Formula One - European Grand Prix

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Jun 28, 2001

The Formula One season moved on with the ninth round of the 2001 season scheduled to be held at the Nurburgring, in Germany, called as the European Grand Prix. The place, Nurburg, is situated just 50 kms from the birthplace of the Schumachers, Ralf and Michael. Both were expected to battle it out for home domination after Ralf had pipped Michael for the First place at Montreal, Canada, two weeks ago. The spirits in both the camps, Ferrari and Williams, were quite high, and both went in full swing for saturday's qualifying session.

The qualifying session was a Williams dominated one, with the car perfect in aerodynamics and awesome engine power of the BMW engine, manifesting itself yet again. Ralf and Montoya held the top places for quite a long period until Michael Schumacher got his Ferrari in perfect balance to get pole position by sheer driving skill. He was the only driver in the session to have reached 1:14s while all others were above 1:15 minutes. Mclaren struggled yet again with a poorly balanced car and managed only to qualify 4th and 5th with David Coulthard and Mika Hakkinen respectively. So the stage was set for the battle of the two brothers, with both on the front row and Juan Pablo Montoya just on their tail.

The start of the sunday race was quite dramatic. Michael Schumacher, on his formation lap, experienced some problem in his Ferrari. So he jumped out of his car, took the keys of a BMW bike from a race marshall and drove it into the pits. There he quickly managed to get into the formation lap in time. He had no problems whatsoever thereafter. The race started and it was a pretty good start for all. Ralf got a better thrust in the start and was threatening Michael's position at the very first corner. In response to this, Michael squeezed Ralf to the pit wall and secured his position for the first corner. Montoya was in third place, while the two Mclarens managed to get ahead of Rubens Barrichello into 4th and 5th positions.

The pace of the race was controlled by the Schumacher brothers, both pulling away from the rest. Both were on a two stop strategy for the race.

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