With the derisory roars of the fiercely partisan Monza crowd echoing in his ears, Mika Hakkinen hurled the steering wheel from the cockpit of his stalled and stricken McLaren Mercedes, his Italian Grand Prix ended by a careless extra flip of the tiny paddles which control the car's gearing.
Clambering from the car Hakkinen, in impotent fury, ripped off his gloves and hurled them into the dust, the same dust into which he could see his championship aspirations disappearing. Frustration, anger, furious self- criticism - understandable and predictable reactions. The world championship leader knew he had erred crucially and let his chief adversary back onto the field for another tilt at the title. But as the news was relayed by the Ferrari pit crew to a struggling Eddie Irvine and Jordan's Heinz-Harald Frentzen swept into the lead, Hakkinen was succumbing to another less predictable reaction.
Caught by the prying lens of a helicopter-mounted camera, the Finn was seen crouched on an apparently private forest path, wiping away tears with his fireproof balaclava and being consoled by the same marshals whose guiding arms he had shaken off moments earlier. The world championship leader, driven to tears. Twenty-three laps later and Eddie Irvine had gained the solitary point needed to put him back on level terms with Hakkinen. In the Ferrari motorhome, the Irishman was thanking his lucky stars and toasting whatever benign conjunction had given him yet another chance of eventual glory. Across the paddock, at McLaren, Hakkinen was in torment, scouring the depths of his resolve, pushing himself to believe he still has a chance of the championship.
"I was in heaven on Saturday, but now I'm in hell," he said morosely. "I can't let myself get despondent. I have to remind myself that I'm still leading the world championship and with three races left I can still do it." However, with the sight of the defending world champion head in hands, defeated and inconsolable, indelibly stamped on the mind's eye, the inevitable question arises: has Hakkinen got the mental fortitude to see it through?
Mecerdes's head of motorsport, Norbert Haug, has no doubts. "I feel sorry for Mika," he said. "To be in the lead and in control of a race is sometimes a really difficult task. Many world champions have made mistakes in these circumstances, but we'll concentrate even harder now to win the championship."
Despite the advancement of Frentzen into the championship frame, the main threat to back-to-back championships for Hakkinen comes from Irvine, and the Irishman will be hoping that, as he attempts to rack up the pressure on Hakkinen, the Finn's concentration will waver.
"Mika has made two errors now when he has not been under pressure," said the Ferrari driver last week. "Let's hope we can make it a hat-trick."
Irvine, battling unco-operative machinery at Ferrari - and some say a similarly-disposed team -cannot hope to compete with the McLaren in a straight fight, so he must hope that his crude psychological fencing pays dividends at the tail end of a season in which Hakkmnen has displayed a race fragility at odds with his performances in testing.
The McLaren driver had scored a staggering 11 poles this year, just three short of Nigel Mansell's seasonal record of 1992, and already two more than he notched in the whole of last season. Yet despite the opportunities those front-row starts have afforded, the Finn has scored 20 less points than by this stage last season. Through a mixture of technical failure and self-destruction, Hakkinen has conspired to allow first Michael Schumacher to challenge his dominance and then, even more carelessly, the German's understudy.
However, while Irvine will go to the Nurburgring in Germany for next weekend's European Grand Prix hoping that pushing the pressure cooker into overdrive will put Hakkinen into a spin as damaging as that which took the McLaren driver out at Monza, very recent history shows it is probably a vain wish. Last year, approaching the Monza race, Hakkinen had a 10-point championship lead over arch-rival Schumacher and, on a circuit which favours the powerful McLarens, was expected to waltz away with enough points to make the title a certainty. But like last week, Hakkinen erred badly.
Overtaken by Schumacher as oil on the circuit forced him to go wide at the first Lesmo turn, Hakkinen put his head down and doggedly set about pursuing the Ferrari. Too doggedly. Overcooking his brakes, he sent his his failing McLaren into a lurid spin which left him beached and beaten. Watching Schumacher disappear into the distance and hack onto level terms in the title race, Hakkinen could feel the screw turning.
Michael Schumacher, like Eddie Irvine last week, took the opportunity to ratchet the pressure up a further notch.
Schumacher went to the following race, likewise at the Nurburgring, hoping to see the cracks turn into fissures. He was disappointed in the most emphatic fashion. When the race came the Finn drove sublimely, shrugging off any challenge Schumacher could throw at him. He took maximum points, consigning Schumacher to second and ultimately to championship failure.
Despite the fact that this year, Irvine has been afforded the extra opportunity of next month's penultimate Malaysian Grand Prix, a completely unknown quantity in terms of form and set-up, the circumstances uncannily mirror this year's championship run-in.
Last year, going to the Nurburgring, Hakkinen had scored four victories, the same tally as this year. He had, as this year, erred badly in Italy and let his main rival draw level.
But when the moment of truth came, the Finn sourced a previously untapped reservoir of icy calm and dispatched his enemies with nerveless precision. Irvine, whose past mastery at mind games has given him the edge over rivals in the past, would do well to learn the lessons of history or he is likely to be doomed to repeat his absent leader's errors.
