Studio Harcourt Paris, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
On 2 May 1999, Rubens Barrichello lined up at Imola for his 100th Formula 1 world championship race and finished third for Stewart Grand Prix. It was a tidy way to mark a milestone. What made it quietly absurd, in retrospect, is that he was still only 26 years old and had not yet driven for Ferrari, had not yet finished second in a world championship, and had not yet become the most experienced driver in the history of the sport. At 100 races, Barrichello was just getting started.
A hundred races by 26
Barrichello had arrived in Formula 1 with Jordan in 1993 as a teenager of obvious talent and immediately recognisable speed.
Rubens Gonçalves Barrichello
- Races (starts):322
- Wins:11
- Podiums:68
- Pole positions:14
- Fastest laps:17
- Driver of the Day:0
- World titles:0
- Points (total):658
Data source: F1DB (GitHub)
The early years were a mixture of promise and frustration, as they tend to be for drivers who are fast enough to deserve better results than their machinery can produce.
There were flashes: a remarkable qualifying performance at Spa in 1994, an emotional first pole position at the same circuit the following year, moments that confirmed the ability was genuine even when the results were not forthcoming.
By 1999 he was at Stewart, the team Jackie Stewart had built with his son Paul and Ford backing.
It was not a front-running operation, but it was a serious one, and Barrichello was its leader.
Paul Lannuier from Sussex, NJ, USA, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Arriving at Imola for the San Marino Grand Prix with a century of starts behind him, he was an experienced, settled racing driver who knew exactly what he was doing in a Formula 1 car.
Imola, 2 May 1999
The San Marino Grand Prix produced a third place for Barrichello, which was precisely the kind of result Stewart needed and precisely the kind of result that suited the occasion.
It was not a win, but it was a podium in a competitive race, taken with the composure of a driver in his natural environment.
One hundred races will do that to a person.
Michael Schumacher won for Ferrari, with Eddie Irvine second.
Barrichello completing the rostrum gave Stewart their best result in some time and gave the afternoon a pleasing symmetry: a driver marking a landmark occasion by doing what he did best, which was driving a racing car quickly and bringing it home in one piece at the sharp end of the order.
What a hundred races looked like from there
At the time, 100 starts felt like a significant marker. In most careers it would be approaching the end of the story, or at least its final chapter. For Barrichello it was roughly the halfway point.
He moved to Ferrari for 2000 and spent six seasons as Michael Schumacher’s teammate, winning nine grands prix and finishing second in the 2002 and 2004 world championships.
He then went to Honda, Ross Brawn’s subsequent Brawn GP operation and Williams, racing with consistent pace and occasional brilliance deep into his late thirties.
When he finally left Formula 1 after the 2011 season he had made 323 world championship starts, a record that stood for years.
The milestone he marked at Imola in 1999 turned out to be something he would go on to double.
The Barrichello problem
There is a particular kind of Formula 1 career that generates complicated feelings, and Barrichello’s is one of them.
He was unambiguously good. His qualifying pace, his racecraft, his ability to extract performance from cars that did not always deserve his results: all of it was real and sustained across two decades.
The world championship never came, largely because Schumacher was in the same team during the years when Barrichello had the best machinery beneath him.
Whether that proximity helped or hindered his legacy is a question that still produces disagreement.
What is not in question is the consistency, the professionalism and the sheer volume of racing that produced that consistency.
The man who took a podium in his 100th race at Imola was the same man who was still taking competitive results more than two hundred races later.
