Three corners from the finish line he made an elementary mistake and Rubens Barrichello took

Three corners from the finish line, he made an elementary mistake and Rubens Barrichello took his Ferrari down the inside of the Renault at the penultimate corner.”Everyone makes mistakes in life,” said Pat Symonds, the wise elder statesman of the Renault team. There was talk at the French Grand Prix, a week ago, of a screaming match between Trulli and team principal Flavio Briatore.And then there was the race in France, a week ago, in which Alonso suddenly came alive and battled Michael Schumacher for victory Trulli was left fighting for third. Toyota are looking seriously at hiring him as Ralf Schumacher’s team-mate in 2005, a useful lever for Trulli in trying to raise his Renault salary. The word in the paddock is that his financial demands have gone up dramatically after the Monaco victory. It was a dramatic revival of his fortunes after the 2003 season, during which he had been pushed out of the spotlight by Fernando Alonso, a man seven years his junior.

The Renault team kept faith in Trulli for this year and he suddenly started delivering. He seemed to have found the measure of Alonso and at Monaco produced a brilliant performance.But that was seven weeks ago and since then a lot has happened. Trulli’s contract with the team runs out at the end of the year and negotiations are not going well. He won in Monte Carlo in dominant fashion, his first victory in Formula One after eight years of frustration and disappointment. And yet accidents like the one which befell Trulli yesterday at Silverstone, can sometimes play an important role in determining how a driver’s career develops.
Trulli celebrates his 30th birthday tomorrow, but despite his experience in the sport and the fact that he is fourth in the world championship, having won this year’s Monaco Grand Prix, he seems to have developed the image of a man who is on the skids.Seven weeks ago, Trulli was the hero of Renault. As Jarno Trulli’s Renault was somersaulting through the sand trap on lap 40 of the British Grand Prix, the Italian was not thinking about his future with the Renault team.

“You see,” team boss Peter Sauber said pointedly, but with a smile, to his driver, “today we had a car that was much quicker than the Williams…”The final placings went to David Coulthard and Mark Webber, the Australian’s Jaguar finishing three-tenths of a second ahead of Fisichella’s team-mate, Felipe Massa.. Nobody was hurt, but after treatment they were forced to miss the race.Further back, fortune smiled on Juan Pablo Montoya when the man who may well replace him at Williams-BMW next year, Giancarlo Fisichella, had a longer than scheduled final stop to have his engine’s air pressure replenished, dropping his Sauber-Petronas behind the Colombian’s car. Somehow we’ve managed to drop behind a bit, which is very disappointing, particularly in front of our home crowd.”The team had an unpleasant setback yesterday morning when some of their key engineers were the innocent victims of a drunk driver on the road into the circuit. “Today’s race performance was nowhere near our testing performance earlier in the year. Our pace showed that we weren’t as fast as we were at the start of the season.