The 2003 Formula One season ended with another Red double in the World Championship, with Michael Schumacher winning his sixth drivers’ title and Ferrari its thirteenth Constructors’ Championship.
Yet, in Maranello, the engineers realized that they were called to bring something extraordinary to the track to repeat the success the following year. And that’s exactly what they did.
F2004: the single-seater so fast it made Jean Todt doubt
After a brief and customary shakedown on the private Fiorano circuit, the new car was taken to Imola to be directly compared with the previous one, the F2003-GA. According to simulations, the new Ferrari was expected to be about half a second faster. It was precisely when Michael Schumacher lapped two seconds quicker that the first doubts arose.
Instead of congratulating each other for the work done in creating a missile, all the technicians tried to understand the reason for this discrepancy; convinced that something was wrong and led by Jean Todt himself. The only one convinced that this was the true potential of the new car was the Kaiser, who had unparalleled sensations behind the wheel.
The rest is history: Ferrari and the German legend celebrated the titles in the summer, in a one-sided season like few others in Formula 1. In short, the Ferrari F2004 single-seater wasn’t too fast to be true (despite the team’s amazement): it was simply too fast for all the competitors.
