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In retrospect, though the F2002 was blisteringly fast, much of Ferrari’s design effort was allocated to improving the handling rather than straight line performance. The team did this by lowering the center of gravity, while improving the weight distribution on both the chassis and engine. Though the Ferrari didn’t have any sort of revolutionary technical piece of engineering up its sleeve like an ultra-wide angle engine, or a V10 capable of 18,000 rpm, Ferrari designed its Formula One challenger as an overall package. Treating the engine, suspension, chassis and even tires as one cohesive unit, engineers at Maranello put a lot of emphasis in designing and manufacturing all of the car’s components to the highest standard, ensuring the highest possible levels of safety, performance and reliability in a Formula One racing car. Ferrari designer Rory Byrne and his team burned the midnight oil and worked until the eleventh hour to bring the F2002 to life. In fact, development time took so long that Ferrari decided to race a slightly tweaked version of the 2001-specifcation F2001 for the first two rounds in Australia and Malaysia. While Michael Schumacher won the Australian Grand Prix in convincing fashion, Ferrari thought that their advantage wasn’t big enough. Though the likes of David Coulthard, Ralf Schumacher and Juan Pablo Montoya already found it hard to keep pace with the F2001, nothing could have prepared them for the F2002. For the opposition, the F2002 was literally hell on earth. It broke all the rules by doing everything very fast. When it made its debut at the Brazilian Grand Prix, the newer Ferrari proved itself to be a winner, enabling Michael Schumacher to roar first to the checkered flag. Since then, it has eclipsed most of the standing records in Formula One history. By the eleventh race at Magny Cours in France, Michael Schumacher secured his fifth driver’s title, the earliest ever in a Grand Prix season. By the end of the 2002 season, the Michael Schumacher and F2002 combination was able to: clinch the most grand prix victories in a season by a single driver, give Schumacher his first win in Germany, attain the closest Grand Prix finish (0.01 second) with team mate Rubens Barrichello in the Indianapolis Circuit in the United States, and the most grand prix victories by a driver. Not to mention, the F2002 enabled Schumacher to cruise to a one hundred percent finishing record (his lowest being third place), while his team broke most of all the existing lap records for qualifying and the race proper. The domination showed by Michael Schumacher, Ferrari and the F2002 car prompted the call for drastic changes by several top people in the sport. However, as previously shown by the likes of Formula One’s foremost teams, these talks of curbing performance figures and equalizing teams become moot as engineers from places like Maranello turn to improve their cars more and more, giving performance and reliability unheard of in the sport five years ago. |
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