Sauber The best car he had, 1999–2000

At Montreal on 13 June 1999 the Sauber mechanics soaked Pedro Diniz in beer. He had finished 6th in the Canadian Grand Prix, and it was his first point for the team, at the sixth attempt. His explanation, to Folha de S.Paulo, was short: “The secret was managing to stay on the track.”

Sauber had signed him the previous October, when he left Arrows under a clause in his contract, to replace Johnny Herbert beside Jean Alesi. He brought Parmalat and other backing with him, which reports put at between US$6 million and US$10 million. Peter Sauber, who had founded the team at Hinwil in Switzerland and still ran it, put it differently.

Compared to his high-rated teammates his performance in the past two years has impressed us more than his regularly mentioned relationship with strong business partners.

The C18, Leo Ress’s development of the previous year’s car, ran a Petronas-badged 1998 Ferrari V10 on Bridgestone tyres, and one of its special features was a second roll structure over the top of the survival cell. It was launched on 19 January 1999 in the Jean Tinguely museum in Basle, with Parmalat on its rear wing. Diniz’s car was number 12.

The first five races gave him nothing. At Melbourne, in Alesi’s spare after a fuel-pressure problem, he qualified two places ahead of him, which surprised few, wrote Atlas F1, since he had a reputation for occasionally embarrassing better-known team-mates; he ran as high as 4th before the gearbox lost three of its gears. At Interlagos he was 6th when Toranosuke Takagi, rejoining, drove over his nose. At Imola a sticking fuel flap, the gearshift electronics and a change of steering wheel came before he went off, probably on somebody else’s oil; at Monaco he locked his front brakes at Sainte-Dévote on the lap he was due to stop; at Barcelona the transmission failed.

Three points

Montreal had begun no better. A crash on the Friday morning left him with a sore neck, and he started 18th. He was 10th after one lap. Behind two Safety Car periods he lost places at a restart to Ralf Schumacher and Herbert, won one back when Ralf went off at the hairpin on lap 33, and was passed by Eddie Irvine late on; Jacques Villeneuve complained that Diniz had passed him under the Safety Car’s yellow. The race finished under yellow flags, and he was 6th: “after starting 18th, finishing sixth isn’t so bad”.

Four weeks later, at Silverstone, he started 12th, raced Herbert, and held off Giancarlo Fisichella’s Benetton through the closing laps for another 6th. Eddie Jordan explained afterwards that Damon Hill had backed off at the end because Jordan knew it had a good gap to Diniz.

In Austria a fortnight after that he qualified only 16th, and the team took downforce off the car for the race; he was 4th in the warm-up. He was 8th after one lap, and fought Ralf Schumacher, who put him on the grass twice before the move that settled it: “I overtook him round the outside and when we got to the hairpin he tried to come back at me, outbraked himself and spun off.” He was 5th by lap 11 before a two-stop plan dropped him back, and he finished 6th, on the winner’s lap: three 6th places in four races. Peter Sauber said that to score from so far down the grid took a lot of risk. That evening Diniz admitted to Folha that Benetton had been in touch about 2000.

A team order

In Hungary on 15 August he qualified 12th, one place behind Alesi, made the better start and ran 9th, ahead of his team-mate, for 19 laps. Then came the instruction: “Mr. Sauber told me to let him by. I did this, at the chicane at the top of the hill, but I was upset and lost my concentration, and spun under braking.” That evening Alesi, who had retired 3 laps from the end, announced that he was leaving Sauber. Six months later Peter Sauber would say that the team had never had team orders.

Benetton, which had sounded Diniz out as a replacement for Alexander Wurz, did not come back to him, and on 25 August Sauber announced that he would stay for 2000. Peter Sauber praised his consistency, his contribution to developing the car and how well he worked with everyone in the team. Diniz told Folha why he had signed: “I thought it better to settle it than stay in uncertainty.” Five days later Sauber signed Mika Salo to replace Alesi.

Nürburgring, 26 September 1999

On the Friday of the European Grand Prix his front wing came off as he passed the pits. He qualified 13th, three places ahead of Alesi, and said his last lap would have been good enough for the top 10 had Irvine not gone off the road and come straight back on in front of him. The first start was aborted when Marc Gené stalled his Minardi, and the second was given about five minutes later.

Diniz made a very good start. Into the first corner, the Castrol S, Hill’s Jordan slowed suddenly, with what was reported as an electrical problem; Wurz’s Benetton, behind it, swerved right and hit the Sauber at an acute angle. The Sauber went onto its side, slid upside down across the track and rolled onto the grass. Its roll hoop had broken off at the first contact with the ground, so that when the car finally overturned he slid along with only the second roll structure and the high head support between his helmet and the ground. Folha reported that his head struck the ground several times before the car stopped; his helmet was cracked. Alex Zanardi took to the gravel to avoid him, and the Safety Car ran for the first 6 laps.

He could be seen moving in the upturned cockpit. Folha had him lifted out, immobilised, seven minutes later, and crash.net reported him taken from the righted car still in the regulation safety seat, waving to the crowd. Among those who reached him was Alex Dias Ribeiro, the Brazilian former Grand Prix driver who drove the FIA’s medical car.

Se fosse há alguns anos, o acidente teria sido fatal.

If it had been a few years ago, the accident would have been fatal.

He was taken to the circuit medical centre and then to hospital in Bonn, with bruising to his shoulder and knee and no fractures, and he flew home to Monaco the same evening. Wurz, who called him a friend, said he was very lucky that Diniz was not injured. Johnny Herbert won the race, the only victory the Stewart team ever had.

On his website Diniz wrote about the long slide. He had feared, he said, that the car would catch fire, and had told himself to stay calm.

While my car rolled towards the gravel trap, I prayed and asked God to protect me. … I was very lucky, that’s a fact.

The roll hoop

Sauber published its engineers’ analysis four days later. The first impact, at about 95 km/h (59 mph), had been absorbed as it was designed to be. Then the roll hoop had struck the kerbs sideways, under a load far beyond the safety limits the rules required, and broken; as the car rolled again, the second structure and the head support had protected him. Sauber said it would reinforce the roll-hoop mounting before the Barcelona test the following week, and in the first week of October he was back in the car there.

At Sepang three weeks after the accident he called for an enquiry: “The FIA will have to look at the whole thing and try to make roll hoops safer, because my accident could have been very serious.” At the same Malaysian Grand Prix the FIA showed the teams’ technical representatives the data from the accident recorder, which showed that the roll bar had not survived the sideways impact. The technical directors agreed, unanimously and voluntarily, to double the lateral load in the roll-structure test for 2000, from 12 kN to 24 kN. It was not made a rule, and in February 2000 Patrick Head said that between two and five teams had not complied; Sauber was among the teams named, and agreed to strengthen its roll bars before Melbourne. Much higher test loads were set for 2001. In 2022 Wurz, by then the drivers’ association chairman, remembered Diniz’s as the last roll hoop to collapse in Formula One, as far as he knew, and said it had led to stricter crash tests.

After Austria he did not finish another race until the last of the year. At Sepang he was the first driver to spin on the new circuit, on the Friday, and in the race he went into the gravel while trying to take a drink. At Suzuka he was 11th, and Alesi, in his last race for Sauber, 6th. Alesi had out-qualified him 12 times to 4, but Diniz had scored 3 points to his 2 and was 14th in the championship. Joe Saward thought he had outscored Alesi simply by being there at the finish, while crashing more often than a driver of his experience ought to.

Salo came from standing in for Michael Schumacher at Ferrari, and Peter Sauber promised the two of them equal status. The C19, launched in Zurich’s Hallenstadion with Enrique Bernoldi as its test driver, was about 10 kg lighter than the C18 and ran the previous year’s Ferrari engine in its Monza specification. It was weak in qualifying until the middle of the season. Diniz’s car was number 16.

The second race was his home Grand Prix, at an Interlagos resurfaced and bumpier than ever on the main straight. On the Saturday morning Salo’s rear wing failed at high speed and he crashed; in qualifying the upper plane of Diniz’s wing failed, though he hit nothing, and advertising hoardings fell onto the track three times. Diniz qualified 20th. Peter Sauber, unable to find the cause at the track to his satisfaction, withdrew both cars, and said he was sorry above all for Pedro, at his home race. Sauber’s investigation later blamed loads from the bumps far beyond what the wing had been designed for. It was the only race of the 99 he entered that Diniz did not start.

It’s a shame to be out of my home race due to the rear wing failures I suffered all day long. I understand the safety reasons mentioned by team principal Peter Sauber, even though I’d prefer to go on.

The year was full of incidents. At Monaco he was left on the pre-grid, regained his place when the first start was aborted, and when the race was stopped after a pile-up at Loews on the first lap he ran back to the pits for the spare car, beating Jenson Button there; he hit the barrier on lap 31. In Canada he pushed Pedro de la Rosa’s Arrows into the wall on lap 48 and was given a 25-second penalty: “I just took my normal racing line, and he kept going. I think he would have been wiser to have backed off.”

In Austria, in the chaos of the first corner, he swerved round Jos Verstappen, hit Fisichella, touched Salo and spun, and was given a 10-second stop-go. At Hockenheim he and Alesi, now at Prost, collided at the third chicane at high speed; Alesi said Diniz had suddenly changed line, and Diniz said Alesi had put two wheels on the grass: “Suddenly it started raining wheels!” Atlas F1’s Pablo Elizalde was blunter: “The Brazilian ran into Jean Alesi’s Prost at Hockenheim at nearly 300km/h, and caused an accident where fortunately no one was hurt.”

There were better afternoons. At Imola he started 10th and finished 8th, and grandprix.com wrote that the size of a wallet was not everything: he could mix it with the fast men, it said, though he remained inconsistent. At the Nürburgring in May, eight months after the roll, he spun to last on lap 3 in the rain and fought back to 7th, his best result of the year. At Monza, in the race in which a fire marshal, Paolo Gislimberti, was killed, he was 8th again.

At Indianapolis on 24 September, the first Grand Prix on its road course, he qualified 9th. The race started damp, and he was one of the few to start on heavy wets. He stayed out while others stopped and by lap 9 was 3rd, behind Michael Schumacher and Heinz-Harald Frentzen: as high as he ever ran in a Grand Prix. He stopped on lap 12 and rejoined 6th, was passed by five cars as the track dried, and was 6th again when Verstappen went off. Then, he said, the car began to feel strange, like a brake problem or a loose wheel, and a stop on lap 58 dropped him to 8th, a lap down. “I’m really disappointed today … Without that, I would have finished sixth.”

Salo out-qualified him 11 times to 6, and was ahead every time both finished. Diniz finished 10 races and scored no points.

Why he stopped

By August his seat was in question. He said that staying at Sauber was his priority, and grandprix.com reported that he had offered British American Racing £8 million to drive for it in 2001. That month Sauber ran him at Mugello against its test driver, Bernoldi. Diniz was a second quicker, and protested in public.

A driver with six years experience in Formula One and in his second season with a team shouldn’t be put in that sort of situation … If they don’t know how quick I can go now, when will they know?

His manager wrote to Peter Sauber that the test was not what one expected of a Formula One team. On 28 August Sauber signed Nick Heidfeld, for three years, in place of Salo, who was going to Toyota, and in the autumn Kimi Räikkönen impressed in tests at Mugello, reportedly half a second quicker than Diniz. Peter Sauber said much depended on whether Diniz wanted to stay. Diniz said he might go to Prost or stay where he was, but that he was definitely not going to Minardi. Sauber’s drivers for 2001 were Heidfeld and Räikkönen.

On 30 November 2000 he announced that he would stop driving: his family had taken a stake in Prost Grand Prix, reported as 40 per cent. Folha wrote that he had come into Formula One with the reputation of a playboy and, in his six years, had changed it, above all in Europe. In 2012 he gave the magazine Trip another reason.

Em 1999 eu estava correndo na Sauber, o melhor carro que tive. Mas eu estava com 29 anos, me via em situações que eu já não curtia tanto. Mesmo as festas e o glamour, eu já estava achando tudo meio sem graça, vazio. Foi perdendo o encanto.

In 1999 I was racing for Sauber, the best car I ever had. But I was 29, and I found myself in situations I no longer enjoyed so much. Even the parties and the glamour, I was finding it all a bit dull, empty. It was losing its charm.

His last Grand Prix had been at Sepang on 22 October. He started 20th and was out at the second corner: by grandprix.com’s report, he was trying to pass Heidfeld; by his own account, Heidfeld squeezed him and he hit Alesi. Either way, that was the end of it: “A long way to come for such a short run.”