Winners; sure – and losers; don’t think so

10th September 2006 and the Formula One Italian Grand Prix was held at Monza. It was won, fittingly by Michael Schumacher in the Scuderia Ferrari 248F1. Just minutes after the V8 stopped breathing the world was told what the world needed to hear.

Michael Schumacher, a name that for so long, has so consistently been at or very near the top told the waiting media about his retirement from racing. On a day like this it is inevitable that I would have to write something about the imminent departure of a motor sporting icon.

His last Monza. He will retire from racing at the end of 2006. The future holds only uncertainties and for that he cannot be sure of having enough in reserve to meet his own towering standards. Personally, I think this is a good thing, if not a great thing. He knows it’s time to go and he told us all so. Better to go out at the top than just hang on with your best days past you. I can’t write anywhere near enough words here to describe or pay homage to the achievements this man has recorded. Many, many others will do that for me and I’ll be able to buy the books, the films and so on.

There are thousands of young people who have grown up watching F1 knowing only that MS drives a red Ferrari, indeed my own children think any racing car that is missile-like in looks with sticky-out wheels is a “schumacher”, although they are only young and Dad will see to it that they are not misguided! My eldest teenage daughter cannot grasp the idea that a man can drive in over two hundred and thirty F1 races and win every third one. And there we go already on the statistics.

MS is not about numbers though. He is about winning and if ever the adage about second place being the first loser was applied then this man has to be the epitome of that phrase. I know he’s done this and that, I know he’s played dirty, I know he’s been controversial and I know he has always been the most passionate, committed-to-winning racing driver the World has ever known. Bar none. I know these things because for sixteen years I have followed almost every single race he’s raced. I’ve watched him at Hockenheim, I’ve read as many printed words about him as almost all my other racing heroes totalled together, both in English and his native German. That said, he is not my ultimate motor racing driver, that’s for another piece but he is such an enigma, which is why so much is being said about him.

He has also won more Formula One races than any other driver, ever. And surely you don’t turn up in your fireproof Nomex suit on a Sunday afternoon having come through the savage younger ranks of FFord, FRenault, F3, GP2 to see if you can win a Formula One race? You turn up to win. I am convinced that if more of today’s drivers arrived with that attitude we would see racing the likes of which we can only imagine.

Fans, critics and followers are talking of favourite moments. For me the OMP-gloved hand slipping out of the cockpit as the chequered flag dropped some ninety times already. That all-knowing feeling that he’s just beaten the rest – again.

Others, so rapt in their admiration for MS talk of him in a religious light but surely a false god if ever there was one?

Of course he is, we jokingly among our peers talk about MS being König Schumacher, or Schumi the King, at one point I had even wanted to put a picture up with the words,

“…and God came down to earth and drove a Ferrari”

… and probably still will but only in order to wind up visitors to the house. To thousands of people he is seen in the same light as a major pivotal religious influence but a god he cannot be. As a mere mortal man he may have achieved so much, the record books have been re-written for him but he is no god. Just a man, started out as a normal kid with a dollop of talent in a knocked together kart from dad and the rest as they say is now very much history. And he will go in the same way as he has passed through. So that’s why he can only be a demi-god at most.

The world is alight with red-hot press about Schumacher and will be for some time, Michael Schumacher happened and he turned Formula One upside down, inside out and back to front. Any establishment is bound to reel from that and F1 will be reeling for quite some time.

Perhaps the reason so many people in F1 have so much to say against Michael Schumacher is that they simply cannot let themselves as drivers ex or current, champions gone by, managers, rule-makers and fellow competitors believe that a human being can accomplish so much in the SAME GAME as themselves? Ten years of that game has been played with the same team, which is something else I think galls nearly everyone who doesn’t wear a Marlboro shirt with a small black horse rearing on a yellow shield. Ten years is a very long time in any job but in F1 where it’s all so volatile, so money and media focussed ten years is a lifetime. Two times World Champion Mika Hakkinen, the flying Finn himself admitted that sticking with one team is the only way to the top. There’s too much technology advancement, sponsor influence and risk of change to face by changing teams all the time. Witness Frank Williams Grand Prix Engineering. MS was either clever enough to see this, which I truly believe he and his advisors were clever enough to see, or he simply wanted to be a Ferrari driver no matter how (what red-blooded male doesn’t?), which is probably true as well. Kimi Raikkonen has just realised a boyhood dream and the world waits with baited breath for him to appear clad in the red suit of F1 warrior. The renaissance for Ferrari could not have happened at a better time either and they for one will be eternally grateful to MS.

Call it jealousy if you like, call it what you will. What is clear is that once the 2006 season has been decided, and really I think for many people it matters not if it ends in an unprecedented eighth title for MS, then the world of F1 can move on. The rule-makers are probably glad too, for never before has such a formidable combination of talent, intelligence, skill and sheer adversity been put together in one team representing such a force to be reckoned with and for it to happen at Ferrari was almost too much for the poor FIA. Certainly it’s been too much for some of their rivals? How Il Commendatore’s eyes would be twinkling behind those dark glasses. The rule-makers truly have had their work cut out keeping in front of the likes of Brawn, Todt and Schumacher because if the rules lean in one particular way then the clever ones will exploit them to the full. That is one of the markers that defines a top team.

What really has to happen now, in order to get back on a level keel, is for MS to go down in history and the whole business of rules and regulations be set for the new scene. The talent coming through that can bring us all a new Formula One. The losers here aren’t really losing much at all. I am far happier that he will not be racing in 2007, because the sport millions dearly love to watch can breathe new life again, if you like it is only going to lose this excess baggage.

2007 then can be the year that instead of the whole F1 grid, every team and the entire world media barrage ‘racing’ against Michael Schumacher, will be the beginning of an era where at last the field can be levelled by removing the largest obstacle that everyone has wanted to surmount these last sixteen years and everyone from the fans to the rule makers can breath a huge sigh of relief so letting the drivers finally race against each other again. Look at most of the tributes from the ‘best of the rest’ of current drivers and it’s easy to read this message into most of what they say. What is a real shame, and true reflection of the whole F1 spectacle is that none of them have the sportsmanship to come right out and say “thank god he’s going, we can all race against each other now…”

There will be people disappointed and even sad that MS is going but there are no real losers because of the legacy that is Michael Schumacher. The redefined standards; the new way of tackling winning and becoming champion, the way of building success, picking out the best of everything available, the commitment to winning and ultimately working in a team, not for a team. Maybe the days of me, me, me, that we saw with our other ‘most-loved to be hated’ drivers will return but then we’ll have new villains to turn on. Maybe we’ll see more current drivers learning from the MS legacy. Maybe the drivers will all slip back into the fags and pints of beer after a race, partying til 4am, raising hell and dare I say it showing openly something we now miss called friendship amongst each other?

Probably not – that really is lost.

Whatever happens, F1 has changed forever and like it or not that’s down to one driver, one man, one name.

Michael Schumacher.