Todt: “If we hadn’t won the 2000 world championship, that Ferrari would have exploded”

Ferrari and Schumacher: 2000, the long-awaited victory At the dawn of the 2000 season, Ferrari was coming off a 21-year-long abstinence in the drivers’ world championship – the date of Jody Scheckter’s last success. It seemed like a real curse, with a series of titles slipping away for various reasons between 1996 and 1999, which had put the tenure of both team principal Jean Todt and Michael Schumacher to the test. They were very intense years, with very strong opponents, such as Williams and McLaren.
But 2000 was a triumph, a triumph that took pressure off Ferrari, which achieved a driver-constructor double for five consecutive years. Other times. Todt’s story: 2000, the “now or never” year. In this regard, the account of that tiring period preceding the victories given by Jean Todt on the High Performance podcast is very interesting: “In 1997 we lost in the last race. In 1998 too, when there was the accident at Spa in the rain while lapping Coulthard. In 1999 there was the mistake of the mechanics and the accident of Michael and then Irvine who he lost to Hakkinen. That year, however, there was the constructors’ championship”. For the following year there was the feeling that we would be facing a point of no return, Todt explained: “We knew that 2000 would be the last year. If we hadn’t won in 2000, the team would have exploded. And we won. That success was not a given, because I remember that in the middle of the season during a meeting I said: ‘We have to win the last four races, otherwise the team is finished’. And we won, and then it was a dream period.”