By role
July 7 2004

The Renault F1 team did all it could in order to win the French Grand Prix. They pushed the maximum making Ferrari to have to go for an aggressive strategy change adding one more pit stop that saw. An important part of the Ferrari win was the consistence performance of their Bridgestone tyres helped by the short late stints made by the Scuderia.

Renault F1 has analysed their podium performance and also the reasons of why Ferrari finished on top:

In the space of four laps, the complexion of Sunday’s French Grand Prix changed completely. Until Michael Schumacher made his second pit-stop on lap 30, the French Grand Prix had looked like a hell for leather all-out sprint: Fernando Alonso had streaked away from pole, and retained track position through the first round of pit-stops. Emerging from the pits on lap 14 with a three second lead, the young Spaniard had extended this to four seconds before the gap began to be slowly whittled away by Schumacher. It looked like we had on our hands a close tactical battle. In reality, it was more a game of cat and mouse: if only Ferrari could give Schumacher a clear track, they would be able unleash the full performance of his F2004…

Schumacher’s second stop of the afternoon was the quickest to that point of the French Grand Prix (and only beaten by his fourth stop), the World Champion taking fuel and tyres in just 19.425 seconds. He then emerged onto a clear track, and suddenly began setting lap times three or four tenths of a second faster than his previous best. The lap time comparisons between Alonso and Schumacher for that period of the race are as follows:


MSC ALO Difference
L29 (IN) 77.279 76.561 0.718
L30 (OUT) 92.446 76.885
L31 75.479 76.864 -1.385
L32 75.377 (IN) 77.656 -2.279
L33 75.878 (OUT) 92.291
L34 76.248 75.551 0.697
L35 75.758 75.576 0.182

Prior to the second stop, even when running in relatively clean air four seconds behind Alonso, Schumacher’s best lap had been 1:15.761 on lap 8. However, on laps 31 and 32, he essentially gave himself the breathing space he needed to leapfrog ahead of the Renault. But it was close. The Renault mechanics completed the third fastest pit-stop of the afternoon, getting Alonso on his way in 19.791 seconds, but crucially, Fernando’s in-lap was half a second slower than Schumacher’s, and he lost nearly four tenths in the pit-stop. Indeed, in light of this, the out-lap Fernando completed – almost two tenths faster than Schumacher – was outstanding, and after emerging from the pits, the Renault – taking advantage of fresh Michelins – began lapping at a similar pace to the Ferrari. But this instant tyre performance soon dropped off and Alonso settled into a rhythm in the low one minute 16 second bracket, while Schumacher opened the gap he needed to make his four-stop strategy work.

Looking at the race stints of the two top finishers, the manner in which Schumacher accelerated his pace in startling:


MSC ALO
Stint 1 76.5 Stint 1 76.4
Stint 2 76.7 Stint 2 76.8
Stint 3 75.9 Stint 3 76.3
Stint 4 75.9 Stint 4 77.1
Stint 5 77.1
Average 76.388 Average 76.738

When, in stint 1, Fernando held his own, and then saw himself slowly reeled in by Schumacher in stint 2, the Renault team had good reason to think that the R24 was a match on performance for the F2004 – after all, Alonso had qualified three tenths ahead of Schumacher, on a significantly heavier fuel load. Suddenly though, Schumacher began lapping incredibly quickly – and with that, gave himself the freedom to make four stops to win. Those laps didn’t win the race – there was plenty of hard work left to do – but they were undoubtedly the pivot that freed him to run his audacious strategy. Had the Ferrari not got track position at the second stop, the twenty-twenty vision of hindsight suggests things might have been very different indeed…