At the same time (it went without saying), if you were Eddie Irvine, Schumacher’s new team-mate, you were not much more than a spare coat hanger in the changing-room of Destiny. Schumacher was so comprehensively involved in the business of creating a viable car that every minute of the day went on shaping it to his desires, his strategies, leaving Irvine with plenty of time to iron his overalls, watch TV or chase girls. Like Senna, Schumacher drove his cars slightly over the edge, with a great deal of twitching and balancing and fighting. Unlike Jim Clark, who just got into whatever was available and made it his own, Schumacher had to have his cars tweaked and prinked until they were hysterically nervous. Which made them increasingly difficult for anyone else to drive.
Thus, after half a season of pummelling the F310 into shape, Schumacher was starting to make progress, while Irvine, who had begun the year by going faster than the German, now routinely found himself a second and a half slower, every lap. Everything bent itself towards satisfying Schumacher’s desires. Paolo Martinelli, one of the Ferrari technical directors, said, unsurprisingly, ‘Michael is able to be very clever when he is doing laps in the car: which are the points that must be addressed first?’ The point being that, whichever point was addressed first, it was only ever one of Michael Schumacher’s points.
Much of which good work was then eclipsed by the fact that he tried to bounce Jacques Villeneuve clean off the track in the final (and deciding) Grand Prix of 1997, at Jerez – so far failing to bump his way to the Championship that he was, instead, disqualified from it entirely.
There they were, entering the Dry Sac corner, Villeneuve ahead in the Williams, holding the inside line, perfectly properly, when Schumacher, half a car’s length behind, simply drove his right front wheel into the Williams’ radiator side pod. ‘The hit was very hard,’ Villeneuve said, subsequently. ‘It was not a small thing.’ Martin Brundle, commentating for ITV, nailed it right away. ‘That didn’t work,’ he said: a professional racing driver spotting a professional foul. ‘You hit the wrong part of him, my friend.’
Then came the fall-out. The Frankfurter Allgemeine called Schumacher ‘a Kamikaze without honour’. La Republicca said the whole thing was ‘Shameful’. Villeneuve himself (who had once upon a time shown Michael who was boss) got on his high horse, complaining that, with Schumacher, ‘You don’t know if the track will be wide enough, you don’t know if he has seen you and it is very difficult to judge.’ The British press went to town, heaping contumely on the charmless German (Serve Schu Right, etc.). In fact the only person who seemed unconcerned was Schumacher himself. He just put 1997 behind him, rallied the team and went on with the ’98 season as if nothing had happened.
There seemed to be something of a contradiction in Schumacher’s personality.
On the one hand, he was an exemplary worker, a true inspiration to the team, a storming driver, yet modest in his habits away from the track, placidly married to long-term partner Corinna, starting a family, not even especially interested in getting his face all over the papers, the epitome of virtue. On the other hand, after five brief years in Formula One, he had racked up two race disqualifications, two race suspensions and one complete Championship disqualification. Stirling Moss was a fan at this time, and, relishing the fact that Schumacher was a proper racer rather than a percentage player like Prost, generously declared that ‘If Schumacher had raced with us [Moss and his contemporaries] he would have driven with the ethics of people of our era.’ Which was nice of him to say. As it was of Niki Lauda, to claim that ‘The only thing I would criticise him for is that he does not admit to mistakes.’ But even as Schumacher went on his way, hanging Irvine out to dry, bludgeoning the Ferrari team to suit his own ends and regarding the track as his first, everyone else’s second, you wondered whether old Stirling (or old Niki) had quite got it right.
Indeed, when Schumacher crunched his Ferrari at Silverstone in 1999, badly breaking a leg, some took this as a Karmic intervention, a sign that he needed to rethink his priorities. ‘I suddenly felt my heart beat slowing and then completely stopping,’ Schumacher revealed afterwards. ‘The lights went out.’ Irvine promptly rethought his priorities, emerging brightly from the Master’s shadow, setting the car up to his own liking, taking four victories that season and not quite winning the Championship. He ended up a mere two points behind Mika Hakkinen. And that would have been some kind of irony: all that work, all that stupendous team-building, all that Teutonic dedication, only for fun-loving, girl-chasing, wild-card Swervin’ Irvine to take the prize at the end. How Villeneuve, Hill, Brundle and, in probability, Irvine would have laughed.
But we all know what really happened. History was duly made in 2000, when Schumacher walked all over the opposition and became Ferrari’s first world champion for twenty-one years. And then did it again. And again. And again (only just, though, two points clear of Kimi Raikkonen). And again. ‘It means a lot to me to win my seventh title here in Spa-Francorchamps,’ Schumacher mused, blandly, in August 2004, ‘and especially as this is Ferrari’s 700th GP. Quite remarkable really.’
As an unintended consequence of this bludgeoning supremacy, the worldwide viewing figures for Formula One started to tank. 2002 was particularly bad: the year that Ferrari won every Grand Prix bar two. True, McLaren had very nearly whitewashed the 1988 season; which was bad enough in its way. But at least two of the greatest drivers of the post-war era – Prost and Senna – had spent that year locked in a remorseless struggle which didn’t resolve itself until the end of October. Schuey, on the other hand, had 2002 all wrapped up by July, leaving him nothing much else to do for the next three months except find some fresh records to chase and lob an occasional win in the direction of his latest teammate, the gentlemanly Rubens Barrichello.
Something was clearly up when ITV, who had bought the rights to show Formula One for an estimated £30 million back in 1997, started to complain. Viewing figures had held up reasonably well until the French GP, when Schumacher clinched the Championship. After that, audiences fell by 600,000 a race, on average. Over the season as a whole, ITV reckoned they lost some 5 million viewers.
Bernie Ecclestone was at first high-mindedly dismissive: ‘It’s difficult for anyone to fight against Schumacher, but that isn’t the fault of Michael or Ferrari.’ The chorus of complaint grew louder. Bernie began to get nervous. By October, he had reassessed the situation so fundamentally that, instead of letting Schumacher and Ferrari simply get on with things unbothered, he reckoned it might be a good idea to bung some extra weights into Schumacher’s car in order to slow him down. ‘After what has happened with Ferrari this year,’ he announced, ‘we have to put a cap on it. We have to do something to keep the sponsors and the viewers happy.’ A kilo of lead, it was reckoned, should add 0.3 of a second a lap to Schumacher’s time – enough to let the others catch up.
Not that all embarrassments were of Schumacher’s making. In the 2002 Austrian GP, at the imaginatively named A1-Ring, Barrichello made the running – pole position, a comfortable lead in the race – only to be told by Ferrari to give up the lead to Schumacher at the last second, so that Michael could take maximum points. Barrichello, seething, but having no other option, did just that at the finish line, to the boos, catcalls and massed thumbs-down of the crowd. On the podium, the Austrian Chancellor duly gave the vast silver winner’s trophy to Schumacher, who at once handed it over to Barrichello with as much finesse as if it were a plastic replica at a karting event, and pushed Rubens up onto the top step. Alan Jones reckoned that Schumacher should have said, ‘This is his race, I’m going to let him have it,’ no matter what instructions were coming from Jean Todt. The FIA reckoned that Schumacher and Ferrari were showing insufficient respect to the protocols of podium behaviour and fined them $1 million.
It happened again, same year, at the US Grand Prix at Indianapolis, even though Ferrari had forsworn the use of team orders. This time Schumacher let Barrichello past (just) at the finish line, and settled down to endure the cont
umely of others. And again, at the US Grand Prix, in 2005. Ferrari wandered home one-two in front of a hail of booing Americans, not least because all the other top teams had pulled out, owing to problems with their Michelin tyres.
Schumacher was, on these occasions, an innocent victim of the agencies of others. There was something graceless and ridiculous about the way he sometimes picked up his points – emphasised by the glazed stoicism with which he dealt with any subsequent complaints – but it wasn’t all down to him. But then, somehow, he managed to cap a career of providential shamelessness in his final season, 2006, by parking his car across the track at Monaco during qualifying – either as the result of a genuine driver error or in order to make sure that Fernando Alonso couldn’t snatch pole position from him.
This was especially important as he wanted to set himself up to take his sixth win at Monaco and thus equal Senna’s record there, another vital number to add to his collection. So he went into the Rascasse corner, just as qualifying was coming to a close, drove slowly and incorrectly round it, and ended up stationary. According to one of the stewards, ‘He performed some absolutely unnecessary and pathetic counter-steering, and that lasted five metres, until there was no more chance of going through the turn normally.’ His speed at the point at which he lost control? About 10 mph. ‘That’s completely unjustifiable.’ For Keke Rosberg, it was ‘The worst thing I have seen in Formula One. I thought he had grown up. He is a cheap cheat. He should leave F1 to honest people.’ Benetton boss Flavio Briatore said, disgustedly, ‘It was unbelievable. This is Monaco, this is Ferrari, so nothing will be done. It’s a disgrace.’ Even Jackie Stewart, choosing his words with care, reckoned that ‘It was an unfair advantage. I am sure he knew Alonso was on a fast lap. It reflects on him and Ferrari.’
Schumacher, naturally enough, stood his ground. ‘No, I didn’t cheat,’ he argued, ‘and I think it is pretty tough to be asked if I did. I don’t care what other teams think. You saw me lock up and run out of road. Initially I didn’t stall the car but I hesitated to reverse because of the traffic coming from behind and then I did stall.’ It did him no good. After seven hours of headbanging with the race organisers, Schumacher found himself stripped of his pole position and was obliged to start, in disgrace, from the pit lane.
Ricardo Patrese, Schuey’s Benetton team-mate back in 1993, was one of the few to speak up publicly for him. ‘What’s happening against Schumacher is something from the days of the Inquisition,’ he protested. ‘How can you decide that Michael stopped in the middle of the track deliberately?’ But then he made a most interesting comparison: ‘In 1990 Ayrton Senna crashed into Alain Prost at the first turn in Suzuka. Afterwards, he clearly said he did it on purpose. Does it look like Ayrton is less respected because of that? That he isn’t a legend in F1?’
This was the unnerving thing: disgrace didn’t mean that much to Schumacher. In fact, he used it as a kind of leverage to greatness. By refusing to be put off by his very public demotion, and by fighting his way up from the pit lane, the worst starting-place imaginable, he drove his way into fifth place; and at Monaco, the circuit where overtaking is impossible and grid position is everything. It was a magnificent performance, a display of the unremitting racer mentality that so appealed to Stirling Moss, and which all great drivers have had – the need to keep fighting, keep moving up, never submitting to Fate. So he was shameless and indomitable and brilliant, and still, at the remarkable age of thirty-seven, as fast as anyone on the track. What were we to think?
And he did it again, only more so, and without the controversy, in his very last Grand Prix – Brazil, October 2006.
By now, he had decided to quit Formula One. Up to the Japanese Grand Prix, he was in with a shout for his eighth title. But his engine blew up at Suzuka and, with an unusual air of gravitas about him, he announced, ‘This year, it wasn’t to be,’ even though, given unbelievable good fortune, he could still have taken the title in São Paulo. Plainly, he didn’t get his eighth Championship – Fernando Alonso, everybody’s new favourite, got his second Championship instead – but Schumacher went out with real, unquestionable style.
Having qualified a feeble tenth, he nonetheless started to carve his way through the field, before getting a puncture, trundling back to the pits, enjoying a leisurely eleven-second stop, and coming back out, absolutely last on the track and in danger of being lapped by Felipe Massa, his twenty-five-year-old team-mate, and now, the race leader.
What he showed then, was a kind of greatness. He simply refused to be beaten. From the absolute back of the pack, he fought his way, fair and square, no illegal moves, past the makeweights (Sato, Speed, Albers), past Barrichello, Fisichella, Raikkonen, setting fastest lap on the way, and was closing in on third-place Jenson Button and second-place Fernando Alonso, when the chequered flag came out and it was all over. It was, simply, a wonderful, even generous, performance: a treat for the fans, a piece of pure driving for its own sake. He seemed to have enjoyed himself, too. ‘We were driving an amazing car today,’ he said, either in recognition of the part played by Massa in his car, or because he was entitled by then to use the royal first person plural. ‘These wheel-to-wheel duels are the highlight of Formula One, especially when you can see the track opening up ahead, you’re driving a good car, you’ve sussed your opponent and you’re ready to make your move. Generally, you just want the race to be over, but today I would have liked it to go on a bit longer.’
It was as if he had finally calmed down enough to do something because it was a joy to do, rather than because it would enlarge his already overweening reputation and put some extra silver in the trophy cabinet. It made him seem human, again. It made one want to recycle a bit of Macbeth: nothing in his racing life became him like the leaving it.
So then you turn back to Senna, to try to put some kind of perspective on Schumacher’s history. Ayrton Senna didn’t exactly make it acceptable to turn the desire to win into a kind of Holy War; but he did seem to shift the ethical framework of the sport to the extent that supreme talent became a validation of any behaviour on the track that didn’t result in death or injury. And he got away with it by combining idiosyncratic cow-eyed intensity with an unlikely spiritual loftiness and the sort of talent that was pointless to complain about. He also won three World Championships – a terrific achievement, but one which he had to share with Jackie Stewart, Jack Brabham, Niki Lauda and Nelson Piquet, and which was beaten by Alain Prost’s four titles, trounced by Fangio’s five, and hopelessly eclipsed by Schumacher’s seven. He was fallible, in other words. He didn’t get everything he ever wanted. He died still yearning for something beyond his reach.
Schumacher, on the other hand, had none of Senna’s charisma, none of his otherworldliness. For all his dedication, genius and off-track straightforwardness, he ended up coming across as a train-spotter (all those numbers, all those records), but a train-spotter with a fantastically ruthless streak and a marked talent for self-deception. His colossal, mono-maniacal success single-handedly threatened to kill off Formula One’s popularity with both the public and the sponsors, as well as alienating anyone with a sentimental reverence for fair play or the sporting spirit. The more he won, the less it seemed to be worth.
Yes, this tends to happen to players or teams who like to win whatever the cost to the fans, or whose personalities radiate dislikeability: from John McEnroe at his most adolescent, to Douglas Jardine, captain of the England cricket team in the Bodyline Series, to Arsenal in the George Graham years. Your sporting invincibility has the effect of making you personally vulnerable. We know this, and live with it. Yet the existence of these people, these nagging, conflicted presences, leads one back to the same question: what exactly is sport for? Or, more directly, what is sport?
Is sport, in fact, what Michael Schumacher made his living at? Wouldn’t he have been just as happy running Siemens or BASF? Or was that never really the issue, all those years ago, when he took his first drive in a proper racing car? Was it just
the means to an end?
28
ECCLESTONE, MOSLEY AND THE RISE OF THE TECHNOCRATS
In a way, Schumacher’s insistence on getting the job done, no matter what it did to his reputation, was no more than a recognition that Formula One was big business, and that if he was going to become the Microsoft of the race track, there was no point in being half-hearted about it. Two generations had been and gone since the days when Peter Collins gave up his car to Fangio at Monza in ’56 (costing him the Championship), or Stirling Moss got Mike Hawthorn’s points reinstated in 1958 (ditto). New rules applied.
And it wasn’t as if the sport’s supremos could complain. Bernie Ecclestone and Max Mosley had spent years turning F1 into one of the biggest cash-generators on the planet. As Mosley himself admiringly said of his colleague, Bernie Ecclestone was the man who in thirty years had transformed ‘a niche sporting contest with a worldwide following and virtually no television coverage into a world-famous branded competition with a global following plus a television audience rivalled only by the World Cup and the Olympic Games’. On a good Sunday in the late 1990s, it was reckoned that 350 million people might sit down all around the world and tune in to a Grand Prix. Ten years on (with the Far East now tuning in), it was nearer half a billion: a potential audience which made multi-national companies frantic to buy twenty square centimetres of logo space on Michael Schumacher’s overalls, or an inch or two on a McLaren sidepod. And if Schuey occasionally overstepped himself with regards to the laws of the sport, it scarcely mattered so long as Shell and Vodafone got their names clearly reproduced across all media, paper and electronic.
Which, in itself, was fine. If there was a snag, it was that very few people could account for Ecclestone’s and Mosley’s quasi-imperial positions at the head of Formula One’s bureaucracy; nor for the fact that they seemed to have been there for so long.
Burning Rubber: The Extraordinary Story of Formula One Page 22
