Matt Bishop: F1's self-destruction at Indianapolis - inside the 2005 US GP

How did that happen? OK, here goes. The version of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway then used by F1 was a 13-turn switchback made up of half the famous oval, encompassing two of its superfast banked turns, and an infield section consisting of 11 fiddly low- and medium-speed corners. As such, it was a tricky challenge for the teams’ and tyre companies’ engineers, and in 2005 the Michelin men got their sums wrong.

During Friday practice a number of the Michelin runners suffered left-rear tyre failures, after which, as a safety precaution, the company’s on-site engineers examined all the tyres that they had brought to the circuit. Faults were discovered with six tyres, and those six tyres were immediately flown back to Michelin’s Clermont-Ferrand (France) headquarters for further analysis. At first, a batch (i.e. manufacturing) problem was suspected – so, in order to provide a backup option, Michelin arranged for a shipment of Barcelona-spec tyres to be flown to Indianapolis. They arrived at 8.30am on Saturday.

That same morning, swapping and pooling gossip and rumours in the Indy media centre, we journalists learned that Michelin’s engineers in Clermont-Ferrand had been unable definitively to isolate a root cause of the failures that had occurred on track the day before, but we were given to understand that they suspected that the unusual lateral and vertical loadings induced by the high-speed running on the Brickyard’s famous banking, and particularly in Turn 13, had caused the Michelin left-rears to deform.

As a result, Pierre Dupasquier (worldwide racing director, Michelin) instructed the seven Michelin-contracted teams to run no more than 10 cumulative laps per car in the two Saturday morning practice sessions. After those sessions, the tyres were taken off each Michelin-contracted car and flown to Michelin’s Lexington (South Carolina, USA) plant for yet more analysis.

Later, in qualifying that afternoon, each Michelin-tyred car successfully completed its one fast lap (i.e. three laps in total, comprising an out-lap, a flying lap, and an in-lap) since F1 qualifying was run as a single-lap shoot-out in 2005. The fastest four qualifiers were all Michelin runners – Jarno Trulli (Toyota) in pole position, followed by Kimi Räikkönen (McLaren), Jenson Button (BAR), and Giancarlo Fisichella (Renault).

After qualifying, all the left-rear Michelins that had been used in qualifying were flown to the Michelin facility in Akron (Ohio, USA) for final analysis, accompanied by FIA personnel tasked with making sure that parc fermé regulations were strictly adhered to. Meanwhile, news reached us that Michelin’s engineers in Clermont-Ferrand were now certain that Friday’s failures had indeed been related to the unusual lateral and vertical loadings induced by the banking at Turn 13.

Then, early on Sunday morning, it became clear that Michelin’s last get-out-of-jail-free card had disappeared, and the Michelin-contracted teams finally grasped that their tyre problem was a critical one. The reason was that, under further Turn 13 simulations conducted in both Akron and Clermont-Ferrand, Michelin’s left-rear tyres, including the Barcelona-spec left-rears, had all failed. So the only solution for the Michelin-contracted teams was either to withdraw from the event altogether, for safety reasons that would constitute force majeure, or to advise their drivers to race at reduced speed through Turn 13.

Clearly the former would be legally, contractually, and reputationally devastating for the entire F1 community, and the latter would not be workable. Senior people began to panic. Wild rumours started to circulate. Was there technology available via which a mandatory Turn 13 speed limit could be imposed on the Michelin runners? Could the Michelin runners be diverted down the pitlane on each lap, thereby avoiding Turn 13 altogether? Could a temporary chicane be placed immediately before Turn 13?

Of the above three suggestions, only a temporary chicane seemed to be (a) potentially safe and (b) even remotely feasible. Dupasquier supported the idea, as did the team principals and drivers of all the Michelin-contracted teams, as did Tony George (owner, Indianapolis Motor Speedway), and as indeed did Bernie Ecclestone. But Max Mosley, at home in Monaco, point-blank rejected the idea, his not unreasonable view being that it would be unfair on the teams supplied by Bridgestone, whose engineers had got their sums right.

That Sunday morning a febrile atmosphere began to develop in the F1 paddock. Ecclestone, George, McLaren‘s Ron Dennis, and Renault‘s Flavio Briatore all telephoned Mosley to beseech him to allow a temporary chicane to be built – even going so far as to suggest that no Michelin-contracted team be eligible to score world championship points in the interests of sporting equity.

I called Mosley, but unsurprisingly he did not pick up. A couple of days later I called him again. This time he picked up, and this is what he told me: “A temporary chicane would not have been part of the homologated circuit. It would not have gone through all the elaborate safety procedures we have nowadays – simulation, extrapolation, physical inspection, and so on. So, if there had been an accident – even one not directly related to the fact of the chicane – and someone had been injured or worse, then we [the FIA] would have been in an indefensible position in front of a United States court, because it could have been shown that we had not followed our own circuit-homologation procedures.”

As usual, Mosley’s logic was impeccable and his attitude intransigent. That was the kind of man he was. Everyone else, Ecclestone included, was ready to compromise. Even Eddie Jordan, the ex-owner of his then still eponymous Jordan team that had been recently purchased by the Midland Group — whose cars were on Bridgestones and whose drivers Tiago Monteiro and Narain Karthikeyan, therefore, finished third and fourth when that farce of a six-car ‘race’ finally took place, which result would have been categorically unattainable to them had the Michelin-contracted teams taken part — later spoke the following words into my tape-recorder: “Look, I’m pleased that my old team finished third and fourth, of course I am. But the old maxim ‘all publicity is good publicity’ is untrue.

“It’s unbelievably sad to see the finest sport in the world drifting towards self-destruction like this. In the past, if a similar situation had cropped up, the team bosses would have gone to Bernie and said: ‘The tyre company ballsed up. They say we can’t race. But clearly we have to. Sort it.’ The understanding would then have been that the teams would be bound by Bernie’s suggested solution. Bernie would have gone to Max, together they’d have found a way, and Bernie would have said: ‘Right, we’re racing, and this is how we’re going to race.'”

Why did that not happen at Indianapolis in 2005? There were probably many reasons, some of them expressed with typical eloquence by Mosley in the paragraphs above, and others perhaps never spoken by him and now lost forever, since he took his own life four years ago. But 20 years ago, sitting alone in his Monaco apartment, was he discomfited by the spectre of the imminent failure of F1 to put on a decent sporting spectacle in the world’s biggest economy? Was he worried by the prospect of that coming calamity? Later, was he bothered that throughout the ‘race’, when it was finally run, the spectators had booed and jeered and chucked beer cans onto the circuit? “Well, the whole thing was very annoying,” he later told me, “because I’d been looking forward to a long lunch followed by an afternoon with a good book.”

That reply was (a) probably true and (b) surely designed to wind up the Michelin-contracted teams’ bosses something rotten. But why? Why was Mosley on the one hand so urbane and statesmanlike yet on the other hand so impish and blasé? It is a good question, and the answer to it might well have been lying concealed somewhere in the serpentine coils of his complex character, where perhaps only he might have been able to access it, assuming that one fine day he might have wanted to do so. If so, it is also now lost forever.

Although he is no longer here to defend himself, it is worth our reminding ourselves that on his watch the FIA’s nickname was ‘Ferrari International Assistance’, that sobriquet the result of his having appeared to favour the Scuderia serially and in many ways, and that Michael Schumacher won the 2005 United States Grand Prix for Ferrari, on Bridgestones, a few car lengths ahead of his team-mate Rubens Barrichello, and that it was the only grand prix that Ferrari won in an F1 season otherwise totally dominated by the Michelin-contracted teams.

And think about this. Just as in the early 1980s the teams that were aligned to Ecclestone’s and Mosley’s Formula One Constructors’ Association (FOCA) chose to pick a fight with F1’s then governing body (FISA) over the arcane interpretation of a rule relating to liquid ballast, so also the row that apparently stemmed from the Michelin tyre failures in Friday free practice at Indianapolis on June 17, 2005 — 20 years ago to this very day — was perhaps au fond yet another flashpoint in the simmering undeclared war that was already being covertly waged between the FIA and the seven teams that failed to compete in the United States Grand Prix two days later.

Led by McLaren and Williams, and specifically their principals Ron Dennis and Frank Williams, the leaders of those teams had been growing increasingly impatient with Mosley in the years leading up to 2005. Indeed some of them had begun to compare him to Jean-Marie Balestre, his vain and patrician predecessor, who had been the FISA President with whom Mosley and Ecclestone had crossed swords 25 years before: a classic case of poacher turned gamekeeper on Mosley’s part. And, now, in the aftermath of Indy 2005, quite a few F1 team principals began briefing us pressmen that Mosley should resign.

He did not. When I asked him why not, his answer was typically neat: “If something happens that’s at least partly your responsibility, there’s an argument for resigning. But when something happens that has nothing to do with you – for example, a tyre company makes the wrong tyres, and turns up at a race with them, and there’s nothing that the FIA can do to solve the problem short of breaking its own rules and thereby taking serious, unnecessary, and potentially unlawful risks – then it seems to me that the question of resignation doesn’t even arise.”

What happened next? In the short term, at a cost estimated to be €18.5 million (£12.5 million), Michelin offered a full refund to every fan who had bought a ticket for the 2005 United States Grand Prix and supplied free tickets to 20,000 fans for the 2006 United States Grand Prix. In the medium term, the company withdrew from F1 after just one more season, 2006, and it has not returned since.

In the longer term, the relationship between Williams and, particularly, Dennis, on the one hand, and Mosley on the other, gradually descended into open hostility, involving serial disagreements over governance, rule changes, and finally the infamous ‘Spy-gate’ controversy of 2007. But that is another story – and perhaps one day another Motor Sport column. All I will say about it now is that it did no one any good. Or, to quote an African proverb that I like a lot, “When elephants fight, it’s the grass that suffers.”