Ferrari wrapped up a dream championship double with a flawless performance from Michael Schumacher at yesterday's Malaysian Grand Prix on a day which saw Jordan's vision of fourth-place in the constructors' championship evaporate after a few short laps in the Kuala Lumpur heat.
The Irish team went into yesterday's season finale seeking four points and beat both Benetton and BAR out of point scoring positions. But with Jarno Trulli and Heinz-Harald Frentzen propping up the top 10 of the grid after struggling with intractable machinery through Saturday's qualifying session and with Benetton's Alexander Wurz fifth and BAR's Jacques Villeneuve sixth, the challenge shifted from unlikely to impossible.
And so it proved. Frentzen appeared to be poised to make a challenge, slotting his car through the start line frenzy to finish the first lap eighth. But as he began to put pressure on Eddie Irvine, the German's pace began to go off alarmingly, the handling of his car disappeared and after two lurid slides off track, Frentzen was forced into the pits. Armed with new tyres Frentzen tried to re-enter the battle but a lap later and he was back, turning his car into the garage, his EJ10 terminally stricken with a short circuit which disrupted his power steering.
While Frentzen was at least allowed to put the season behind him as early as lap seven, team-mate Jarno Trulli was forced to endure an ignominious end of season struggle to 12th, after he had been forced to pit on lap two for a new nose-cone after colliding with Irvine at the start.
"When I came in for the second time we put a lot of fuel on board so the car was then quite difficult to drive, but I think the real problems was there was more damage from the incident with Irvine," he said. "To be honest, this has not been our season and I'm already focusing on next year."
The pain of being locked into sixth place in the constructors' championship, just a year after comfortably taking F1's `best of the rest' trophy, was exacerbated by being forced to watch Jacques Villeneuve take his BAR to fifth.
Eddie Jordan admitted he had "no excuses" for his team's disappointing season. "This has been an incredibly tough season," he said, "especially coming on the back of last year's successes. Arguably though, we've learned more this year than last and the disappointments have made us more determined than ever to be winning races."
It was a day of mixed emotions at Jaguar, with Eddie Irvine ending a difficult season with a single point for a deserved sixth. But in his final F1 race, team-mate Johnny Herbert suffered a massive smash. Eight laps from home the rear suspension of 36-year-old Englishman's car collapsed in an explosion of debris sending Herbert careering through the gravel traps and into the tyre wall at high speed. Herbert was taken to the medical centre where an X-ray showed only severe bruising to his left knee.
But while it was a day to forget for Jordan Michael Schumacher sealed a historic Ferrari double. His victory, and Rubens Barrichello's third place, sealing a constructor's championship to perfectly compliment the drivers' title the German took in Japan two weeks ago.
It could hardly have been smoother for Schumacher. Despite being beaten to the punch at the start by Mika Hakkinen and David Coulthard, the Finn was soon hauled back, being handed a 10-second stop and go penalty for jumping the starting lights. Hakkinen's misfortune was David Coulthard's gain, however. Realising he was going to be slapped with the penalty, the outgoing champion let Coulthard through to eke out a lead. Schumacher was having no truck with such tactics however and muscled past, in pursuit of the Scot.
Coulthard had the upper hand, however, and began to pull away, forging a six-second gap by lap 16. It wasn't to be near enough however. The Scot made his first stop a lap later, a trip across the grass forcing him in early so that the crew could remove debris from a spin which had lodged in the radiator duct and caused the engine temperature to escalate dangerously.
It was Schumacher's window and as has become almost traditional the German, handed the lead, began to crank out quick laps, giving himself, over the course of the next seven laps, the gap he needed to make his own stop and rejoin ahead of Coulthard.
It was all he needed. Coulthard fought back to within half a second of the champion elect over the final laps but was rarely in real striking distance and Schumacher took his ninth victory of the year, the match of Nigel Mansell's 1992 record tally and the same total he achieved in 1995 in his second championship year with Benetton.
