S13 E4: Malaysia 2002 - F1's first drive-through penalty causes controversy
Bring Back V10s - Classic F1 stories
The Race Media Ltd
4.9 • 764 Ratings
🗓️ 30 April 2026
⏱️ 68 minutes
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Summary
Bring Back V10s makes a rare venture into the 2002 season to look back on that year's Malaysian Grand Prix.
Glenn Freeman is joined by Matt Beer and Jon Noble to reflect on a result that proved to be a false dawn for the season ahead, plus the collision between Juan Pablo Montoya and Michael Schumacher that earned Montoya F1's first ever drive-through penalty.
Also in the spotlight are Jenson Button's maiden podium near-miss, new BAR boss David Richards taking drastic action to sort the struggling team out, a look at what might be the lowest point in Jaguar's miserable F1 story, Takuma Sato's novel approach to trying to swap positions with Jordan team-mate Giancarlo Fisichella, and the latest antics from the Phoenix 'team' that was trying to get onto the F1 grid with year-old Prost cars, and even older engines.
There's also a suggestion from Jacques Villeneuve that back in 2002 F1 needed to get rid of testing and expand the calendar to up to 25 races a year. Imagine that!
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Athletic. |
| 0:10.0 | Do you know the story of the first ever drive-through penalty that was served in Formula One? |
| 0:15.7 | If you don't, you're about to find out because it happened at the 2002 Malaysian Grand Prix. |
| 0:21.6 | But that wasn't all this race was notable for, as it proved to be a false dawn for the season |
| 0:25.9 | ahead, particularly for Williams, which took a one-two with Ralph Schumacher and one Pablo |
| 0:31.0 | Montoya in this race in a season where it wouldn't win another race as Ferrari went on to |
| 0:35.6 | steamroller the opposition. |
| 0:42.8 | As usual, for this era of F1, there were off-track politics dominating the action in the panic, with crunch meetings over future rules taking place once the FIA had dealt with the |
| 0:48.5 | latest attempt by the Phoenix team to turn up with its old Prost cars. |
| 0:53.3 | To go over all of that and much more on this episode of Bring Back V10s with me, Glenn Freeman. |
| 0:58.6 | We have John Noble and Matt Beard. |
| 1:01.1 | Matt, welcome back to an episode of Bring Back V10s. |
| 1:04.4 | Straightforward first question, as always. |
| 1:06.5 | When you think of the 2002 Malaysian Grand Prix, what's the first thing that comes to mind? |
| 1:28.8 | Absolute outrage that hasn't really diminished in that time. Oh, great. Yeah, got reignited by watching the race again and going, seriously, that was a penalty. So, yeah, prepared to be outraged later on. I look forward to that. John. Yeah, I think it was the Malaysia Williams hope that what this meant for the season was going to be fantastic. It didn't come out. And I did my usual check the old hard driver |
| 1:33.9 | photographs to see what came up from Malaysia 2-2. I had about 100 photographs, 98 of which |
| 1:39.8 | were a holiday in Lancawi between Australia, between Australia and Malaysia. |
| 1:47.1 | And then I took two photos on the grid of hardly anybody there. |
| 1:51.9 | So there are my own personal memories of Malaysia, but the holiday and Lancai was great. |
| 1:52.7 | Okay. |
| 1:55.0 | Well, more on that in the Race Members Club. |
| 2:01.7 | Let's start, though, this 2002 episode by talking about 2001 cars. |
... |
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