The Brazilian Grand Prix Winner Nobody Could Name for Five Days

Giancarlo Fisichella won the 2003 Brazilian Grand Prix. Officially, for five days afterward, nobody actually racing that afternoon, including Fisichella himself, knew that for certain.

A race that fell apart in the rain

Interlagos in 2003 turned into what's remembered inside F1 as a "festival of accidents." Heavy rain flooded the track with standing water, and one by one the field lost the plot: Michael Schumacher, Juan Pablo Montoya and Kimi Räikkönen all spun out at different points. The decisive moment came when Mark Webber lost his Jaguar climbing toward the start-finish straight and hit the tyre wall hard enough to scatter debris across the entire width of the circuit. Fernando Alonso, arriving moments later, couldn't avoid the wreckage and crashed into it. The track was impassable. Race officials threw the red flag and ended the session on the spot.

Whose race actually ended first

Results in a red-flagged race are drawn from final positions two laps before the stoppage, a detail that matters enormously when nobody's sure exactly which lap the red flag came out on. In the confusion at Interlagos, officials initially believed it was thrown during lap 55 and awarded the win to Kimi Räikkönen, with Fisichella second and Alonso third.

Jordan disagreed, and pushed the case through appeal. The team's argument: the red flag had actually come out on lap 56, one lap later than officials first recorded, which meant the standings should be drawn from the end of lap 54, not 53, and that Fisichella, not Räikkönen, had been leading at that point.

A trophy delivered five days late

The appeal succeeded. Five days after the chequered flag had fallen, well after the podium celebration, the champagne, and Räikkönen's post-race interviews as the presumed winner, the result was formally overturned. Fisichella was declared the winner of the 2003 Brazilian Grand Prix, his first, with Räikkönen demoted to second and Alonso holding third. It remains the only Grand Prix win in F1 history that had to be corrected after the fact, days later, rather than decided at the flag. Interlagos has produced plenty of strange weather-driven results over the years, but nothing else quite like this one.