Come the 1998 season, Gabriele Rumi owned 70% of Minardi. From February, Gustav Brunner returned to Minardi from Ferrari as technical director. After a single season with the Hart engine, the team returned to Cosworth to supply customer version V10 Zetec-Rs with outdated specs. The car, although not too fast, proved to be quite reliable, but neither Shinji Nakano nor Esteban Tuero managed to score points, and that was the third consecutive year in which Minardi did not appear in the final standings. The best result was a seventh place for Nakano in Canada, a race in which at one point the Japanese driver had been running as high as fifth.