1994 German F1 Grand Prix Race Report & Results
Event: German Grand Prix
Track: Hockenheimring
Weather: very hot, sunny, dry
Gerhard Berger won his ninth F1 World Championship race at the 1994 German F1 GP today. The Ferrari driver started from pole and won on the Hockenheim circuit for the first time. It was also his first win of the season and the 104th win for the Ferrari F1 team.
McLaren-Mercedes begins, Ferrari runs out of time
Hockenheim arrived with two paddock stories already moving toward their resolution. The first was a McLaren-Peugeot relationship now publicly broken in everything but the contract, Ron Dennis was telling his Woking staff he could land Schumacher (he could not) while quietly approaching Mercedes through Gerd Krämer, his old contact at Stuttgart. Mercedes had decided, after Indianapolis 1994 (Penske-Mercedes had won the 500 with Al Unser Jr.), that they needed an F1 partnership at a top team rather than at Sauber. Sauber's title sponsor Broker had folded; Tissot-Swatch had stepped in at Mercedes's request to keep the lights on. The McLaren-Mercedes era would be announced in September. The 1994 chassis was still painted in Peugeot colours, but the marriage was over.
The second story was Ferrari's first win in 1,400 days, the Scuderia had not stood on the top step since Alain Prost at Jerez in 1990. Berger had taken pole on Saturday at 1m43.582s, Ferrari's first since Portugal 1990, on a brand-new V12 043 engine that Jean Todt had quietly homologated in time for the long Hockenheim straights. Alesi was second on the same engine; Hill third on the new B-spec FW16; Schumacher fourth on a Benetton that the Hockenheim layout would expose for the first time.
The first-lap pile-up
Race day brought 47°C asphalt, the hottest Hockenheim since 1950, and a 150,000-strong crowd waiting to cheer Schumacher home. The start brought disaster. Mika Häkkinen, taking the inside line ahead of David Coulthard, was squeezed between the Williams and a fast-starting Mark Blundell, sent broadside across the field, and triggered a chain reaction. Eight cars were eliminated on the first lap: Häkkinen, Coulthard's running mate Frentzen, Herbert, Brundle (spun by Herbert), Irvine, Barrichello, Blundell, and a separate accident involving de Cesaris, Zanardi, Alboreto and Martini in the midfield. Alesi's Ferrari, on its brand-new 043 engine, retired on lap 1 with an electrical failure entering the forest. Only fifteen cars remained running.
Berger led from Schumacher with Katayama (!) third for nine laps before the Japanese spun his Tyrrell. Schumacher hunted Berger through the first round of pit stops, Benetton's stop on lap 13 was clean, ten seconds, and emerged ahead, but on lap 20 the B194's Ford V8 began to misfire and the German limped to retirement. The home crowd, devastated, started filing for the gates.
Verstappen's fireball
On lap 16, with Schumacher still chasing Berger, Jos Verstappen brought the second Benetton in for its scheduled stop. The refuelling rig's valve failed to close cleanly. Petrol jetted across the car onto the hot exhaust. The B194 was instantly engulfed in a fireball that briefly surrounded both Verstappen and his mechanics. Inside ten seconds the fire was out, extinguisher work that bordered on heroic, and Verstappen had unbuckled and leapt clear. The mechanic on the rig suffered minor burns. Verstappen, with singed hair, walked away. Television viewers across the world saw a man emerge from a fireball that, for a fraction of a second, had appeared certain to kill him. The FIA opened an investigation. The third Benetton scandal of 1994 was under way.
Berger crosses the line, Ferrari weeps
Once Schumacher's engine failed on lap 20, the race was a comfortable Ferrari procession. Berger pitted on lap 21, took 16 seconds (Ferrari mechanics enjoying every second of normality), rejoined leading, and cruised to the flag 55 seconds clear of an Olivier Panis in the Ligier-Renault. Eric Bernard finished a delighted third, what would prove the only F1 podium of his career, with Christian Fittipaldi fourth, Gianni Morbidelli fifth (a long-overdue Arrows points double), and Erik Comas sixth.
"Everyone was waiting for this win with such impatience," Berger said, with the look of a man who had won not for himself but for Maranello. "Since a year and a half the enormous work of the team had to pay off one day." Jean Todt, on the phone in the pit-wall garage, was put through to a sobbing Luca di Montezemolo. The lap of honour was conducted with a Ferrari flag. The 1,400-day drought, the longest in the Scuderia's history, was over.
Ligier celebrated its first double podium since the 1985 Australian grand prix. Cesare Fiorio, in his first race as Ligier's sporting director, asked his mechanics for tricolore flags and was told that the team had not stocked any. Olivier Panis on his ninth F1 race: "It's a bit unreal... twenty laps before the end I was far from thinking of such a thing!" Eric Bernard, on what nobody yet knew was his only F1 podium: "Such a result does a lot of good after the difficult period I went through following my 1991 accident." Hill, lapped twice after his first-lap incident, finished eighth and out of the points.
At Maranello later that evening, the Ferrari workforce gathered for the first impromptu factory celebration in nearly four years. Across the paddock at Hockenheim, Briatore was being grilled by reporters about the fuel-rig fire. The FIA had quietly opened a fourth file on Benetton, added to the ongoing investigations into the British grand prix black flag, the launch-control suspicion, and Schumacher's stop-go non-compliance. Three weeks until Hungary. The 1994 championship's longest courtroom drama was about to begin.
Classification 1994 German F1 GP
Fastest lap: 1:46.211 min by David Coulthard (Williams FW16B) in lap 11
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