10 DAVID COULTHARD
A hard-working team player, Coulthard is the longest serving McLaren driver and is fifth on the team’s all-time wins list. He finished third in the drivers’ championship three times with the squad, and was runner-up in 2001.
Coulthard joined from Williams for 1996 and formed a strong line-up with Mika Hakkinen. The Finn scored more points in 1996, while DC finished ahead the following year. More importantly, the Briton took McLaren’s first wins in more than three years when he triumphed at Melbourne and Monza.
New rules and the MP4-13 leapfrogged McLaren to the front of the Formula 1 grid in 1998. Hakkinen rose to the opportunity, beating Michael Schumacher to the crown as Coulthard scored just one victory, though he helped McLaren take the constructors’ title ahead of a resurgent Ferrari.
It was a similar story in 1999, despite Schumacher breaking his leg at Silverstone and missing six races. Various McLaren calamities, including Coulthard nudging Hakkinen into a spin in Austria, helped Eddie Irvine run Hakkinen close for the title and Ferrari snatched the constructors’ laurels despite the obvious pace of the MP4-14. DC dropped out of contention with an off in tricky conditions in the European GP while leading.
Coulthard took a career-best three wins in 2000 to finish third in the standings again, while Schumacher finally ended Ferrari’s long wait for the drivers’ crown by beating Hakkinen. Coulthard’s defeat of both at Magny-Cours showed that he could take on the best, but he struggled to do it often enough.
The 2001 campaign was Coulthard’s finest. He gained ascendancy over Hakkinen and scored 10 podiums but a string of problems, including a launch control glitch that meant he couldn’t take up his Monaco GP pole, meant he finished well behind a dominant Schumacher in the final table.
Ferrari and Williams were ahead of McLaren in 2002. Coulthard outscored rising star team-mate Kimi Raikkonen and took one of his best wins at Monaco, but the momentum swung away from him in 2003.
Coulthard was unlucky in both Malaysia and Brazil early in the campaign, and it was Raikkonen who challenged Schumacher. After nine years with McLaren, Coulthard was replaced by Williams ace Juan Pablo Montoya at season’s end, a move that made sense at the time but seems less
