20 years ago: Alonso holds off Schumacher in Imola epic

Oscar Piastri will start what may be the last F1 race at Imola from pole, but two decades ago the track was alive after Fernando Alonso won a nail-biter for the ages.

Alonso and Renault arrived at Imola 20 years ago flying after back to back wins, while the reign of Michael Schumacher and Ferrari was fading fast and the pressure was on the “Prancing Horse.”

But Schumacher showed he had lost none of his magic and produced something special to create a finish fans still talk about two decades on.

Below is the Auto Action report from 2005 written by experienced F1 scribe Mike Doodson…

Fernando Alonso coped with a barrel-full of technical shortcomings in his Renault to coolly hold off a magnificent fightback from Michael Schumacher to win the San Marino GP at Imola. It was the third consecutive victory for the accomplished 23-year-old Spaniard.

Schumacher admitted that a mistake which sent his Ferrari flying off the circuit during Sunday morning’s qualifying session had cost him his chances of winning. But the champion showed that even at 36 he has lost none of his extraordinary motivation, as he pushed through from 13th place on the grid, hampered by a pre-race decision to fill his tanks at the first stop and run long during the second stint in order to come out fighting in the final laps.

It was, therefore, only after he had returned to the track following that second pit stop that Michael was close enough to challenge Alonso. The long strategy paid off at last, and for the nail-biting final 12 laps the two men fought a 250km/h game of chess as each sought to outwit the other. Their battle provided the sort of spectacle which has been missing from F1 for too long.

Jenson Button, who had challenged Alonso early in the race, took third place for the freshly competitive BAR-Honda team, while McLaren stand-in driver Alexander Wurz took a well deserved fourth. Kimi Raikkonen retired his pole-winning McLaren-Mercedes after nine laps while leading (broken drive-shaft] and Giancarlo Fisichella retired his Renault early with suspected electronic woes when he was already well beaten by his Spanish teammate.

Not since Nigel Mansell’s Williams mounted a fruitless chase of Ayrton Senna’s fading McLaren at Monaco in 1992 has there been as gripping a battle for a GP win as the one which was staged between Alonso and Schumacher. The difference this time was that Imola offers far more passing opportunities for a faster car than Monaco does.

Alonso confessed afterwards that he had been worried all weekend about the durability of his engine, which had probably been slightly cooked in the heat of Bahrain three weeks earlier. His Michelin tyres were also in a much less healthy state than the Bridgestones on Schumacher’s Ferrari, which had been deliberately scheduled for a late second stop.

“It was probably one of the best fights I have ever had,” said Alonso. “I knew that Michael was more than one second a lap faster than me, so my only chance was to hold him up a little bit in the middle of the corners and then to be on the throttle a little bit earlier… just to have this little space for the straight. And it worked well. We had two or three corners where we were very close, and I was doing my maximum. The tyres and the car were not performing perfectly and I knew that.”

Alonso had been warned by his engineers that any attempt to push harder would spell the end of his tyres, and maybe also of his overstretched engine. He would, therefore, have to dictate the pace to Schumacher, while at the same time covering his back in case the champion managed to creep alongside. His task was made even more difficult by two cars in front of him which he was determined not to lap.

*The last 10 laps I had the Red Bull [of Vitantonio Liuzzil and the Williams (of Mark Webber] in front me and I was hoping not to catch them because maybe / would have lost a little bit of mownforce and Michael (might have been able to overtake me. So in the really slow chicanes and in the slow corners I was braking more than normal, maybe, just to protect my rear tyres and to keep a gap if possible.” Schumacher explained that he would have adopted a different strategy if it hadn’t been for the weather or the incident on Sunday morning.

“If you think what would have happened if I hadn’t gone off in qualifying] it would have been the perfect day for us,” he reflected. “But here you go, we have second place, we have stunning pace and performance, that’s what we take away from this race after a tremendous effort and work from everyone in the team.

“Everyone was just flat-out working on the limit and it paid off. I have to say a big thank you to Bridgestone, who have been suffering since the start of the season from bad publicity. This was the  first step and there is more to come.”

It was not only Ferrari whose development over the last three weeks has given them something to cheer.

The BAR-Honda team has covered almost 9000km of testing to confirm a hunch that its lack of form in the first three GPs of the year was caused by confusing data from the wind tunnel.

A revised aerodynamic package proved so effective at Barcelona (where the revised car was lapping a cool 0.8 second faster than it had done a month earlier) that the PR department was instructed only to claim a gain of 0.4 seconds.

The changes mean that Jenson Button’s season has now started where he thought he’d left off last year: in pursuit of the Ferraris. On this occasion, though, he wasn’t quite equal to the task of fending off Michael Schumacher, who snuck inside him going into the top chicane and set off after Alonso.

*Fighting Michael in that position could have put me out of the race,” Button said.

“So I decided to play safe and ensure we got home and dry with a podium and our first points to show for it. As we saw here today, though, there is so much more potential in the car now, and we can be stronger still if we maintain the momentum and keep fighting for that win.”

The most amazing turnaround at Imola, however, came from Jacques Villeneuve, who miraculously appear to have discovered the form which won him his world title land his most recent race victory way back in 1997.

Encouraging though sixth place may be, it is far too soon to suggest that Villeneuve can be a contender again, but the decision by team boss Peter Sauber to let him work on seemingly engineering set-ups with a fighting drive.

Someone always has to suffer when under-performing teams find their feet again, and at Imola the underdogs were Toyota (who took second places in Malaysia and Bahrain) and BMW-Williams. While the Toyotas of Jarno Trulli and Ralf Schumacher looked just as unconvincing over the high Imola kerbs as their drivers had expected, at least they finished in the top eight points-scoring positions.

Williams, by contrast, managed to qualify creditably enough (Webber fourth, Heidfeld eighth), but were literally left behind at the start, where their traction systems clearly lacked what everyone else seems to have.

Webber drove a tough first lap to recover a couple of the lost places, but then got catastrophically stuck behind Trulli’s Toyota.

The team decided to call the Australian in early for his second pit stop, in a desperate attempt to vault him past some of the gang holding him up, but the stratagem had a contrary effect and he not only lost out to his rivals, but also to his teammate Nick Heidfeld, who finished just ahead of him in ninth place.

At least Webber managed to avoid the indignity of being lapped, but, as he said, “it’s very frustrating to be getting blue flags when you expected to be fighting with the leaders.”

Schumacher now trails Alonso by 26 points. But his extraordinary pace in those final 12 laps shows that the Ferrari 2005 is now a potential winner. It should not be forgotten that Bridgestone’s tyres, which faded badly in the heat of Bahrain, are now back on top in terms of durability.

The possibility of an eighth title for the German may be remote, but it is still there. And Schumacher’s sheer doggedness at Imola shows that he has the stomach for a fight.

Post race Button was disqualified from third due to BAR fielding underweight cars.

2005 San Marino Grand Prix results

Pos	No	Driver	Constructor	Tyre	Laps	Time/Retired	Grid	Points
1	5	Fernando Alonso	Renault	M	62	1:27:41.921	2	10
2	1	Michael Schumacher	Ferrari	B	62	+0.215	13	8
3	10	Alexander Wurz	McLaren–Mercedes	M	62	+27.554	7	6
4	11	Jacques Villeneuve	Sauber–Petronas	M	62	+1:04.442	11	5
5	16	Jarno Trulli	Toyota	M	62	+1:10.258	5	4
6	8	Nick Heidfeld	Williams–BMW	M	62	+1:11.282	8	3
7	7	Mark Webber	Williams–BMW	M	62	+1:23.297	4	2
8	15	Vitantonio Liuzzi	Red Bull–Cosworth	M	62	+1:23.764	15	1
9	17	Ralf Schumacher	Toyota	M	62	+1:35.8412	10
10	12	Felipe Massa	Sauber–Petronas	M	61	+1 Lap	18
11	14	David Coulthard	Red Bull–Cosworth	M	61	+1 Lap	14
12	19	Narain Karthikeyan	Jordan–Toyota	B	61	+1 Lap	16
13	18	Tiago Monteiro	Jordan–Toyota	B	60	+2 Laps	17
Ret	21	Christijan Albers	Minardi–Cosworth	B	20	Hydraulics	20
Ret	2	Rubens Barrichello	Ferrari	B	18	Electrical	9
Ret	9	Kimi Räikkönen	McLaren–Mercedes	M	9	Driveshaft	1
Ret	20	Patrick Friesacher	Minardi–Cosworth	B	8	Clutch	19
Ret	6	Giancarlo Fisichella	Renault	M	5	Accident	12
DSQ	3	Jenson Button	BAR–Honda	M	62	Fuel/Underweight (+10.481)3	3
DSQ	4	Takuma Sato	BAR–Honda	M	62	Fuel (+34.783)3	6

Image: Steve Etherington/LAT Photographic

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