Formula for disharmony

Suzuka 1998. Mika Hakkinen has just won the Formula One World Championship and as he climbs out of his McLaren, deafened by a…

Suzuka 1998. Mika Hakkinen has just won the Formula One World Championship and as he climbs out of his McLaren, deafened by a thunderclap of congratulations from his pit crew, the first person he speaks to is team-mate David Coulthard.

"Next year will be your turn," he says and drapes a conciliatory arm around the Scotsman's shoulders. For Coulthard, the words were "touching", but could not have erased the heartache of a season which could, and possibly should, have been his given the superiority of that year's McLaren MP13. Initially faster and more efficient than his team-mate, Coulthard's season went from the benign - he gifted Hakkinen victory in Australia on the back of a gentleman's agreement - to the malign as his paranoid grew to the extent that he believed he was getting less time and effort from McLaren than the Finn.

By the time the season was half over Coulthard was a massive 28 points behind his team-mate and any light at the end of the tunnel was growing dimmer by the week.

"Next year will be your turn." Those words will have echoed in the intervening months for Coulthard, a mantra of possibility and hope that should have seen him atop the podium in Melbourne.

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But his prayers went unanswered as just 15 laps around the Albert Park circuit proved more than the fragile new MP14/4 could bear. It left Coulthard with no option but to limp into the pits, the start of his "turn" blown apart like the hydraulics system of the car.

If any consolation existed, however ill-humoured it may have been, it was that Hakkinen failed to finish, too. He cruised into the McLaren garage after just five more laps, with similar problems. A blip then.

Ferrari win, but it's Irvine. So no need for McLaren to start pulling hair yet. Just the jitters that come with the start of every season. With five weeks until Brazil, any mechanical kinks were sure to be ironed out. And come race time at Interlagos, after two days of jousting and duelling shaded as ever by Hakkinen, the two McLarens sit on the front row of the grid. As they had done the previous year. As was their right as champions.

But then the lights go out and so does Coulthard, left in a plume of Michael Schumacher's exhaust fumes as the McLaren refuses gear selection and sits stubborn and immobile in its starting square.

He eventually rejoined, a full lap down, and can have only shaken his head ruefully when a few laps later "the gearbox just exploded". He was left sitting by his stricken car for most of the race, forced to watch his team-mate cruise to victory after he too suffered gearbox problems but shook them off. For David Coulthard "your turn" is rapidly mutating from glorious dream to ignominious nightmare. But unlike last season it is not a problem with Coulthard. In '98, as Hakkinen pulled away, the Scot grew increasingly disenchanted with the McLaren set-up as rumours spread that Hakkinen was receiving preferential treatment.

Team boss Ron Dennis denied any favouritism, but others could see the bond that grew between Hakkinen and Dennis after a terrible accident in Australia in 1995 almost claimed the Finn's life.

Swimming against a tide of rumour, Coulthard went under and for the latter half of the 1998 season he proved to be his own worst enemy, a victim of head games of his own making.

This year, though, Coulthard insists he is made of sterner stuff. He invested in his own motor home which he will use from tomorrow's San Marino Grand Prix right through the European part of the season. He says it will allow him more time to focus and believes it will alleviate the stress of travel and hotels. Couple this with a Lear jet to take him to and from races, and a new resolve borne out of last season's miseries, and he seems to have the right pieces to complete the puzzle.

But looming over it all is Hakkinen. The Finn pipped him for pole in Melbourne and has opened a healthy gap.

Prior to Melbourne, Coulthard was professing fearlessness. "I have beaten him (Hakkinen) and I am capable of beating him," he said. "If you just think about the people who are assigned to work with me and of the back-up team behind them, then I have a brilliant group behind me. Taking that in isolation, there's no reason why I can't win a number of races in 1999 and, if I can do that, then the championship's definitely on."

But the championship looks far from "on". While Coulthard may believe he has ironed out the wrinkles that affected him last term, the new season sees him squeezed into a McLaren that apparently has more wrinkles than an old folks' home. The rise or fall of Coulthard's promised year in the sun may come down not to his own attributes, but to those of the car he is employed to drive.

From the day the McLaren MP14/4 was wheeled out of the garage at the tail-end of February and promptly stalled as it left the pit lane, it has been a problem child. Ron Dennis was even considering the possibility of taking the '98 MP13 to Australia, such was the ill-tempered nature of the new model. In the end they took the new car and it failed, spectacularly, a failure Dennis recently admitted he was disappointed by but unashamed of. "I would rather be sitting in this position, albeit with neither car finishing, than in the position of having to find performance," he said. "Finding reliability in a grand prix car is a systematic, design-led process which requires you to understand the problem and then find the solution. Finding performance is much harder."

But the new McLaren's undeniable potency could prove too expensive a commodity for the team given the short-term bursts of speed it has been capable of so far. The old adage, alluded to with admirable prescience by Michael Schumacher in reference to the McLarens the day before this year's Australian Grand Prix, goes: "To win you first have to finish".

Arch-rivals Ferrari, meanwhile, have reliability in spades. The received wisdom of last season had it that McLaren's huge domination of power left the challenge of Ferrari null and void almost as soon as Coulthard's nonchalant handover of the Melbourne baton occurred.

But the statistics refuse to bear this out. The very next race, in Buenos Aires, was won by the `slow' Ferrari of Schumacher, who beat Hakkinen into second. The German then took third in Interlagos, second in Imola, where Hakkinen failed to finish, and as the Ferrari mechanics puzzled over power for Maranello, the unshakeable nature of the Ferrari's construction kept Schumacher in the hunt. The same can't now be said of McLaren, who even this week were considering more technological changes with the fitting of a new exhaust system similar to the one employed by Ferrari.

For Coulthard, and for Hakkinen it must be added, the coming weeks may prove difficult and disheartening.

The phoney war of Australia and Brazil, during which the gremlins invariably come out to play, is over and the long trench warfare of the European season is about to begin and in no less a battleground than the Ferrari bunker at Imola. McLaren need to ensure that their war machines can regularly make it to the front, or else they may find that the enemy has stolen too significant a march on them.