Race History
At its first race in Brazil, the F2002 was victorious, being driven by Michael Schumacher and continuing Ferrari's trend since 1999 for its cars to win on their debut. Michael Schumacher clinched second on the grid and after a first lap altercation with Juan Pablo Montoya, took a somewhat easy win from his brother Ralf's Williams. There was some controversy surrounding tyre allocation because the team only had one F2002 chassis at the race. Therefore Schumacher's spare car was an F2001 chassis and because the two chassis used different wheel rim designs each required separate wheels and tyres. It was thus argued that Schumacher had in-effect twice the allocation of tyres as any other driver. The controversy was managed by Ferrari agreeing to aggregate their tyre usage between the two cars, ensuring that Schumacher used the same total number of tyres as all the other drivers.
What followed was a season of domination, the likes of which had not been seen since McLaren's 1988 season. With the F2002, Schumacher scored 9 more victories, his total of 11 wins was a record for the season, while Rubens Barrichello scored four. The only race that the car failed to win was at Monaco, while the F2001 did not take the Malaysian GP. Furthermore, Schumacher finished every race on the podium, never finishing lower than second with the F2002. The German won the world championship in record time, clinching the title at the 11th race of the season in France. The two Ferrari drivers were comfortably first and second in the drivers' championship, and Ferrari scored as many points (221) as the rest of the teams put together.
Such was Ferrari's dominance that Schumacher and Barrichello were criticized for swapping finishes at Austria and United States - an event that would provoke a ban on 'team orders' for the following seasons, and would be raised again in 2010 when Ferrari were fined after appearing to instruct Felipe Massa to allow Fernando Alonso to win the German Grand Prix.
The F2002 (renamed the F2002B) was still competitive at the beginning of 2003, and Schumacher took the car's last win in the San Marino Grand Prix before it was replaced by the F2003-GA for the next race. The F2003-GA was not quite as successful as the F2002, and Schumacher only won the title by two points over McLaren's Kimi Räikkönen.
Read more about this topic: Ferrari F2002
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