MOTOR RACING: Alan Henry
THE Mercedes baby has come of age. Heinz-Harald Frentzen has at last got the drive his ability deserves and has stolen a march on his bitter rival Michael Schumacher by getting it in the best car in Formula One, the Williams.
The hiring of Frentzen represents a pre-emptive strike by the team owner Frank Williams. After Schumacher’s triumph in the Belgian Grand Prix, Williams said gloomily: “If Ferrari get their act together over the winter, as they will, then Michael could simply disappear next season.”
Williams recognised that his best chance of cutting Schumacher down to size next year would be by putting out his bitter rival Frentzen in opposition.
Like Schumacher, Frentzen is a product of the German kart racing scene. In 1981 he was the country’s junior champion and four years later at the age of 18 he switched to car racing in a Formula Ford 2000.
Successes came thick and fast. In 1987 he was runner-up in the German FF2000 championship, in 1988 he won the Formula Open Lotus title and in 1989 he was runner-up in the German Formula Three championship behind the Austrian Karl Wendlinger and ahead of Schumacher. In 1990 the trio became known as the “Mercedes babies” when they joined the sportscar team then operated by the Swiss Peter Sauber.
Frentzen proved every bit as quick as Schumacher but his career stalled in 1991 when a switch to Formula 3000 did not yield the fast track to a grand prix drive he had expected. For the next two seasons he was exiled in Japan, where he honed his skills as a test driver for the Bridgestone tyre company which had acquired a second-hand Tyrrell-Honda F1 car for development purposes. “In Japan,” he said, “I learned how to interpret what a car was doing for the engineers.”
Fortunately for the young German, Sauber remembered his protege when he started his Mercedes-backed F1 team in 1993. After a freshman season in which the Finn JJ Lehto partnered Wendlinger, Sauber replaced Lehto with Frentzen for 1994.
That same year saw Frank Williams’s first approach to Frentzen, immediately after Ayrton Senna’s death in the San Marino Grand Prix. Frentzen declined the offer, saying, “I simply could not let Sauber down. They got me from Japan when I seemed to have no Formula One prospects.” Wendlinger had been injured in practice at Monaco and the Sauber team were totally dependent on Frentzen’s efforts.
But in 1995 fate took a hand. Wendlinger retired from top- line racing and Sauber needed a replacement. He asked Frank Williams for permission to lease his test driver Jean- Christophe Boullion. A deal was struck and Williams watched with interest as Frentzen eclipsed Boullion’s efforts for the rest of the year. Yet Boullion had been as quick, sometimes quicker, than Damon Hill during testing.
Williams needed no more convincing. Frentzen would be his fall-back in the event of his failing to reach an agreement with Hill. And two weeks ago the 29-year-old finalised a two- year contract with the world constructors’ champions.
“I know I used to have an image of a daredevil who never made it to the finish,” said Frentzen in 1995. “That has now changed. When I joined Sauber I was a bargain buy for the team.” At around 2-million a year he was a bargain for Williams, too.