Having said that, Mika was rattled back in September 1999. Sure, Schumacher was out of the picture (for now), but Häkkinen and McLaren-Mercedes had made heavy weather when they should have been making hay that summer. Ferrari number two Eddie Irvine had dug deep, aided most notably at Hockenheim by super-sub Mika Salo, to push himself into contention. Meanwhile, a combination of unreliability from McLaren, a few questionable strategy calls and alarming driver errors undermined Häkkinen’s season. Sounds familiar.
There’s some irony that back then Ferrari was cast in the Red Bull role. Sure, it hadn’t yet got on the winning streak that would carry Schumacher to five consecutive titles from the turn of the millennium, but the Todt-Brawn-Byrne-Schumacher super-team was almost fully matured and properly sharp. The red cars were close to bullet-proof. If only Mattia Binotto’s Ferrari of today could bottle some of that potent brew for the months to come.
Häkkinen’s fragility hadn’t been helped by team-mate David Coulthard enjoying one of his all too rare platinum-grade days at the previous race at Spa, having gone wheel to wheel through La Source and beaten Mika in a straight fight. Where were the team orders, Häkkinen asked, with some legitimacy? Ron Dennis just rubbed in some salt by placing the blame on Mika for the DC wheel-rub.
But here in Italy, the Finn finally looked set to banish his vulnerabilities once and for all. Having completed 30 laps of 53, he held a comfortable seven-second lead over the in-form Jordan of Heinz-Harald Frentzen and all looked serene – until he paddle-shifted down one click too many, hooking first gear instead of second at Monza’s old left-right first-corner chicane. The MP4/14’s rear wheels locked, around it swung, Häkkinen lost his engine and the car slid to a halt on the scrubby exit. As the tifosi roared in delight and an astonished Frentzen took the lead, Mika threw his steering wheel from the cockpit, chucked his gloves to the ground in a fury and sought the sanctuary of Monza’s greenery to crouch in sorrow. But even 23 years, ago there was nowhere to hide from the cameras as a lens pointing from a merciless helicopter invaded his moment of grief. Horrible. And it wasn’t even the first time that season he’d committed such a sin, having crashed out of the lead at Imola too.
“In 1999 the regulations changed a bit,” Häkkinen told Motor Sport’s Simon Taylor in 2010, referring to the fourth groove that had been added to the dreaded front tyres of that era. “Adrian [Newey] built a car that was more on the limit, we had a few technical problems. Then Michael had his crash at Silverstone and missed six races. I like to believe that if Michael had been there I’d still have won the title, but the satisfaction wasn’t the same.
“At Imola our strategy was two stops. Every lap had to be a qualifying lap. I was pulling out the advantage I needed, got on the kerb too much, lost the back end, hit the wall. The only person I can blame is myself. At Monza, same thing, I am leading, I crash. That time there were other factors: I selected the wrong gear, my mistake, but the transmission locked up, which it shouldn’t have done.”