It ended, alas, in controversy, as we have come to expect of World Championship deciders in the contemporary era. Towards the end of the European Grand Prix at Jerez, Jacques Villeneuve aimed his Williams-Renault inside Michael Schumacher’s Ferrari as they braked for a tight right-hander. And Schumacher, for once taken completely unawares, simply and cack-handedly drove into Villeneuve. Happily, it was the Ferrari which came off worst.
As Schumacher slid helplessly into the gravel trap, Villeneuve his Williams damaged but still operational continued to the finish, and thus to the World Championship, a result which, in the circumstances, gave me particular delight. If Villeneuve’s stock rose consummately that day, so Schumacher’s appropriately fell. Everyone remembered Adelaide, the race which settled the World Championship in 1994, when the German, under pressure from Hill’s Williams, hit a wall, came back on the track in a now hobbled Benetton, and contrived to collide with Damon at the next corner. Those who then gave Michael the benefit of the doubt have revised their opinions since Jerez; those who did not shrugged that his attempt to remove Villeneuve was merely more of the same.
As Jackie Stewart put it, “I don’t believe that what Michael did in Spain was acceptable, nor that it should be tolerated. Even in the late ’90s, there is room in motor racing for morals, for a sense of ethics. If we don’t have that, I don’t believe we have a sport any more.” It was no surprise that JYS responded in this fashion, for he took a similar stand against Ayrton Senna seven years ago, when the McLaren driver brutally and quite deliberately turfed Alain Prost’s Ferrari off at the first corner of the Japanese Grand Prix.
