Thanks Michael!

poppy84 · Sep 10, 2006

You're the BEST!

http://www.gazzetta.it/Hermes%20Foto/2006/09/10/0J5C3UZG--280x190.jpg

http://www.gazzetta.it/Hermes%20Foto/2006/09/10/0J5DQDIF--405x250.jpg

racerdj · Sep 10, 2006

poppy84 said: ↑

You're the BEST!

http://www.gazzetta.it/Hermes%20Foto/2006/09/10/0J5C3UZG--280x190.jpg
Click to expand...

Absolutely nothing more to say!

djui5 · Sep 10, 2006

poppy84 said: ↑

You're the BEST!
Click to expand...

Agreed!

Remy Zero · Sep 10, 2006

thanx a bunch michael. there'll be never another like u. i'm blessed and lucky enough to witness ur extraordinary era.

speedy_sam · Sep 10, 2006

Tribute to Michael by James Allen of ITV-F1

CALLING TIME ON A CAREER

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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bennett · Sep 10, 2006

You will be missed, Michael. Thank you for all the great years, turns, moments, and wins.

speedy_sam · Sep 10, 2006

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Remy Zero · Sep 10, 2006

thanx for the pics and good posts, sam.

SPEEDCORE · Sep 10, 2006

It hasnt sunk in... Only 1 more season, Come back COMMMEEE BAAAACKKK!!!!

Thanx for titles and every title you took away from Mclaren

Clubsport78 · Sep 10, 2006

Grazie Michael.

imperial83 · Sep 11, 2006

Vielen Vielen Dank Michael!

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Thanks Michael!

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