IMO, Malaysia in 1999 was one of MSC's greatest races. When the race was over, Mika was at the point of exhaustion. MSC managed to place himself in front of Mika and frustrate him for half the race. As Mika had said, MSC was slow in places of the track where Mika couldn't pass and fast where Mika couldn't pass. It was a masterclass in keeping someone from passing you without being a complete a-hole.

Every episode, the more I realise how the last few years haven't been anything out of the ordinary. The FIA being inconsistent is just tradition.

3 things are unavailable - death, taxes, and the FIA being inconsistent

The line between innovation and cheating depends on who you support. Typical of motorsports in general.

To understand how this happened, you really need to read the findings of the appeal which was posted online for all to read at the time. It's fascinating. In a nutshell, here is how Ferrari did it: Something about the barge boards were 10mm out of spec. The ruling wasn't real clear on exactly what spec but from what I could gather at the time, it was their distance out from the centerline of the car, not their length. The bottom line is Ferrari needed to find 10mm from somewhere. First, Ferrari was able to show that the jig used by the FIA was not accurate. Because of the compound angles involved, small differences in the placement of the jig could give vastly different results. Ferrari showed that their own in house jig built exactly to the rules was far more accurate and with that jig, the barge boards were only 5mm out of spec. This was so convincing that the FIA actually purchased a set of these jigs for future inspection of all the cars. So that's 5 of the 10mm they needed. For the remaining 5mm, it comes down to the specifics of the rules and the types of dimensions and tolerances. There are three types of dimensions: 1 Minimums. Something has to be at least some dimension. There is tolerance above it, none below it. So if something has to be 10mm, 10mm is legal, 20mm is legal, 9.99999mm is illegal. 2 Maximums. Something has to be no more than a certain dimension. In this case, 10mm is legal, 5mm is legal, 10.000001mm is illegal 3 Set dimensions. Something has to be a prescribed size. This is the one applicable to the barge boards. You can't just say something has to be 10mm. There has to be a tolerance given to account for manufacturing tolerances, measurement inaccuracies, etc. So the rule should read something like 10mm plus or minus .5mm. However, the spec for the barge boards did not list a tolerance. Fortunately for Ferrari, the rules do provide for that. Any set measurement has the tolerance listed or if no tolerance, it is plus or minus 5mm. And bingo, there is the final 5mm Ferrari needed to argue the car was legal. Now this tolerance was never intended to be used for the barge boards, the FIA would have wanted a much tighter tolerance on them but they failed to list it. I could be wrong on this but as I recall, the only other set dimension without a tolerance was rear wing height which they also used the +/- 5mm tolerance on.

& people pretend as if 90s & 2000s f1 was totally perfect and without flaws...

Ceefax 301 - All sports headlines 302 - Football 360 - Motorsport Ah those were the days

Finally someone who didn’t say the fan car was banned

From Adrian Newey's book: "They were clearly oversized" they were excluded, then reinstated, and Ferrari International Assistance reared its ugly head

As it was Ireland's Greatest Year, this was one instance in which I would insist there wasn't Ferrari bias, because Irvine was back in the game. It only counts as Ferrari International Assistance if Schumacher benefits... The modern version with Hamilton and Mercedes is of course MAFiA - Mercedes Assistance Facility in Autosport. Purely on a technical level, it's an open and shut case - this is how it's supposed to be measured, it wasn't measured like that, so the ruling is invalid. You could just as easily argue anti-Ferrari bias in disqualifying them in the first place, if you want to play that game. The '99 decider was a win-win for me. Irvine wins, great! Hakkinen, my favourite driver in my early days with F1, wins, even greater! Nostalgia...

Let me add some interesting and important details to that story: Adrian Newey, designer of the 1999 McLaren, wrote in his book (page 252) that he himself measured the Ferrari's bargeboards during parc fermé and agreed with Charlie Whting, that the bargeboards were illegal. According to him, after Ferrari got disqualified, Max Mosley, President of the FIA at that time, encouraged Ferrari to protest. He goes on saying that Mosley later said to him, that he assumes McLaren lured Ferrari into a trap, because they knew the bargeboards were illegal before, but only protested once Ferrari was ahead in the championship.

The story is a little bit different 'though - the rule at the time was that anything laying between 33cm behind the front wheel centre line and 33cm before the rear wheel centre line needed to be "projected" to either the reference plane (the bottom central part of the car) or on the "step plane" (the bottom of the car ABOVE the mandatory 50mm step they run down the centre of the car back then) as mandated in article 3.12.1. To willingly OVERsimplify the matter, it essentially meant that no non-flat, horizontal surfaces should be visible in that area when looking at the car from the BOTTOM. The Ferrari barge boards in Sepang 1999 (which were a new design introduced at the Nurburgring, not the same used the whole season) were missing a little flat area at the bottom right where they curved outwards to follow the profile of the radiators, making it so that the above part of the board was visible from the bottom of the car. From a purely regulatory standpoint, this is no "loophole in the rulebook", this is straight up being caught with your pants down. Ferrari, Ross Brawn and everyone around the team knew this extremely well back then; I remember that even the Italian press, who can make the British tabloids look like cool, impartial observers of reality at the best of times, were more or less resigned to the fact a potential WDC was lost to what was likely a silly mistake, as it was well accepted by everyone involved (including the rival teams) that the extent of performance gain from the illegal part would be irrelevant. Where the situation becomes murky is the way the appeal was filed and won - on the technical side, there was a relatively nebulous argument that the part was "measured wrong", and that the missing chunk was only about 5mm in width, rather than the 10 mentioned in the disqualification. A tolerance of +/-5 mm was mentioned in the rulebook (although WHAT it specifically applied to, it was a bit of a more complex issue) and as such, a way to reinstate the result was promptly found. This however is just the icing on the cake - in one way, this story goes hand in hand with the Silverstone 1998 incident and the Michelin 2003 fiasco to illustrate the kind of political power Ferrari held at the time. In another way, it was clear from the get-go that the "powers that be" - read, Uncle Bernie - really, really, really wanted a climax finale to happen in Suzuka two weeks later. There was ALWAYS going to be some procedural error, some "missing data", a comma missed somewhere by the Sepang stewards. Think about it, this was a perfect scenario and Bernie got way more than he could dream of out of this situation - for a whole week after the Malaysian Grand Prix and until the final verdict in Paris, media around the world kept covering this story in detail, often even opening the news sections with it (at least it did happen quite a lot in Italy), fueling the public interest in the final race of the season.

I remember Brawn on itv showing us why Ferrari were originally excluded from the race with a barge board and a long metal ruler.

Ayy lmao. Comment to feed the algorithm gods.

I really like these "blasts from the past". Well done and THANKS!

Luca: You’re racing Michael: No Luca: You are racing Michael: Fine… *proceeds to snag pole by nearly a full second*

Oh, man, I remember when Teletext looked like that! Big, HD teles nowadays, it looks all slick and smooth! Not on all channels, though, I don't think, sadly... Least, I haven't seen it...

I'd forgotten about that. I guess I was still too focussed on Damon that year ☺️ Thanks for bringing it back up, it just goes to show that _plus ça change, plus ça même chose._

So... Irvine could have won the championship if Schumacher present himself to work sooner.

thanks for reminding me every 6 months or so that teletext was a thing, that sure as hell is a throwback.

It’s really sad that Irvine didn’t win. He completely deserved it. Just like Coulthard, and Webber. It’s kinda unfair that all three of them kinda happened to be in the right can at the right time and were bloody quick and easily could have won had their teammates in Coulthard and Webber’s case were once in a generation talent. In Irvine’s case a once in a life time talent. It would have been really cool for Irvine if he’d won though.

Another excellent video where an motorsports team exploits a tiny grey area in a given set of rules. This was essentially how the so-called garagistas did things in their 1970s heyday to bridge the gap between them and the likes of Ferrari, spot a grey area in the rules and come with a cheap and ingenious way of exploiting it, pissing off Enzo Ferrari in the process. Aidan, if you want to cover a true master of the rulebook grey area, have a look at a man from Nascar racing called Henry 'Smokey' Yunick. He was a absolute master of exploiting grey areas in the Nascar rules, including an occasion when he was accused of having an oversized fuel tank. In fact the fuel tank was regulation size but Yunick noticed that whilst there was a rule covering maximum fuel tank size, there were no rules covering the fuel line between tank and engine so he used an 11 foot coil of 2 inch hose which gained him an extra 1.5 US gallons of capacity. He also did many, many other things and I know it is not F1 but he was an interesting character nonetheless.

I was a fan of Irvine. The man was a hoot. It doesn't shock me MSC wasn't too motivated to help Irvine out at first since he was always about himself.

awesome video, like you say there have been so many examples of twitter/facebook breaking moments in f1 history and this is just one

6:42 love the credits at the bottom… stunning picture

My favourite bit of commentary from this race was Martin Brundle’s observation that Michael had spent the whole race trying to go slowly [to help Irvine] yet he was still half a minute ahead of everyone else.

This is actually new to me! Thanks for telling the story

Speaking of aero elements. I was a fan of Jordan. The current Aston Martin team evolved from them. So I like the team to do well. BUT...! I think their new rear wing is against the intention of the regulations and should be banned because, if teams ahead of them make it work for them, we'll have vortices disturbing the air for following cars making racing more difficult. The new regulations have improved racing so I'd hate to see that undone by a loophole.

If the boards were illegal all year but Malaysia was the first time they were measured correctly then either Ferrari should have been disqualified from every race up to that point, or the decision the FIA reached was correct. FYI if Ferrari had been disqualified from every previous race then the drivers championship would have finished: Hakkinen - 90 Frentzen - 74 Coulthard - 60 R. Schumacher - 47 Barrichello - 28 Herbert - 19 Constructors McLaren - 150 Jordan - 87 Williams - 51 Stewart - 47

Thank you Aidan. Good job. Well done.

99 - the year my dad was all in for Irvine. I think he'd got me a replica of Irvine's Ferrari when for all intents and purposes I'd rather have a replica of Schumacher's (sadly due to me placing it awkwardly, the thing fell and got smashed up). Having to ad hoc make excuses to my dad as to why Irvine was racing under the British flag is one of the harder things I've had to do. Once you get nationalism involved with some Irish people....it tends to get a bit messy.

As a Northern Irishman I was cheering for Eddie '4'. 'The bas'ards at Ferrari fucked him over' was always my view of it.

Hey Aidan. Here's an interesting video to make..Luca Badoer... his reputation, career and 2 races at Ferrari after a decade out in 09

This sounds a lot like the reverse of the wing fiascos from 2021. RedBull have a wing that's deliberately illegal, but designed in such a way that it passes the test the FIA uses. Tests then changed to fix this and RB given time to develop a new wing. Accidental broke part that ends up with Merc wing illegal and total DQ. And I know there are more instances of things being so uneven kin enforcement like that, going against everyone, that the FIA claiming consistency it so silly. They're the least consistent motorsport body out there.

Yes please on the How Schumacher returned in F1 in 1999 And yes please on another coverage of the 1999 Nurburgring race. Wasn't that the GP of Europe that year btw?

"or if someone at McLaren had eyes with built-in tape measures" Well their lead designer was Adrian Newey so that sounds about right.

Teletext...how I got news back in the day .

To me that was the final proof what kind of a joke the FIA was and still is.

2:09 that was his daughter who picked Montzemelo's phone!

I wonder how much Bernie was pulling the strings in the background. Probably a lot of TV money riding on a Championship finale…

I still miss sepang. The only decent tilke circuit. Often a great race. Perez 2nd place is stuck in my mind. Ferrari had a dodgy relationship with the fia at this point.

Ah, the years of Bernie and "Ferrari International Assistance"... Bless

Schumi. The best No2. The only No.1

Oh jeez... Aidan you look like you've caught the sun... A lot

Häkkinen's strategy was hilariously bad. Despite everything he was ahead of Irvine after Irvine's final stop, but just as Ferrari got worried, he had to pit again. 7 laps from home...

wish there was a place online to watch vintage races. what Espn is hoarding them thinking they will be valuable one day?

1. Comment to feed the algorithm god's 2. Aidan gets exposed to more viewers 3. Aidan finally gets his 100k 4. ???? 5. Profit?

The f1 1999 season review timestamp 2:05:50 shows Brawn explaining Ferraris perspective kzfaq.info/get/bejne/jd9kaJh0yKiamXk.html

👍

patrick head ? did you mean Rory buryn ?

I appear to be early.

high nose F1 car were so much more beautiful

Ferrari cheating and getting away with it

You aren't cheating unless you are caught

I remember in a post-race interview, Ron Dennis casually mentioned "some very bald tyres on those Ferraris" (this was the days of grooves) so initially when I saw that Ceefax headline (I used it too), that's what I thought it was. Unfortunately, said service was not verbose enough for me to understand what the problem actually was so had to watch the race highlights later to make sense of it. Ultimately, it was the ideal result for Schumacher. The appeal didn't help Irv get the drivers title, but it did win Ferrari the constructors in the end, meaning they'd be fully focused on Schumi's drivers title run in 2000.

Some people talk about DAS like it was some kind of game-changing advancement, and Mercedes championships that season are tainted. Since the FIA didn’t ban it immediately, and since other teams didn’t try and develop their own system, indicates that it wasn’t a significant advantage.

Are you related to a youtuber called Ruairidh Mcveigh? You sound the same.

I know a lot of people won’t like this, but whenever ferrari loses. It makes me smile. 😂😆🤣😝🤪😁