WHEN THE McLaren-Mercedes team hired the Spice Girls to unveil their new car a month ago, they were trying to show that has-beens could turn into wannabes. But even amid the euphoria of a £1 million launch party, they would hardly have been optimistic enough to believe that their long and painful period of failure might end in the very next race, with a win for David Coulthard in yesterday's Australian Grand Prix.
Coulthard's victory at Melbourne's Albert Park circuit came exactly 50 races after McLaren's last success, which also marked Ayrton Senna's final appearance in their colours. But as the 25-year-old Scot swept to his second grand prix win, followed home in third place by Mika Hakkinen in the other McLaren, the gods of misfortune seemed to have moved further up the pit lane.
The Williams-Renaults of Jacques Villeneuve and HeinzHarald Frentzen, clear favourites to maintain the form that brought them the drivers' and constructors' titles last season, suffered disaster at opposite ends of a race they were expected to dominate leaving Michael Schumacher's Ferrari to mount the only serious challenge to the McLarens. The double world champion finished between the two silver cars, prevented by an emergency late refuelling stop from sustaining a final challenge to Coulthard, who had responded with impressive calm to the sight of such a formidable foe in his mirrors.
Villeneuve disappeared in the opening seconds, the victim of an accident caused by the rashness of Schumacher's team-mate, Eddie Irvine. That opened the way for Frentzen who led the opening laps of the race with ease before making the first of his two pit stops. But when a botched second stop forced him to press hard to catch Coulthard, a front brake gave way and spun him into a gravel trap with three laps to go.
But their disappointment was as nothing compared with that of Damon Hill, last seen winning the 1996 world championship in a Williams. On Saturday his efforts to qualify the troublesome Arrows-Yamaha in his first race for the team had been nothing short of heroic. In terms of sheer guts 20th place on the 22-car grid in the Arrows represented a feat as remarkable as any of his pole positions with the all-conquering Williams.
"If we get the car to the finish" he said on race morning, "it'll be quite an achievement." To the distress of his admirers, he did not get to the start. He had barely begun the parade lap when he lost the use of his electronic throttle control. As the engine died, he pulled silently off the track and then dismounted to help the marshals manhandle the car out of the way before the race came by.
Hill's departure had no effect on the shape of the contest, which was largely determined by Irvine's notoriously erratic judgment. Villeneuve, whose speed in practice had seriously undermined the new-season optimism of his rivals, slipped his clutch on the start line and got away badly from pole position, but not badly enough to deserve what happened next. As Frentzen made a better start from the other front-row position and zipped past him on the left, with Johnny Herbert's Ferrari-engined Sauber in pursuit, Irvine came up on the inside as they approached the first corner, a right-hander.
Braking impossibly late on a slippery part of the track off the normal racing line, the Ferrari went past Coulthard's McLaren but then slid into Villeneuve's Williams, which was turning into the corner. Villeneuve hit Herbert, who had thrust his Sauber's nose round the outside of the Williams, but was not far enough ahead to avoid the impact. All three cars were out.
Herbert, who had suffered a similar fate at the Irishman's hands at Monza in 1994, was publicly philosophical about his removal from a race in which he could have expected to be challenging for a podium place. "Eddie outbraked Coulthard," he said, "and then he outbraked himself." Villeneuve acknowledged his own poor start, but felt that Irvine's error had nevertheless cost him a probable win.
The Ferrari driver's own version of the event bore no resemblance to anyone else's. "Villeneuve closed me down," he claimed. "It was a racing accident. It was very difficult to see. You have no vision out of the sides of these cars because of the head restraints." This seemed enough to convince the race stewards, who watched the video, heard the evidence, and decided to take no action.
If Villeneuve was a blameless victim, his team could only point the finger at themselves for Frentzen's subsequent failure to win the race. The performance of the brakes on the Williams had been criticised by Villeneuve at a press conference the night before, and the drivers were given a two-stop strategy, against one stop for the other teams, in an attempt to reduce the strain on the brakes by running light fuel loads and keeping the car's weight down. But the gamble failed when a wheel-changing problem in Frentzen's second stop cost several seconds and forced him to push so hard in the closing stages that the left front brake disintegrated, permitting Coulthard to coast home to a win which was also the first for a Mercedes-Benz engine in Formula One since Fangio wrapped up the world championship at Monza in 1955.
Gerhard Berger's lacklustre fourth place yesterday was poor consolation for the Benetton team, who were distinctly unimpressed as they watched Jean Alesi, their other driver, coast to a halt with a dry petrol tank on the 35th lap. Alesi ran in fifth place during the early stages, but lost radio contact with the pit and failed to notice when his crew repeatedly hung out a board ordering him in for refuelling.
For Alain Prost, Olivier Panis's fifth place and a seventh for the Japanese debutant Shinji Nakano in the renamed Ligier-Hondas represented a solid if unspectacular start to his ownership. Panis's two championship points were also the first scored on Bridgestone tyres in Formula One. Nicola Larini brought the second Sauber into sixth place, with Frentzen classified eighth and the promising Jarno Trulli ninth in a Minardi-Hart.
As for Hill, a long and hard season beckons. If he thought the last four years were character-building, the prospect of 16 more races like this one will test his resilience to the utmost. On the other hand, even the smallest improvement will feel like a victory. If he and the team have hauled the car up to the middle of the field and are finishing races by the time they get to Silverstone in July, they will deserve a championship trophy of their own.
