FEBRUARY 5, 2002

The Ferrari crashes in Spain

A week ago Michael Schumacher and Rubens Barrichello both had sizeable accidents during testing in Barcelona.

A week ago Michael Schumacher and Rubens Barrichello both had sizeable accidents during testing in Barcelona. Both cars were damaged in the crashes and the cars were then sent back to Maranello to be repaired. Initially there was speculation that the shunts had been caused by a technical problem but both drivers later told the media that they had made mistakes. It seemed however rather odd that this should have happened.

We have since heard reports from eye-witnesses who say that Schumacher's crash did not look at all like a driving error and that the cause of the crash seemed to be some kind of technical failure.

The question that needs to be answered in that case is why the drivers are saying that the crashes were their fault if it was not the case. The obvious explanation was that it would be highly embarrassing if both cars were seriously damaged by an identical technical failure but a team like Ferrari is big enough to cope with such an embarrassment. The other possibility is that the team does not want the opposition to know it is having trouble with new systems being tried on the old cars.

The final possibility is that the eye-witnesses are wrong but we hear that there is film of the Schumacher shunt and that this underlines the fact that the crash did not look like driver error.