The Ferrari F2002, which won 14 of the 15 races it started in 2002, on track at Ferrari's Finali Mondiali in 2023. Photo: mirco.81 / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0
On September 29, 2002, Ferrari tried to finish a Formula 1 race in a dead heat and missed. Michael Schumacher, already a five-time world champion, backed off through the final corner at Indianapolis and let teammate Rubens Barrichello pull alongside. The timing beam split them by 0.011 seconds, and the 2002 United States Grand Prix went to Barrichello.
That is still the second-closest finish in championship history. Schumacher called it an attempt to “go together over the line.” Ferrari insisted nobody had ordered anything. It was widely read as a public settling of accounts for Austria, four months earlier, and it became the last act of a season that pushed the FIA into its first explicit ban on team orders.
A Season With Nothing Left to Decide
Indianapolis was round 16 of 17, and it decided almost nothing. Schumacher had wrapped up the drivers’ title at the French Grand Prix in July, with six races still to run. Ferrari clinched the constructors’ championship in Hungary in August. The F2002 was so far ahead that the only open question was second place in the drivers’ standings, and Barrichello was the favourite for that too.
The car explains the season. Ferrari introduced the F2002 at the third round in Brazil, and from there it won 14 of the 15 races it started. The only one it lost was Monaco, where overtaking is close to impossible and David Coulthard’s McLaren held Schumacher off. By September, Ferrari’s main problem was how its dominance looked to the people watching, not whether it could win.
Austria: The Debt Ferrari Created
What happened at Indianapolis only makes sense next to what happened at the A1-Ring on May 12. Barrichello led the Austrian Grand Prix on merit and was told over the radio to let Schumacher through. He did it on the run to the flag, handing over the win by 0.182 seconds. The crowd booed. On the podium, Schumacher pushed Barrichello onto the top step and handed him the winner’s trophy.
The FIA World Motor Sport Council met in Paris on June 26. Team orders were legal in 2002, so the council did not punish the order itself. It punished the podium: Ferrari, Schumacher and Barrichello were fined a combined $1 million for breaching podium procedure, with part of it suspended. The rulebook allowed a team to swap its drivers’ finishing positions, but it did not allow the drivers to swap places on the podium afterwards. That distinction shows how poorly the regulations were keeping up with the problem.
The Race: 73 Laps of Formation Flying
Schumacher took pole with a 1:10.790 on the 4.192km road course, which uses part of the Speedway’s oval and its main straight. Barrichello qualified alongside him, and the race mostly followed that order. Schumacher led for most of the afternoon, and Barrichello only went ahead while the pit stops cycled through. He also set the fastest lap, a 1:12.738 on lap 27.
Nobody else could get close. Ralf Schumacher’s Williams tangled with teammate Juan Pablo Montoya on lap 2. Kimi Räikkönen’s McLaren developed a misfire early on, and Coulthard eased off over the final 20 laps to protect his engine. Coulthard still finished third, but 7.799 seconds behind the Ferraris. Montoya was fourth, ahead of Jarno Trulli’s Renault and Jacques Villeneuve’s BAR.
Schumacher led by about 3.4 seconds on lap 64. That lead shrank to half a second by the start of the last lap, which in the F2002 meant he had lifted, not that Barrichello had found pace. Through the final turn, Schumacher moved off the racing line and let Barrichello come alongside on the run to the bricks. Schumacher appeared to be aiming for a tie. Instead Barrichello was ahead by a little over one hundredth of a second.
What Each Side Said
In the post-race press conference, Schumacher said he had seen “a great opportunity to finish equal” and admitted “we failed.” Barrichello said his teammate had been kind enough to let them finish together. Team principal Jean Todt denied that the result had been arranged. That left an odd official version, in which the world champion lifted on his own initiative and gave away a Grand Prix win while trying for a result the timing system was very unlikely to produce.
The timing detail is worth knowing. The closest finish on record, Peter Gethin beating Ronnie Peterson at Monza in 1971, is listed as 0.01 seconds because timing then was only recorded to the hundredth. By 2002, F1 timed to the thousandth. A dead heat at that resolution would have needed both cars to cross the line within one-thousandth of a second of each other. Missing by 11 thousandths was always the likely outcome.
Why It Mattered
For Barrichello, the win made the result of the season official. The 10 points confirmed him as runner-up in the championship with a round to spare. It was the best championship finish of his career, earned as the number-two driver in a team that did not hide who its number one was.
For Ferrari, the finish undid a lot of the goodwill a crushing season should have earned. After Austria, a staged-looking finish in front of a crowd of about 125,000, at a Grand Prix meant to build F1’s audience in the United States, was the kind of image the championship’s organisers least wanted. A team that had dominated on performance was now being judged on how it chose to finish races.
For the rulebook, the 2002 season led directly to change. For 2003 the FIA banned team orders that interfere with a race result. In the same off-season, points were extended from the top six to the top eight on a 10-8-6-5-4-3-2-1 scale, and single-lap qualifying was introduced. The aim was to make title fights closer and make races harder to control from the pit wall. Austria was the main reason for the ban. Indianapolis showed that a dominant team could still control the result even without anyone giving an order.
The Lasting Effect: A Ban Nobody Could Enforce
The ban lasted eight seasons, and teams spent most of them working out how to get round it. Direct instructions were replaced by coded radio messages. The rule’s weakness became obvious at the 2010 German Grand Prix, when Ferrari told Felipe Massa “Fernando is faster than you,” and he let Alonso through. The stewards fined the team $100,000, and the World Motor Sport Council declined to add anything further. Before the 2011 season the FIA removed the ban, deciding that openly allowed team orders were better than orders everyone could see but no one could prove.
That is the rule teams race under today. Team orders are legal, and they are now judged by fans and the media instead of by the stewards. Ferrari still has the same decision to make, as it does now with Hamilton and Leclerc, where it still isn’t naming a number one. What has changed since 2002 is that the orders are heard openly on the broadcast. Nobody tries to disguise them as a tie at the finish line.
Indianapolis 2002 is remembered as the closest finish most fans have seen. It is also a clear example of the problem the sport spent eight years trying to regulate: when a team is far enough ahead of everyone else, it can decide the order of its own finish.
Related Reading on Backfire Racing
A year later, Schumacher and Ferrari were running at a different pace entirely. See Schumacher’s 2003 Monza sprint, F1’s fastest race for 22 years. For a team that went much further than a staged finish to fix a result, read how F1’s first night race was won with a deliberate crash. And for Ferrari’s own look back at the era, see Ferrari’s Schumacher tribute at Monza.
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