Petrolhead Blog » Michael Schumacher

On cheaters who prosper

Adam — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 19:42:45 +0000

Two races ago, on the streets of Valencia, Fernando Alonso was left apoplectic at the sight of Lewis Hamilton finishing 2nd. Lewis had unwittingly broken the rules during a safety car period, in a borderline call that the stewards of the meeting needed time to review. The safety car left the pit lane as Hamilton arrived in the same area, and by the time the Briton had made his mind up that he was allowed to overtake it and carry on, he’d just barely left the designated overtaking area. By the time they’d given Lewis a pit lane drive-through penalty, Hamilton had built up enough gap over the cars behind that he could enter the pits running 2nd and leave them running 2nd.

Fernando, who had been right behind Hamilton prior to the safety car period but ended up finishing 9th after dutifully waiting behind said safety car when it left the pits, found the whole business a trifle unfair. The stewards of the meeting had, he said, manipulated the result.

Today at Hockenheim, the Spaniard’s team mate Felipe Massa dominated the German Grand Prix. He snatched the lead at the start, maintained it through the pit stops and looked set for a first win since his comeback from the terrible head injuries sustained a year ago in Hungary. He didn’t make any serious mistakes, and Alonso mounted only one, unsuccessful, bid to race him for the lead. Despite that, it was Alonso who won the race.

His team, you see, had manipulated the result.

Article 39.1 of the F1 rulebook states, “Team orders which interfere with a race result are prohibited.” Article 39.1 was a reaction to the 2002 Austrian Grand Prix, in which Ferrari ordered Rubens Barrichello to let Michael Schumacher through to win in spite of Michael being the runaway championship leader and Rubens having been faster all weekend. To emphasise that the win was being taken away from him, Rubens slowed very deliberately within yards of the finish line. It was obvious, it was embarrassing, it brought the sport into disrepute.

Changing the rules brought an end to that kind of blatant fiddling, but nobody is under any illusions that team orders are a thing of the past. The trick is to encode the message – give the driver a keyword or simply let him know that the car behind is his team mate, and that his team mate is faster. It’s not all that hard to make it appear that your driver was simply feeling generous and sporting, with the team’s best interests at heart. Nobody believes it for a second, because top sportsmen are driven by desire to win and would sooner remove body parts than give up a result, but nobody can disprove it either. Not unless you’re as subtle as a sledgehammer.

It was on lap 47 that the call came over the radio. ”OK – Fernando…is faster…than you. Can you confirm that you understood that message?” The emphasis was already present in the voice of Rob Smedley, Massa’s race engineer. Exiting the hairpin on lap 48, Massa dawdled, cruising at part-throttle until Alonso was safely by. ”Well done mate, good lad. Just…just stick with him now. Sorry…”

Massa, his spirit suitably crushed, didn’t bother to stay with him but did finish P2. The podium ceremony was a suitably frosty affair in which none of the major players looked all that happy, the Ferrari drivers went into the press conference to receive a kicking so thorough that 3rd place finisher Sebastian Vettel playfully asked to be excused on the basis that nobody wanted to ask him anything, and their team was fined $100,000 with the possibility of further punishment to come.

Assuming that everyone gets to the end of the year in a regular sort of fashion, Felipe Massa isn’t likely to win this year’s world championship. He has 85 points to leader Hamilton’s 157. Alonso, in a Ferrari that now looks like a very good car to have, sits on 123 points. Had Ferrari left Massa out in front, he’d have had 92 points and Alonso 116. In other words, Alonso would have been slightly further out of contention, but with Massa not all that much further in contention. Alonso, while not always well rewarded in terms of results, hasn’t made all that many mistakes this season, whereas it’s only this weekend that Massa has started to look anything like his old self. If they’re expecting that pattern of performance to continue (in other words, if Hockenheim was a one-off, if they were always expecting Felipe to go well there), it makes sense that Ferrari would want Alonso out in front.

In saying that, it makes just as much sense that the viewing public would want him to get there fair and square or not at all. Parallels have been drawn between this and other recent examples of Ferrari drivers swapping positions – Massa letting Raikkonen by in Brazil 3 years ago, Kimi returning the favour in China the following year – but in those instances the impact upon the title fight was obvious. Raikkonen became champion in Brazil, and Massa’s win in China set up his heartbreak on home soil, when Hamilton pipped him to the post by a single point. Both were at the very end of a season, and neither were met with any kind of condemnation. Strictly speaking, both of them were exactly as illegal as today’s effort.

What’s the difference? For one, the impact of today’s switcharound isn’t immediately apparent. If Alonso becomes champion by less than 7 points, it will be, but a glance at the current standings shows the Spaniard in 5th place – it’s not easy to explain to the casual observer why asking Massa to slow down was necessary. A knock-on effect of that is that it leads you to ask the obvious question – if Fernando was much faster than Felipe, why had he been unable to overtake him? He’d tried once, into the hairpin on lap 20, and after being forcefully rebuked he hadn’t been able to get close enough for another shot.

For another, today marks exactly 12 months since a spring detached itself from Rubens Barrichello’s Brawn in Budapest, clattered Massa in the face and came within an ace of killing him:

There’s a human aspect to this story, the kind of human aspect that the relatively safe theatres of modern motor racing very rarely offer up. Seeing Massa recover was an incredible relief, seeing him back in a racing car was heartwarming, and seeing him lead a race on merit for the first time in a long time could only ever raise a smile. What better way to mark the first anniversary of that horrific accident than a win for the likeable Felipe?

That goes not just for Massa, not just for his fans, but for Ferrari. What a lovely little PR exercise that could have been. The PR exercise they launched instead began as damage limitation and ended as a disaster. Continued insistence that they hadn’t given a team order was necessary – you don’t admit guilt in these circumstances – but the team displayed an inability to grasp why the fans felt aggrieved about Alonso being handed victory that harked back to the bad old days of the previous regime, and suggested that no lessons at all have been learned. There followed a suggestion that Massa had shifted up several gears at once exiting the hairpin that was an insult to the intelligence of the watching millions. Compounding the issue was that Ferrari had left themselves no choice but to enlist the help of Massa and Smedley as part of their damage limitation exercise. The two men are good friends, both knew they’d had a Grand Prix win snatched away from them and neither man has enough acting talent to hide their true feelings.

The cumulative effect is that instead of celebrating a fairytale success, Ferrari head to Hungary next week with the jeers of the media and the fans ringing in their ears. How odd that this episode should again have Alonso as a major player – between his 2007 season at McLaren, the Renault Liegate saga and this year at Ferrari, it’s impossible to view the constant controversy surrounding Fernando as a set of unfortunate coincidences. Circulating behind Massa earlier in the race but unable to pass, Alonso could be seen throwing his hands in the air, and a “This is ridiculous!” was picked up on his car-to-pit radio. How much of a role did Fernando’s persistent petulance play?

You’re a race fan. That is to say, you’re a fan of racing. You’re not a fan of races where the result is decided by men in garages wearing headphones. Are you more upset that the rules were broken, that they were broken with a complete disregard for your powers of thought, or because from a human perspective, and like Barrichello before him, Massa is a very nice man?

Ready, steady, g-ohmystars

Adam — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 22:32:00 +0000

Ever wondered how hectic the start of a Grand Prix must be for the men in the midfield? Here’s a bit of on-board footage from Sunday’s race in Valencia, as seen by an old bloke in a Mercedes:

A bit busy, then. I stand by my opinion that this Schumacher chap isn’t all that bad.

In defence of Schumi

Adam — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 23:37:40 +0000

I had intended to write this piece a few days ago. Unfortunately, spending a long weekend camping in a field directly under the landing path for the adjacent East Midlands Airport, pausing only to rock and drink a volume of cider you’ll later come to regret, tends to leave you feeling a tiny bit beaten up. By the time I felt anything like human enough to come up with something coherent, Autosport’s Tony Dodgins had beaten me to it. Still, you’re not all Autosport Plus subscribers, so let’s have at it anyway.

The popular opinion appears to be that Michael Schumacher’s return to Formula 1 racing was a mistake. In the wake of his 11th place finish in Canada last weekend, there were forceful suggestions from fans and media figures alike that Schumi was a desperate character, shorn of his past speed, completely without answers to the pace of his younger rivals. Martin Brundle described Sunday’s race as the worst one he’d ever seen Michael Schumacher drive. Some of the criticism seemed a bit like bandwagon jumping, some of it was written by men very capable of forming their own opinions. What I’m about to do is take that Indianapolis Motor Speedway blog, the opinion of a man who has forgotten more than I’m ever likely to know about motor racing, and then completely disagree with it.

Cards on the table before we start, then. This simple blogger really wants the Schumacher comeback to work. It feels a little strange to be rooting for him, because it got incredibly dull watching him win what seemed like every weekend in the early part of the last decade. Brilliance is that much easier to appreciate when it overcomes a worthy opponent, and with a fantastic car in a team geared around him, Michael managed to go whole years at a time without having to take on such a challenge. No matter how good the package is, though, you still have to drive it, and Michael did that better than anyone else in the modern era. The idea of him returning to put everyone back in their place, the grand old man of motorsport showing he still has it 3 1/2 years after his last race for Ferrari, is one I can wholly support.

That, as anyone with the gift of sight must accept, isn’t happening. Whether he hasn’t yet quite got to grips with a 2010-spec car on this season’s narrower tyres or whether he simply doesn’t have the searing pace of old, Schumacher is not blowing everyone away. He’s spent a fair chunk of the season in broadly the same part of the field as teammate Nico Rosberg, a jolt to all those used to seeing Schumacher, then a 30 second gap, then Rubens Barrichello (it should of course be noted that old Rubinho, whatever you may think of him and however you might perceive his time at Ferrari, was close enough to Michael often enough to earn respect, and sometimes plain faster).

What is happening, though, is that Michael’s getting progressively closer to being the kind of driver demanded by the huge weight of expectation. Having been at best ordinary and at worst dismal through the early-season flyaway races, Spain provided the first glimpse of vintage Schumacher. His overtaking move on Jenson Button, sweeping around the outside of the first chicane as the Brit left the pits and giving the reigning champion precisely one car width and no more with which to do something about it, was a reminder that the aggression and competitive spirit remained undimmed. His defence of the position against a McLaren with a huge advantage in a straightline was a lesson in robust rearguard driving that didn’t once overstep the limits of fairness, and the BBC’s mid-race revelation that Michael was purposely changing his line through corners to cause maximum disruption to the handling of the man behind was startling. The mental capacity for which he became famous, then, must still be there.

Monaco. Leave aside your thoughts on the time penalty he was given, consider the move he made on Fernando Alonso, ask yourself whether it was the move of a man losing his touch, a man with no answers for the drivers around him. If you answer yes, consider doing something else on a Sunday afternoon.

Turkey. A weekend in which Michael had something in hand over Nico from the first lap on Friday morning, drove clean around the outside of Button again on the opening lap and settled in to an uneventful P4 in a car that had nothing for the McLaren and Red Bull battle ahead. Best of the rest might not be where you’re used to seeing the 7-time world champion, but there was no realistic prospect of him finishing any higher.

I know. You’re wondering how there’s any way to defend his performance in Montreal. You’ve taken in all the business about being too aggressive with Kubica, being passed by Sebastien Buemi and a fleet of Force Indias, that swerve on his old mate Felipe Massa towards the end of the race, and you can’t see how it’s possible to excuse the inexcusable.

Let’s immediately get rid of this idea that the Canadian Grand Prix was the worst race he’s ever driven. Dodgins cites the 2003 Japanese event, in which Michael drove into everything that moved on his way to a nervy 8th place and a narrow world championship win. You might wish to select the 2005 Chinese race, which involved an accident on a reconnaissance lap 30 minutes before the race started and a faintly ridiculous spin into retirement while trundling around behind the safety car. You could look to the Hungaroring, where Michael was classified 8th but didn’t make the finish in 2006 after a series of wheel-banging sessions damaged a track rod.

You could, but you’d be as silly to pick that race as you would be to select last weekend’s one.

There are parallels. In Montreal, as in Budapest nearly 4 years back, Schumacher had been on the pace in practice – it suits the ‘give it up now, Michael’ argument to ignore that his pace on Friday in Canada was strong, up with the very quickest cars on a longer run during practice. Both times his grid position was lower than it should have been, in Hungary due to a time penalty for a rule infringement and in Canada due to a bad tyre choice in Q2, the Mercedes not able to generate sufficient heat in its rubber. Both times Schumacher made big strides in the opening part of the race, up to 5th in Hungary and as high as 3rd during the opening pit stop sequence last weekend, 7 seconds off the lead and maintaining the same pace as the Red Bulls.

In 2006, Michael and Giancarlo Fisichella made slight contact, the Ferrari front wing being knocked askew and necessitating a pit stop that sent the German down the order. Last weekend there was no contact, but close quarters racing with Robert Kubica that saw the Mercedes puncture a tyre. Schumacher had Kubica touching the grass on the inside of the track towards turn 3, exactly the kind of aggressive move to maintain position we’ve seen in the past – ask Alonso about the shove into the scenery he took on the opening lap at Silverstone in 2003. Kubica arrived at turn 3 going too quickly to make the turn, and while you could argue that Schumi should have conceded position and passed Robert again as the Renault recovered back to the racetrack, it’s not entirely fair to ignore Kubica’s later admission that he wasn’t in position to complete the pass and would have ceded the place had he not wanted to demonstrate how little he’d been intimidated.

Kubica isn’t averse to the odd dangerous manoeuvre himself, unless you consider violently swerving into the path of a rival at 200 mph in a late, misguided bid to enter the pit lane a safe activity, but I digress.

Puncture repaired, the Merc was now out of sync on tyre strategy, vital in a race that saw teams struggling to get any kind of life out of the softer tyre. Some drivers couldn’t get 5 quick laps from them. In a call that Ross Brawn later admitted was optimistic, Mercedes tasked Schumacher with making them go for half a race. Since he couldn’t, they didn’t.

Lacking grip under braking and visibly down on traction under acceleration, Michael was a sitting duck. Buemi made a very well judged move to claim 8th position, while Massa’s attempted pass was a badly thought-out affair – there wasn’t time to pass on the outside before the final chicane and still turn into the corner, and ample space on the inside for a move that would surely have worked – though there can be no doubt that Michael wombled across the road prior to contact being made. Liuzzi and Sutil snatched the final points positions away on the final lap, after a scrap that occasionally bore greater resemblance to tag team wrestling than to motor racing – Liuzzi and Schumacher made contact through the chicane of turns 6 and 7, matters being resolved in the Italian’s favour when the Mercedes’ rubber cried enough again through the following 8-9 chicane. Sutil’s pass, taking advantage of Michael’s reduced speed as he rejoined the racetrack, was an altogether cleaner affair, but none of Schumi’s aggressors had any doubt that there’d been a race.

A race, though, brought about by the degradation of those soft tyres, which were surely never going to make it, and it’s a fool who overlooks that. Those with longer memories may recall a race a few years back in which, recovering from an unscheduled pit stop, Schumacher found himself on worn tyres (intermediates on a drying track this time), with a queue of cars behind him and no grip to fight them off with. Michael held his ground forcefully, perhaps a little too forcefully at times. More than once, he visited previously uncharted stretches of land, usually located some distance away from the prescribed racetrack, in a bid to hold position. More than once, he refused to concede position even when it seemed prudent to do so, hitting both Pedro de la Rosa and Nick Heidfeld. If you were paying attention a few paragraphs ago, you’ll not need to be told that the race was in Hungary, or that it took place in 2006.

Michael, who came within an ace of making it 8 world titles in what everyone thought was his farewell season, was no spent force then. Incredibly resistant to being overtaken, yes, and driven to stretch the rules to their limits and beyond if it helped him to stave off a challenge from behind, but far from over the hill. Wondering what’s changed since then? As far as I can see, it’s this:

Nothing at all.

Should Michael have got away with it?

Adam — Mon, 17 May 2010 21:52:59 +0000

When is a rule not a rule?

One of the new features of Formula 1, 2010 style, is that when a safety car period ends, cars can overtake each other before the start/finish line. A bold white line across the track a few hundred yards before the start/finish signifies the point at which the drivers can go racing.

On lap 75 of the Monaco Grand Prix, the safety car came on track to control the field while the marshals cleaned up the aftermath of the Jarno Trulli Formation Parking Team’s very public failure to perform. The incident, in which Trulli almost overtook Karun Chandhok’s HRT before landing on the Indian’s head instead, took until the 78th and final lap of the race to clean up.

The standard drill at this point is for the safety car to drive into the pits while the racing cars proceed to the finish, governed by yellow flags so that overtaking remains prohibited and the race order is preserved. The standard drill when a green flag is shown is for the racing cars to go racing. On the 78th lap at Monaco, the safety car came in, and the green flag was shown.

After a steady start to his racing return, Michael Schumacher has shown signs in recent weeks of being, well, Michael Schumacher. He may not have quite the searing pace he used to possess, but his racecraft remains intact, as demonstrated by his pass of Jenson Button around the outside of Barcelona’s first chicane, a move to which Button took public and unjustified exception. The Schumacher of old, ever the cunning operator and with more spare mental capacity than anyone else in the field, would have spotted a green flag and gone racing straight away. A lot of people took a lot of pleasure from seeing the 41 year old returnee doing exactly that this Sunday.

Into the last corner, Schumacher squeezed inside the Ferrari of Fernando Alonso, who had himself been keen to go racing for a brief moment and got sideways under power in all the excitement, giving Schumi the chance of an inside slot that he wasn’t about to pass up. The move was wonderfully executed, brilliantly opportunistic and a reminder to everyone, not least the man occupying his old Ferrari, that the old boy remains a potent force.

Looming large on the horizon is a giant ‘however’.

However…Article 40.13 of the FIA F1 Sporting Regulations states, “If the race ends while the safety car is deployed, it will enter the pit lane at the end of the last lap and the cars will take the chequered flag as normal without overtaking.” All fairly clear and certain, then. The penalty for an illegal overtake is a pit lane drive-through, but as it was assessed after the race finished, Michael was given a 20 second penalty, the difference between his 6th place on the road and his 12th place in the final classification.

Those green flags, though. There was a green flag waving. There was also a green light. Green flags signify the cancellation of yellow flag conditions – that is to say, the resumption of normal racing, which, as casual observers can be forgiven for not knowing, is intended to feature overtaking. Article 40.13 is clear, yes, but the actions taken on the track yesterday afternoon introduced a completely unnecessary kind of ambiguity. Under the circumstances, wouldn’t anyone with a racer’s instinct have tried to put a move on the car ahead? More to the point, wouldn’t anyone watching the action want them to attempt a pass?

I know I did. I saw the standings as the cars crossed the line, noticed MSC cross the line ahead of ALO on the on-screen timing graphics, I knew instantly what Michael had done and for a brief moment, before I caught myself and realised he couldn’t hear me, applauded. To my mind, what Michael Schumacher did at the end of the Monaco Grand Prix is what every single driver in the field should look to do on every restart – the man he overtook was looking to do the same thing, and you mustn’t for one second believe Ferrari’s claim that they knew overtaking wasn’t allowed; a man who knows that doesn’t nearly crash the car twice trying to defend his position, as Fernando Alonso did. The debate over the rights and wrongs of the incident, which is set to rage for some time now Mercedes have confirmed their intention to appeal against the penalty, should never arise because as long as the race is still on, the racing drivers should be doing just that. Racing.

The last corner of a motor race is still a part of it, and if we’re going to have rules allowing drivers to overtake early during all other safety car restarts, we shouldn’t be treating the last lap any differently. For as long as we are treating it differently, we must apply the rules as they are written, so if Article 40.13 says no overtaking on the last lap, Race Control absolutely must not show green flags and green lights to the drivers. If they do so, if they create such needless confusion, then the grounds upon which they punish the driver silly enough to believe the message their eyes are receiving…those grounds must be shaky indeed.

Man out of time – a quick catch-up

Adam — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 00:37:10 +0000

There are reasons why nothing has been posted for a little while, all of them rather too mundane to detain you with here. Time that might otherwise have been spent doing this had to be spent doing something else instead. There is, of course, a quick and easy fix: match my current salary.

Shall we have a little refresher?

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Remember that Mercedes concept livery? Here’s the real deal, or as real as a deal can be when it’s painted on last year’s Brawn:

Elegant, classy, understated and yet still distinctive and recognisable. You may feel differently, of course, and while that’s fine, you may wish to consider this: what if you’re completely wrong?

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USF1 have announced their first driver for 2010. You may recall that the stated aim was to promote US talent in all areas of the sport, including driving, and if so you won’t be at all surprised to learn the name of the good ol’ boy they’ve signed.

Jose Maria Lopez.

Lopez comes from Argentina, which as far as my atlas can tell is somewhere in the extreme south of the USA. His record in the junior classes is alright but not exceptional (winner of the now-defunct Formula Renault V6 Eurocup in 2003, solid in F3000 and GP2 thereafter but only a single race win to his credit), and while he’s gone on to great things in the competitive touring car series held in his home country, he ended up there because Renault didn’t see enough in him to employ him further after his stint on their Young Driver Programme. With no recent single-seater running and a start-up team supporting him, Lopez could find himself settling in for a rather long 2010.

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Staying with USF1, they’re about to demonstrate that they’ve really been building a racing car all this time. Their first F1 machine, Type 1, is scheduled to turn a wheel in anger for the first time at Barber Motorsports Park at some point in February, before joining in the final European tests prior to the season opener in Bahrain on March 14th. The car is yet to break cover and the team have kept something of a low profile, leading to increasing doubts over their participation, but at least they have some kind of plan in place.

The same cannot be said for another of this season’s new teams, Campos Meta, who have been very clear in saying that their car isn’t finished yet and might not run at all prior to Bahrain. Their being in Bahrain is apparently certain, but the heat of a desert nation is not the ideal place to give a car its first shakedown. In fact, the first race isn’t the ideal place to do it regardless of location. Bruno Senna remains contracted and ready to drive, his teammate may not be known until the eve of the first race, and the team continue to actively seek investors.

Lotus will have their car ready for launch on February 12th and running at Jerez 5 days later, while Virgin aim to give their machine a shakedown in the first week of February prior to joining the established teams at Jerez on February 10th

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Red Bull and Force India have taken the decision to skip the first test of the winter in Valencia next week, citing a desire to spend more time working on the design of their cars. Dark mutterings have inevitably followed, but it should be remembered that Red Bull did exactly the same thing in 2009.

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With refuelling banned for 2010, the Sporting Working Group have voted to introduce a rule stating that the top 10 qualifiers must start the race using the same set of tyres they qualified on. This has yet to be ratified by the F1 Commission or World Motor Sport Council but looks certain to be added to the 2010 rulebook.

The objective is to maintain some kind of strategic element, giving teams the choice between qualifying well on a soft tyre that might not be ideal for the start of the race or sacrificing grid position for a good race tyre. Whether the idea has any bearing on the tyre choices made by the teams will depend largely upon the compounds that Bridgestone provide. If there’s little appreciable difference between the softer and harder options, there won’t be a decision to take.

Also awaiting ratification is an amendment to the existing points system. The SWG meeting resulted in a proposed scoring system of 25-18-15-12-10-8-6-4-2-1, with points being issued down to 10th place. The aim here is to encourage drivers to push for victory by increasing the points weighting for the winner, while also ensuring that drivers and teams finishing lower down the order still have something to race for by extending the points-scoring threshold down to 10th place.

There was a time, not at all long ago, when points were awarded to the top 6 drivers, 10-6-4-3-2-1. When that points system was introduced in 1991 there were 31 cars entered each weekend. Only 26 could start the race, 20 of those would end up with nothing to show for their efforts, and as a result a point was a precious and valuable thing. That system was weighted more heavily towards the winner than the proposed 2010 system too – assuming the same drivers finish 1-2, it’ll take 4 races this year for the leader to build up an advantage greater than the points available for a race win, a race more than under the 1991-2002 system.

There’s not necessarily anything wrong with the new system. It’s just that the old one was better. Am I wrong? Let me know.

Question time

Adam — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 00:38:56 +0000

Though not the sort of question you’ll have to think too hard about, unless you’re one of the utter, utter cretins this is being written to address. I’m going to nudge you ever so gently in the direction of the right answer, because I’m a sport like that. Look at this picture:

Done? Take your time, these words will still be here when you’re ready. What is this picture? Is it:

a) Michael Schumacher testing a GP2 car, in a test which has been sanctioned by the FIA, the F1 testing committee and GP2, which allows GP2 to gain feedback on their new car and a big old dollop of publicity while also giving Michael’s troublesome neck a workout?

b) That cheating German git getting in some practice before the F1 testing ban ends on February 1st?

Still not sure? It’s a). Now leave.

The limits placed on off-season testing in F1 were designed as a money saving measure. They don’t exist to keep drivers out of racing cars, though that inevitably happens. If a driver wishes to do something else over the winter to keep his hand in, and the necessary permissions are given, he can do so.

In this case, Michael Schumacher is doing it because it’s in everyone’s interests to have a race-fit Schumi in Bahrain on March 14th, because there are few better ways of drawing attention to your new car than getting the most successful F1 driver in history to break it in, and because it’s the kind of thing you do when the only thing you know is how to win.

Something really big, happening

Adam — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 02:16:28 +0000

It’s official.

Schumacher rumours gather pace

Adam — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 02:15:38 +0000

Heavens above, it’s actually going to happen, isn’t it?

The German tabloid Bild reported this weekend that Mercedes had agreed a one year contract with Michael Schumacher. The German tabloids, in common with the majority of tabloids, are not always renowned for printing stories that have any basis in fact. This particular paper, however, has been used in the past by both Willi Weber and Norbert Haug as a means of leaking stories, and if you’re wondering what they’ve got to do with anything, you should know that one is Michael’s manager and the other is awfully high up at Mercedes.

The latest is that Schumacher didn’t attend Ferrari’s Christmas party last weekend, and that the company will not stand in his way if he genuinely wishes to return. Michael has done a lot of karting this last few weeks, and while he generally competes in a good number of charity events at this time of year, many are viewing this as a fitness test; in the summer, even a run in a kart was enough to show Schumi that his injured neck was not yet up to the demands of a Grand Prix. That nobody, including the man himself, has made any comment on his fitness through the winter can only lead one to believe the injury has healed, though it is thought that this hasn’t been officially checked out.

James Allen, the respected racing journalist, has spent a lot of time detailing why there’s nothing in it for Michael and why a comeback doesn’t make sense. He, like I, might just have overlooked that sometimes, the pleasure of driving on the limit is the only incentive a man needs, and that nobody in modern racing derives more pleasure from that than Michael Schumacher. Allen’s sources in Italy and Germany all indicate that the deal is on, and that subject to medical clearance and a release from his Ferrari obligations, the most successful driver in history really is on the way back.

Memories of an anti-climactic summer are still raw, and it’d be wise not to get too excited. Difficult, though, isn’t it?

Does Schumi make sense for Mercedes?

Adam — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 01:20:42 +0000

No matter how unlikely it might seem, the speculation linking Michael Schumacher to a full-time racing return with Mercedes Grand Prix in 2010 refuses to go away.

Whether you pay any attention to it is another thing entirely, and depends upon where you take your news from. If you read The Times, you’ll know that Mercedes motorsport vice-president Norbert Haug has refused to rule out the possibility of Schumacher driving for the team next year. If, on the other hand, you’re a Grauniad reader, seek help. Oh, and you’ll have read about Ross Brawn telling the German media that Michael absolutely, definitely, positively won’t be coming back. Autosport follower? You’ve probably spotted newly-confirmed Mercedes driver Nico Rosberg giving the issue a thorough swerving. Radio 5 Live listener? You, my friend, cannot get away from Eddie Jordan insisting that it will happen.

[As a quick aside, isn't it nice to see Eddie finally finish his first coherent thought of the season? Harsh, maybe, but still...we must acknowledge that his finger has been firmly on the pulse where driver changes have been concerned, but then he did also declare that no KERS car would ever sit on pole position and that the McLaren was a dog with no hope at all of winning a race this year...]

Mercedes CEO Nick Fry has said that in order to have seat fittings completed in good time, he’d like to have a driver in place by Christmas. Why would the widely-expected signing of free agent Nick Heidfeld take until Christmas? Of course, Michael freeing himself from his consultancy role at Ferrari could take a week or four, couldn’t it?

It could. Then again, persuading Kimi Raikkonen that he could have a championship-winning car after all might take a little while. Maybe Merc will have to spend that long waiting for the announcement on Renault’s future that might yet set Robert Kubica free. What if it’s you, you sly old fox, trying to sort out a Superlicence before putting pen to paper?

We speculate because we don’t know, and as long as we speculate we keep Mercedes in the news for the right reasons. This time last week they were losing the new world champion to McLaren, at the same time as they were announcing the end of their close relationship with, by golly, McLaren. Whichever way you look at it, it’s impossible to escape the conclusion that the shine was rather taken off their purchase of Brawn. “Yes, that’s right, the Silver Arrows are back. McLaren? We’re breaking away slowly. Button? No, he’s…you know, gone to…I mentioned the Silver Arrows, yes?”

For those who know where Schumacher came from, it’s Hollywood. Michael rose to prominence driving sportscars for Mercedes in the early 90s, winning races in the World Sportscar Championship and being blisteringly fast – faster than the car could handle, as it turned out – at Le Mans. His contract stipulated that when Mercedes entered F1 they would do so with Schumi in one of their cars, but when in 1993 they made their entrance with Sauber, their star driver was happily settled at Benetton and had no desire to return. One last fling, with the team he should have been with from the start, makes perfect sense to the romantic. For those who know only that Schumacher is a very fast, very famous racing driver, the image of the Mercedes works effort can only be enhanced by the idea that the most successful F1 driver there has ever been would consider driving from them. In either case, it’s the sort of good news that can very conveniently bury any of the more unfortunate things that might have happened to the team recently.

In reality? Rosberg has an element of the unknown about him. We know he’s quick, but without a reasonable benchmark for the last three seasons it’s not really been possible to tell whether Nico has flattered his car or merely flattered to deceive. The unknown with Raikkonen is which man will turn up; the brilliant, supreme racer or his disinterested alter-ego. Kubica had a few glorious months in the summer of 2008 but is otherwise yet to consistently deliver. Heidfeld is perceived, perhaps unfairly, as a solid journeyman ultimately lacking that extra something. Should any of those men win races or titles, they will do so in what must be a very good racing car.

Schumacher has won 91 Grands Prix. He is quite correctly regarded as one of the finest, most gifted natural talents to ever sit behind the wheel of a racing car. At Benetton and in the early years at Ferrari, he won races in cars that had no business being at the front of motor races. Should he win races or titles in 2010, he will do so not because he drives a Mercedes, but because he is Michael Schumacher.

Does he make sense for Mercedes? Only as long as they don’t give him a contract.

Ferrari confirm Massa’s replacement’s replacement

Adam — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 10:44:31 +0000

It was a glorious dream while it lasted, wasn’t it? Michael Schumacher has announced that injuries sustained in a motorcycle accident in February are severe enough to end his planned comeback before it ever got started.

His injuries, for those disinclined to click on the link, included fractures to the head and neck. Had we all known that before now, perhaps we’d have greeted Schumi’s return with a little more scepticism. We didn’t, though, and we shouldn’t now reflect that it was any kind of desperate dream or publicity stunt; it appears, to these eyes at least, that Michael spent the last couple of weeks giving this comeback one hell of a go.

The replacement’s replacement is a man most famous for breaking down in tears after retiring from 4th place at the Nurburgring 10 years ago, Ferrari test driver Luca Badoer. Badoer will finally be making his racing debut for the Maranello concern some 11 years after signing to test for the team. Already passed over once, when Schumacher broke his leg at Silverstone in 1999 and was replaced by Mika Salo, Badoer has a chance to rid himself of an unwanted record. With 48 starts to his name, Luca has made more starts without scoring a point than any other Formula One driver.

We wish him the best of luck. Not the same now, though, is it?