The growing competitiveness of the BMW Williams F1 team has elevated team mates Ralf Schumacher and Juan-Pablo Montoya to potential world champions of the future. However, it is a far from ideal partnership.
While BMW Williams F1 drivers Ralf Schumacher and Juan Pablo Montoya could both, quite conceivably, become world champions in the future, there is no love lost between them.
Schumacher recently admitted that his relationship with the other drivers in Formula One was not ideal, probably because he is three-time’s world-champion Michael’s brother and “everybody wants to beat a Schumacher”. However, from the onset Ralf and Montoya have not gotten on well at all and Montoya this week spoke out on his relationship with the German.
“Ralf and I respect each other, and we push each other really hard. But your team mate is not the guy to go and have dinner with”, Montoya was quoted as saying in Autosport.
Montoya admitted that he did not expect to be friends with Schumacher during their time at Williams together, or during their time in Formula One, because they “are rivals even if they are both driving for the same team”.
While the rivalry between the two Williams charges has yet to reach the scale of the acerbic feud between Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost at McLaren in 1988/1989, a recent sequence of events indicates that the spirit of teamwork at Williams is almost non-existent.
Even before the season began, there were rumours of a rift between the pair. Things have gotten worse following incidents at the French and British Grands Prix, where Schumacher twice refused to allow Montoya to pass him. Although the team blamed the French Grand Prix incident on a “radio malfunction” in Schumacher’s car, Ralf’s “reluctance” probably cost Montoya a podium finish at Silverstone.
During the post-race conference after the German Grand Prix, Schumacher implied that the engine failure on Montoya’s car, which happened while the Columbian had a gigantic lead, was as a result of his team mate’s indiscretion. The failure handed Schumacher the race on a plate.
“Going into the race we knew it was going to be tough on the engine. Juan Pablo pulled away and I thought ‘you do what you want’ ”, Schumacher said at the time. “I had started to save the engine already because I know how long and hard this race is. And it paid off in the end.”
