Three points for the Scuderia in the
season's first race
Melbourne, March
8, 1998
- DNF and 4th
position
- Faster than
Williams?
Michael
Schumacher DNFed and Eddie Irvine gained the 4th
position - that's the result for Ferrari in the
1998 season's first race at Melbourne in
Australia. Well, it could have been better, but
this year's first Grand Prix clearly proved that
Ferrari's F300 does match the technical level of
the world-champion Williams, maybe the Ferrari is
even the better car.
  
But it also became
even more clear that another team will join the
battle of the others for the motorsport's crown:
McLaren-Mercedes. Mika Hakkinen and David
Coulthard lapped all the other drivers in the
Australian Grand Prix.
For Michael
Schumacher, the race was already over after six
laps: Engine trouble forced him and his F300 (s/n
184) to resign. Prior to that, Schumacher had
been able to defend his 3rd starting position and
obviously was the only driver who managed to keep
up with the leading McLaren. Why the engine did
eventually fail is unknown at this point.
Schumacher noticed that the temperature was
rising critically - it is possibe that leafage
which had been blown onto the track tamped the
Ferrari's air-inlets during the first lap and so
caused the engine's collapse.
Eddie Irvine
is very pleased by his 4th position; he stated
that he probably could have performed even better
lap times than the Williams if their topspeed had
not been slightly higher than the Ferrari's. The
fact that Irvine did not get any chance to
overtake, but instead was stuck behind Frentzen
for many laps indicates that the changes in the
FIA's F1-reglement which should actually make
overtaking easier for the drivers will probably
not show the effect the FIA expected them to
have.
 
Irvine drove the
race in the T-car, s/n 181 after he had driven
s/n 183 in qualifying (reaching the 8th starting
position in the end, time elapsed 1:31,767,
exactly slower by one second than his teammate).
On Sunday, one had decided to change the car for
the T-car, a decision that eventually proved to
be correct while the decision to exchange the
engine of Schumacher's car quickly before the
start in a hurry obviously was not a good one.
Ferrari's team
boss Jean Todt, however, feels comfortable with
Irvine's result and pointed out that it might
even have been better if the pit-stop had been
performed faster.
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