, but also a sense that such horrific moments was simply the way of things in an undoubtably dangerous sport. These days, any death in motorsport is examined, questioned and picked-apart from every possible angle. Partly from the universally tactless popular media, which only gets excited about sports like ours when something horrible happens, and partly from the sport itself, desperate to learn whatever lessons they can about each mercifully rare, but always awful tragedy.
But poor Ratzenberger, who was entering only his third F1 weekend of his career at Imola 15 years ago, will forever have his death overshadowed by what happened the day after during the race. A victim of his own tireless efforts to try and get the awful Simtek car into the race, back in the days where there were more cars in a qualifying session than grid slots for the race, it was his loss that so suddenly broke the fragile facade of safety that had blanketed F1 over the previous few seasons, and that had been reinforced just the day before after Rubens Barrichello survived a nightmare shunt of his own in practice. But, with Ayrton Senna also lost the following day, Ratzenberger is left as a mere addition to that most horrible of F1 race weekends.
Not everyone was so quick to forget him though. Max Mosley, a man not particularly known for a sense of decency in recent years, chose to attend Ratzenberger's funeral instead of Senna's emotional, and very public, mourning in Brazil. "I went to his funeral because everyone went to Senna's," Mosley explained years later, "I thought it was important that somebody went to his." And that, you can't really argue with.
6) Williams and McLaren's dealings, Jerez 1997.
Ah, Jerez 1997. It always comes back to Jerez 1997. We know the story by now, of scurrilous cheating, blatant flounting of the rules and so on. But, as any half-baked university lecturer will bray at you, history is written by the victors. So, naturally, the story of the finale to the 1997 season is one of a good old brass-balled triumph over an evil German malevolence. Which means, of course, that the sins of the winners are forgotten.
So little is mentioned of McLaren and Williams conspiring to work together to defeat a common foe, the two teams working out a plan whereby McLaren would look to get in Schumacher's way early on, only for Villeneuve to let Mika Hakkinen and David Coulthard through in the closing laps to take a 1-2 for McLaren, while Villeneuve kept 3rd and took the championship. Was there any collusion? Well, despite the FIA dismissing the claims over a lack of evidence, there was little doubt that something had happened between the two teams (look at this post-race clip at around 2:15, where Ron Dennis nervously stutters his way through a non-typically direct question from Louise Goodman).
So, in the end, perhaps there was nothing to it, or perhaps there was. With Schumacher's moment of stupidity rightly punished, maybe the FIA simply decided that to punish the other title contender as well would turn a mess into an outright farce, and so left it be. After all, it didn't really affect the outcome all that much, and Schumacher's own actions ensured that there was no moral high ground for him to take on this one. But when the likes of the UK's Daily Mail pompously opine that Jerez 1997 was the day that Schumacher "lost the last vestige of his reputation of being a sportsman", which to some extent is true, it is truer to say that it was a day where nobody really covered themselves in glory, sportsmanship-wise.
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