Motor racing: Irvine wants more success

"IF I leave here still leading the World Championship," Eddie Irvine said yesterday as he prepared for Sunday's Brazilian Grand Prix, "I'll be a happy man. And if I'm still leading it after the 16th race that would be fantastic. But there is a very long, long way to go. I'm not getting excited."

It has been a heady month for the 33 year-old from Dublin, who scored his first World Championship victory when he steered his Ferrari home first in Melbourne on March 6. By Formula One standards it has been too long a period without action, due to the cancellation of the Argentinian Grand Prix, but Irvine has made the most of it. "I find that I'm being followed round Milan by more photographers," he said, "which I'm not wild about, but, if that's the price of winning, I'll pay it."

A recent trip back to Northern Ireland for his mother's 60th birthday prolonged the celebrations. "Cars were driving past my Dad's garage beeping their horns, and the success was even mentioned in the Peace Talks at the Northern Ireland Assembly," Irvine noted with an uncharacteristic touch of pride.

Whether he can repeat the triumph this weekend is a moot point. Certainly, neither Irvine nor Ferrari's sporting director, Jean Todt, are willing to commit themselves, cowed by the shadow of Michael Schumacher. Like every other team Ferrari has been testing incessantly since Melbourne but though the Australian race dealt an unusual hand of cards to some, it is far too soon for a true pattern to have established itself.

"The proper answer will become apparent over the weekend," Todt said carefully. "We do not yet know what the others may have achieved. But in Australia two things worked against us. We had not optimised our technical package, and we did not have an aerodynamic part. Now we have both, but whether or not they will be sufficient, we have no way to know."

If caution is the watchword at Ferrari, it is no different at McLaren. Melbourne indicated that the world champion team retains the sort of advantage it enjoyed at the start of 1998, but its reliability cost it a runaway success in Australia. Where Ferrari's testing has aimed to find speed, McLaren has chased reliability. With the tests taking part at different venues, comparisons are academic.

"We've been working very hard and we've done a lot of miles," said McLaren's technical director, Adrian Newey. "We have achieved race distances, but we have also had the odd failure. Sure, we've improved, but we cannot be totally confident."

Newey nevertheless believes that McLaren has made sufficient progress to move further ahead of their rivals than the 1.3sec gap that the champion, Mika Hakkinen, enjoyed in Melbourne. Ferrari appears to acknowledge that. Privately, Todt expects McLaren to be dominant in qualifying, but expects his cars to match their pace in the race.

"We only got 95 per cent out of the car in Melbourne," Michael Schumacher said. But while he blamed part of the shortcoming on the team's inexperience running on Bridgestone tyres, after Ferrari used Goodyear last season, he also said that the team understands its car much better now: "With the small aerodynamic modifications that we have made I expect the gap to be much closer. But these things are always very difficult to predict."

So, too, is Ferrari's reaction to another Irvine victory. Todt was clearly uncomfortable with suggestions that a repeat might prove embarrassing to Schumacher's campaign, and his response was disingenuous. "People say that Ferrari depend totally on Michael Schumacher," he said. "Eddie's win, his first, was a nice answer to them."

The world knows that Ferrari places all of its eggs in the Schumacher basket, and his contract gives him complete priority. Irvine was instructed to let his team leader go by, should the occasion have arisen in Australia.

But Irvine is a master of this particular poker game, and deferred openly to Todt. "Whatever happens, it would be nice to leave here and go to Imola still leading the World Championship. People might want me to start philosophising, but there's nothing to say. I just would like to lead going to Imola, pure and simple."