Michael Schumacher’s future seems to be the only thing people are talking about at Monza this weekend. Forget Ferrari being at their home track in the closing stages of a crucial battle for the world championship, or the imminent announcement that Raikkonen will be a Ferrari driver next year. For months, Ferrari have said that they will announce their driver line-up for 2007 at Monza, and they’re sticking to that. And Schumacher is not happy.
He has seven world titles to his name, 89 victories, 152 podiums and 68 pole positions from 244 starts. No further comment needed.
We first met at a sports car race at Silverstone in 1991. He had got into a bit of trouble for undoing his belts out on the track — and he has been known to get himself in trouble from time to time since then. He won the Macau F3 race by taking out Mika Hakkinen in the closing stages, for example. That controversy says as much about him as does his brilliance. It wasn’t until his grand prix debut at Spa later in the year with Jordan that we began to see the full potential. I can still hear the commentator getting more and more excited: “Michael Schumacher is P7 on the grid!” The confirmation for me that he was special came at Suzuka at the end of that year, by which time he was driving for Benetton with the great Nelson Piquet as his teammate. He was driving Piquet’s spare car in practice and crashed it, wiping out the gearbox. Now we would see how good he was after his first “big one”. He had rocked up into the team with a triple world champion as teammate and had just wrecked his car. Anybody else’s confidence might have suffered. He was strapped back into his own race car and his first flying lap was faster than any he’d done before, and right on the pace. We had a megastar in waiting.
Some of my earlier impressions of him began clicking into place to form a fuller picture.
In that Silverstone sports car race I had driven the whole endurance race by myself. I finished third and was destroyed as we went to the press conference. Michael turned to me and asked: “So you drove the whole race?” I said: “Yes,” and he then just looked straight ahead. He said nothing.
More significant parts of his personality revealed themselves after we became teammates. Mentally, he had a confidence and gleam about him that could bury you. Physically, he is lucky because he doesn’t sweat and always looks sharp. He had been following a fitness regime for years and simply raised the bar still higher.
It was soon apparent that he could drive every corner of every lap of a race distance on his and the car’s limit. We were coming from an era where you had to nurse the clutch, gearbox, tyres and fuel consumption, whereas by now the cars were becoming increasingly unbreakable in races that were more akin to 60 or so consecutive qualifying laps. He was fast, acrobatic, fit and fearless.
After testing at Barcelona one day we went training in the gym. Every piece of equipment I picked up, every exercise I did, was wrong, according to him. It was mind games, designed to make me question myself. It made me smile, as it does today when he uses press conferences to plant doubt in the minds of his competitors. Fair game, though.
I recall sitting in the Benetton team motorhome early in the 1992 season. Michael and I were there with Ross Brawn, Rory Byrne, Pat Symonds and Tom Walkinshaw, people with enormous combined experience. Michael said something that was just plain, technically wrong. We explained to him why he was wrong, but he would not accept it. I was impressed by how much self-confidence he had.
That’s a trait we have seen many times since. He will do something outrageous on track but will not admit he is wrong. His stance is “you’re either with me or against me”, in effect a friend or an enemy, with nothing in between. He has his camp around him in the team and they have to be totally on side with him on everything.
They are not sycophants telling him how good he is, rather more disciples. Ask the team if you can schedule an interview, and they have a big discussion, not about the interview, but about whether they should even ask him.
Away from the track he can be fun to be with, and he loves to chat for hours. He is a strong family man and a generous person with those around him and in terms of his charity contributions. But his camp of trusted people has become ever smaller and curiously no longer appears to include his brother Ralf.
Where Schumacher cannot draw the right line is on track. He cannot see when he crosses the line between tough but fair, and ruthless but foul. That is exacerbated by his total belief that he cannot be wrong. He has a default mode in the car: if you’re going to pass him, he will drive you off the road. He even did it to me as a team-mate. We saw him do similar thing in his title-deciding drives at Adelaide in 1994 with Damon Hill and at Jerez in 1997 with Jacques Villeneuve.
These incidents, and tricks such as his parking stunt in qualifying at Monaco this year, will have an impact on the way he is remembered. There will always be a “but” when discussing Michael because of this, and it will pass through generations along with his record of successes. It is a tragedy.
But the essence of his greatness is plain and simple — raw speed. Twice in my life I have looked at telemetry overlays of a teammate and seen something that I knew I just couldn’t do. With Hakkinen it was a specific technique in slow corners. With Michael it was through Bridge corner at Silverstone where I would fly off the road if I copied it. You check the set-up, the dynamic ride height and tyre pressures, everything to try to understand how he can keep his foot full on the throttle in such a corner.
And that is where he nails his teammates in the head. Crucially, he can win a race while not in the fastest car. Very few drivers can achieve that. He can and does make fundamental errors, but he can also string a row of faultless, mesmerising laps together at vital parts of a race to steal surprise victories. Teams love that, and we see that skill only once in a generation.
He is one of the greatest drivers of all time. But the fact that there are constant paddock discussions and internet fan polls about how he will be remembered merely confirms how complex the enigma of Michael is.
Why on earth have he and the team painted themselves into a corner with this promised post-race announcement today? It seems to me that he doesn’t want to retire but probably will. He is not scared of Raikkonen as a teammate in 2007; nor should he be. His workrate and intimate knowledge of the team would give him the upper hand, and he remains more than fast enough.
It cannot be money or safety. No, Michael is more concerned about the key team people around him leaving, and suddenly not having all of the aces and support. They are reacting to each other as this era nears the end.
Michael deserves a season-long “farewell tour” to a great champion, not getting upset with everyone for asking him his plans, then delivering a post-race statement today, when the race and championship are taking centre stage. He should carry on another year, but you can’t tell him much, that I do know.
My gut feeling, though, is that he will somehow buy himself some more thinking time in his statement today.
