Among Formula 1’s most famous ones that got away is the 1988 season, where McLaren would have won every single race had Ayrton Senna not tangled with Jean-Louis Schlesser’s tardy Williams in the closing laps. Up there with that performance is Michael Schumacher’s 2004 season in what was also among the most dominant F1 cars ever: the Ferrari F2004. The German won 12 of the first 13 races of the season, a run blighted only by a clumsy DNF in Monaco.
For McLaren team principal Andrea Stella this is a defining period, because he was Schumacher’s performance engineer at the time and remembers the heady sense of excitement in the air as Ferrari realised the F2004 was far faster than its simulations had predicted.
