It's not as if it is a
surprise that Michael Schumacher has decided to quit after more
than 15 years at the top, but as James Allen explains, the great
man will leave a big void.
James has been in F1 for as long as Michael, has worked with him
at various different times and knows him as well as anyone
outside Ferrari.
So who better to lead our appreciation on the sport's departing
hero...
The curtain falls
 Although
everyone has been talking about it all weekend, it is still hard
to accept that Michael Schumacher has called time on his F1
career.
Our careers have overlapped; I
started in 1990, he made his debut at Spa in 1991.
It feels like a very long time
ago that he burst onto the scene at Spa in the green 7Up Jordan,
because it is a long time - 250 races.
I’ll never forget standing at
the top of Eau Rouge during Friday qualifying (as it was then)
with veteran journalist Denis Jenkinson.
We had no diamond vision
screens then but Jenks reeled off the top five as he saw it,
based on their speed from La Source and through Eau Rouge. He
had Schumacher fifth behind Senna, Mansell, Patrese and Berger
and he was right of course.
 The
Jordan looked amazing and it was this 22-year-old called Michael
Schumacher at the wheel.
Jenks said that we should keep
an eye on this boy. He looked like the real thing.
A week later I was having
dinner in London with an F1 crowd which included John Watson. He
took a call, I believe from Eddie Jordan, and when he hung up he
said, “Schumacher has gone to Benetton!”
After just one race the guy was
the hottest property in the sport.
The history
 Frank
Williams said that he and all the other team owners were kicking
themselves in Spa that they hadn’t spotted Schumacher’s
potential sooner.
Ross Brawn, then at Benetton,
certainly had, racing against him in sportscars, Ross with
Jaguar, Michael with Sauber-Mercedes. Mercedes were not in F1 in
1991 and by the time they arrived Schumacher was lost to them.
They had several big efforts at
getting him, but failed each time.
So it was Flavio Briatore, from
1991-95 and then Jean Todt who had the principal benefit of
running Schumacher in their car and he repaid both of them in
spades.
Statistically at least, he is
the greatest driver in history.
He has re-written the history
books and raised the bar in terms of what is expected of a Grand
Prix driver.
Now they have to have immense
commitment, their fitness must be scientifically monitored and
their preparation for each race has to be perfect.
As a child racing karts Schuey
developed the mentality that you get out of racing what you put
in. Rarely has any sport seen a harder worker.
 At
Benetton he learned the F1 ropes, guided by the experienced
hands of Brawn and particularly Pat Symonds, who was his race
engineer back then.
He also learned how to play the
political game, making sure that the team was firmly lined up
behind him and that his number two driver stayed just that.
By the time he arrived at
Ferrari in 1996 he was the real deal.
The car that year was a dog,
but he still won three races with it including an emotional win
at Monza, where tens of thousands of tifosi opened a giant
Ferrari flag under the podium.
 I
interviewed him a lot in those days and I recall his eye-popping
awe at the scale of the reception and the passion he had felt
from the crowd that day.
At Ferrari he built around him
a super team of engineers and managers, ruled by a ‘circle of
fear’, in which the key players were motivated as much by a
desire not to let the others down as by the thirst for victory.
Ferrari had not won a title for
going on 20 years, but Schumacher gave them five in succession
from 2000-2004.
 I
recall vividly the win at Budapest in 1998, where Schumacher was
asked by Brawn to find something like 19s in 17 laps over
Hakkinen as he switched him on to a bold three stop plan and he
did it, winning the race.
The McLaren on the Bridgestones
was a superior car to the Ferrari on Goodyears that year, but
Schuey took some unlikely victories to keep himself in the title
chase.
This weekend is his 15th
appearance at Monza and amazingly he comes here as a title
contender for the 11th time. I do not know how he has withstood
the pressure of being the pacesetter in F1 for so long.
If you look at how much it took
out of driver like Hill or Hakkinen, how they aged before your
eyes and then you look at Michael who has changed remarkably
little.
 I
think that the accident at Silverstone in 1999 did him a favour
in that respect.
It gave him an unexpected three
months off at a very busy time and he was able to take stock of
where he was, recharge his batteries and refocus. He came back
at a higher level and that propelled him to the five titles in a
row from 2000-4.
I honestly don’t believe he
would have kept going for so long if he had not had that break
in 1999.
The talent
 As
a pure driving talent, he is obviously up there among the
greats, with Jim Clark, Senna, Stewart, Fangio, Prost and a
handful of others. But unlike all of those drivers he has rarely
had someone of his own level to race against. And he admits this
privately. His battle with Ayrton Senna was in its infancy when
the Brazilian was killed in 1994.
Mika Hakkinen challenged and
beat him in the late 1990s, but he lacked Schumacher’s strength,
motivation and consistency.
Only in the last two seasons,
with the rise of Fernando Alonso, has Schumacher come up against
a driver truly on his own level. They have raced hard this
season, honours have been evenly split between them, but Alonso
has begun to get the upper hand and I think Schumacher knows
that.
 Alonso
told me last week that he loves racing against Michael because
neither wants to finish second to the other.
Alonso is the driver most like
Schumacher in many ways.
I’m not sure that he works as
hard, but he has a similar mentality, he also has great
intelligence and adaptability, which are two of Schumacher’s
great qualities. For this reason their battles at Imola last
year and this as well as Istanbul, were so interesting, because
Schumacher could probably see a lot of himself in the way the
other car was being driven
The sure thing
 Schumacher
is quitting because he doesn’t want to race in the same team as
Kimi Raikkonen. Jean Todt has a soft spot for Finns from his
rallying days. He likes their quiet, uncomplicated natures and
above all he values their attacking spirit.
The crucial point here is
timing.
Ferrari had to take Raikkonen
now because he is available. If they had not signed him up (12
months ago the deal was agreed) then Kimi would have gone to
Renault and Ferrari would have been left with no proven top line
driver for the future.
Massa may turn out to be a
world-beater, so might any number of youngsters, but right here,
right now if you want to win you need either Kimi or Fernando or
a big car advantage.
Ferrari needed certainty, so as
not to lose all the momentum they have built over the last five
years. Schumacher could offer them another year, maybe two at
best, but is he still at the same level, could he fulfil his
part in the ‘circle of fear’?
Reluctantly Schumacher was
forced to accept this. Ferrari were doing the right thing in
hiring Raikkonen and that lead directly to his decision to stop.
The dark side
 There
is also of course, the darker side to Schumacher’s racing
genius.
His willingness to punch below
the belt is something that sits oddly with his prowess as a
driver.
He got away with it a few times
in his early career, the first really high profile occasion
being when he deliberately drove Damon Hill off the road in
Adelaide to clinch the 1994 drivers’ world title, many wondered
why he felt he needed to do such things as clearly he was a
vastly superior driver.
But it seemed as though he
panicked under pressure and lashed out. So desperate was his
desire to win, he could not accept that he had made a mistake
that would lead to him coming second.
Schumacher came of age as a
driver when the sport was ruled by hard men like Senna and
Prost, who had a history of committing professional fouls on
each other.
 He
thought that this was how things were done. He got away with it
in 1994, but when he tried it again on Jacques Villeneuve at
Jerez in 1997, the world had moved on and he was crucified.
He remains the only driver to
be disqualified from a championship for unsportsmanlike
behaviour. It is a stain on his record and on his character.
As was Monaco this year, where
he was found guilty by the race stewards of deliberately parking
his car on the racing line during qualifying, to stop Alonso
from beating him to pole position.
 I
was quite shocked by that.
Knowing that in all probability
it was his final season in F1, it seemed an odd moment for him
to remind everyone of the bad things he has done in his
otherwise exceptional career.
But again it was a case of,
having made a mistake, lashing out to stop the other man from
beating him. Now the older driver, Schumacher was raging against
the dying of the light, desperate to stop Alonso, in many ways a
younger version of himself, from beating him.
The legacy
 It
is hard for you and I and even his fellow drivers to understand
the mentality of a great champion like Schumacher. They see the
world differently. My insight into it comes principally from
something Nigel Mansell told me about Senna.
On the podium in Budapest in
1992, when Mansell had finally won the world championship, Senna
came up to him and said, ‘Well done Nigel. Now you understand
why I am such a bastard. It is because I never want anyone else
to have the feeling that you have now.’
Mansell said it made his blood
run cold when he heard that. He was a sportsman, a racer, but
not cut from the same cloth as Senna and Schumacher.
This then is the enigma that
was Michael Schumacher the racing driver.
 An
exceptional driver, a great leader and a ferocious competitor,
who has given the sport so many great moments, but also some
darker ones.
Will history revere his amazing
record or judge him harshly for his treachery? I think the
former. But one thing is for sure; the sport will be very
different next year without him.
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