Giancarlo Fisichella

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Giancarlo Fisichella

Wednesday 14th February 2007

After failing to hold onto his Renault race-seat, Giancarlo Fisichella is taking a step down the grid to Force India in 2008. But it could be just what the Roman needs to finally prove himself to the F1 fraternity.

Giancarlo broke into F1 with Minardi in 1996 after being their test driver, he then moved to the Jordan team in '97 and showed glimpses of excellence in a fractious season with team-mate Ralf Schumacher.

His off-season move to Benetton for '98 team was a controversial one with Benetton chief Flavio Briatore taking the Jordan team to court to secure his services.

In his first season with the Italian outfit he got off to a shaky start but slowly found his feet towards the end of the season including a pole position at the A1-Ring in Austria.

Much vaunted as a young pretender to the F1 crown a couple of seasons back, Giancarlo had (thus far) failed to show the sort of pace needed to reach the highest level.

However, a lot of this is down to the poor equipment at his disposal. 1999 brought a couple of promising performances - most notably Canada.

2000 started off well, with five points finishes in the first eight races, but some high profile collisions coupled with mechanical failures meant that the Italian's season took a serious nose dive from then onwards.

Benetton's last season before changing into Renault was not a good one.

A flexing chassis hindered the power output from the radical new Renault engine making the car dreadfully slow. Fisi and new boy Jenson Button struggled.

Gradually Mike Gascoyne's technical team got a grip on things and Giancarlo managed third at Spa and 11th in the Championship, before leaving for Jordan-Honda.

2002 was a similar case of 'career on hold' as his natural talent languished in a car that was under-developed due to Jordan's lack of resources.

Coupled with the fact that the Honda engine needed little encouragement to grenade itself and an inexperienced team-mate (Sato) who wrecked a lot of the available chassis, it was another year with little to show - apart from a spectacular accident in practice for the French GP which sidelined him from the race.

Fisi will always remember 2003 as the year in which he won his first grand prix.

It occurred in the third race of the season, the Brazilian GP. Using all his race craft and skills in treacherous conditions, Fisi was able to take victory just ahead of Kimi Raikkonen in a topsy-turvy race.

Yet the season ended up being another huge disappointment, and the Italian struggled to score more points in the wretched Jordan.

At the end of the campaign, he moved on to Sauber, clearly with designs of using the Swiss outfit as a stepping stone towards earning a seat with one of F1's big guns.

For his part, Fisi kept up his end of the bargain with the understanding Sauber team, thoroughly eclipsing team-mate Felipe Massa and guiding Sauber towards mid-table respectability. His reward in August was a choice between Renault and Williams.

Eventually, he opted for a return to Renault. And so, after years and years of waiting for his opportunity, one of F1's most gifted drivers was able to show what he is capable of from the front end of the grid and show it he did, at least in Australia.

Fisi began the 2005 Championship with a pole position and a victory at the season-opening Melbourne race. However, that proved to be the highlight in what was to become a problematic season for the Roman.

While team-mate Fernando Alonso went from strength to strength, Fisi's performances went into a sharp decline as driver errors and reliability issues dogged him, leading to some speculation that all was not fair at Renault. The team, naturally, denied the rumours.

True or not, though, Fisi would add only another two podium finishes to his tally before the season concluded in China, while Alonso would rack up 15 in total as well as the Drivers' Championship title.

2006 once again saw Fisichella as the clear number two at Renault. While his team-mate wracked up seven victories, Fisichella could only manage one, the Malaysian Grand Prix, and finished the year fourth in the Drivers' Championship. Alonso, however, claimed his second World title title.

It was largely disappointing season for the Italian, who even though he wracked up more points in one year that he'd ever done before, felt he could have done better.

In 2007 Fisi became Renault's lead driver after the departure of Fernando Alonso and with a rookie team-mate, Heikki Kovalainen, by his side, Fisichella was expected to shine. But he didn't. The Renault lead man struggled for pace throughout the season as the team battled to get a handle on the new Bridgestone rubber.

In the early races Fisi obtained better results than Kovalainen, but in Canada and the USA it was the Finn who claimed the higher finishes. Fisi's season in fact hit a low point in Canadian when he was disqualified for exiting the pit lane while the traffic light was showing red, the purpose of which is to prevent cars rejoining the race ahead of the safety car. He later stated that he had been busy avoiding other cars in the pit lane and had simply not noticed the red light.

The Renault team seemed to have made significant progress in terms of pace by the Spanish GP, but a series of fuel rig problems meant that neither driver was able to capitalise on this apparent increase in performance. Fisi crashed into the Super Aguri of Anthony Davidson at the 2007 Hungarian GP which broke his rear suspension and forced him to retire.

The Roman only managed to score points in one of the final six races as his charged seemed to fizzle out. He finished the season in eighth place, one position lower than his rookie team-mate.

During the off-season Renault announced that they had no space left for Fisi, after signing Fernando Alonso and newby Nelson Piquet Jr. That left the Roman in search of a new team and he spent of the winter during trial runs for Force India.

His performances paid off with Fisichella set to be revealed as their second 2008 driver later this week.

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