How a fallen Red Bull F1 hope became a Porsche great

During a remarkable 2006 GP2 campaign, Lewis Hamilton marked himself out as a future Formula 1 star with a convincing title-winning charge that included clean sweeps of the Nurburgring and Silverstone. But, while the now seven-time world champion had to wait until round three to take his first triumph, another series rookie opened his account on the first weekend of the year, when he took the reversed-grid spoils at Valencia.

Like Hamilton, he's currently sitting on a run of four consecutive titles, although you'd be forgiven after the quickfire 2020 campaign for missing former Red Bull Junior Michael Ammermuller's coronation in the ADAC GT Masters.

Coming after a hat-trick of Porsche Supercup titles for Lechner Racing, the bespectacled German's successful switch to Germany's hotly-contested national GT3 championship is all the more notable given that the Porsche he shared with former Supercup rival Christian Engelhart was being run by a team brand-new to motorsport.

Just like Hamilton's Mercedes operation, plagued by engine trouble in testing before dominating the season, Ammermuller's Munich-based SSR Performance squad benefited from the pandemic-induced delays to hit the ground running with a podium at its first race, before scoring the first of three race wins at the second round.

"Of course, I'm very happy about the last four years and especially 2020 with the new team and a different series," reflects Ammermuller (below, right) who admits he played hard to get with SSR boss Stefan Schlund. "I was not so sure in the beginning if this is the right decision. I said to him, 'I will call you back in two weeks', but I didn't call him and he rung me back...

"I told him, 'I want racing because of fun, that's the most important thing. But I only have fun if I have success.' That's why I decided to do this. If I would have thought it will not be possible to win races or have good people in the team, I would have said no."

The campaign was one that arose purely out of pragmatism. Ammermuller had originally planned to dovetail his first GT Masters campaign since 2017 with a ninth season in the Supercup, before clashes following the pandemic prompted him to choose the series he considered the most likely to proceed.

"I was not sure at that time [if the Supercup would happen] because it's a very international championship," he says. "I thought it might be more likely that a German championship will happen."

It proved a sound call, and SSR - with technical support from Manthey Racing - was a highly competitive prospect, with the two drivers complementing each other well.

"He's a very clever driver, that's probably the most outstanding about him," says Engelhart, the 2017 Blancpain Endurance and overall Blancpain GT champion. "In GT Masters it's actually very difficult to get many points in the second race when you win the first race, because you always have to carry 30 kilos.

"I can't tell because I did only one race weekend [before the injury], but I'm sure that if I wouldn't be injured, I would have had a good chance to get a Formula 1 seat" Michael Ammermuller

"That's I think why in GT Masters we had 12 different winners last year. We're the only guys that won three races, the others only won one race each. On the difficult races, you do what is possible and you try to maximise what you have, because you cannot win every race.

"You can see his great experience and how he's handling battles on track when he's fighting with other cars, how he's defending, or also how he can pull a lap out of the bag in qualifying. In every moment you can really see that he's focused on what he has to do in that moment, he has the experience and the abilities and he's a true professional."

At the Oschersleben season finale, Ammermuller and Engelhart overturned a seven point- deficit to the Rutronik Audi of Kelvin van der Linde and Patric Niederhauser after a "sensational" - per Engelhart - pole from Ammermuller set SSR on-course for race-one victory. When van der Linde was eliminated in a race-two start crash, it caused a red flag that proved doubly helpful to SSR, as Engelhart had been turned around at the start by Albert Costa's Lamborghini and risked losing out to title outsider Robert Renauer in third.

But, with positions reset, there was no such issue at the restart and fourth place was enough for the title. Unsurprisingly, Ammermuller picks it out as the key point in the campaign.

"For everybody who is fighting for a championship, mentally that's the hardest because that's the last two races that count," he says. "You have not so many races left so you have to be in front of the others and make the points. We had the lead after the first race in Oschersleben and I think this destroyed the other teams because then they were in the position like we were on Saturday morning."

Given Ammermuller's affinity with 911s, it's perhaps not a surprise that he was immediately on the pace with SSR, but a GT3 campaign is a very different beast from the Supercup. Where the latter is a single-driver, spec-car formula, the former is a multi-make Balance of Performance category where two drivers share a car.

Ammermuller says "you have a lot more factors which you cannot influence in the GT3. In the Supercup, it's more the driver and what I can control." But, despite getting the car to himself in the Supercup, its status on the F1 undercard means practice is very limited.

"Also, the tyre is not an endurance tyre; it's a sprint tyre so you have only one lap sometimes where the new tyre is quick in qualifying," says Ammermuller. "Without ABS it's really difficult to push the car on the limit - you can lose the car more easily than a GT3 car. I think this helped me a lot."

So how did Ammermuller, a man who works day to day for the family recycling firm, become an undisputed Porsche master? It's not been an easy ride, despite the early patronage of Red Bull, which took him straight from Formula Renault 2.0 to GP2 with Christian Horner's Arden team. He followed his promising start at Valencia with second in the feature race at Imola and a third at Barcelona, joining Hamilton and winner Alex Premat on the podium.

But his season tailed off afterwards, not helped by being taken out at the first corner at the Hungaroring after qualifying a promising third, so the pressure was on when he joined ART for 2007, even taking the #1 earned by Hamilton.

An "unlucky" clash with Kazuki Nakajima at the Bahrain season opener left him with a broken wrist, and his struggles on his return after almost three months out with no testing led to his being dropped by Helmut Marko, just as Scott Speed was being herded towards the Toro Rosso exit door.

"At this time, we didn't have any simulators to train on, so there was no chance to train," he reflects. "This was my problem to come back after this break without testing to compete immediately with the top drivers."

It was a bitter pill to swallow - ART team-mate Lucas di Grassi had endured a nightmare maiden GP2 campaign in 2006 for Durango, but emerged the following year as Timo Glock's main title rival, so it wouldn't be beyond the realms of possibility that Ammermuller could have made similar progress to earn the F1 berth that eventually went to Sebastian Vettel...

"I'm not racing to make history or to be somewhere on a list. I just want to race and have fun" Michael Ammermuller

"They pushed me up very fast and they stopped it in the same way very fast!" he says. "If they let me have more time to recover, maybe I could have had more success in formula cars. I can't tell because I did only one race weekend [before the injury], but I'm sure that if I wouldn't be injured, I would have had a good chance to get a Formula 1 seat.

"It's done and I can't change anything, but if I hadn't been injured, many things could have been different."

To keep his F1 dream alive, Ammermuller headed to A1GP, where he was again quick in the Super Nova-run Team Germany squad with which Nico Hulkenberg had won the title the previous year, but earned a reputation for getting embroiled in incidents.

"I had a lot of pressure to perform because at this moment I didn't have a lot of options to do anything else, so that was not an easy situation for me," he says.

Without the sponsorship to continue in GP2, "the only option was to do Formula Master which I knew was not very good, but I did it because it was the only chance to stay in motorsport". Third in the points wasn't enough to revive his fading F1 hopes, but he managed to find a berth in GT Masters for 2010 before the crucial move to one-make Porsches came with the recommendation of an old friend.

Christoph Huber, whose Huber Racing team ran Larry ten Voorde to the 2020 Carrera Cup Germany title, was then working as team manager for the late Walter Lechner's successful squad and was key in Ammermuller landing alongside double champion Rene Rast in 2012. Ammermuller learned quickly and followed his soon-to-be-triple-champion team leader home for a 1-2 at Hockenheim, but it was another two years before he finally broke his duck at the 28th attempt, in the final round of 2014 at Austin.

"The first win was very special because it took a long time; I was many times on the podium but never won a race," he says. "After that it's easier, you can drive more free because you know you can do it. After that I was always getting stronger."

Third in 2014 and 2015, he improved his points tally in 2016 as he slipped to fourth, but then the floodgates opened in 2017. He took four wins on his way to the title, a feat he matched in 2019 after only winning once in an ultra-close fight in 2018. Now fifth on the all-time Supercup wins tally, does becoming its all-time conqueror motivate Ammermuller?

"I'm not racing to make history or to be somewhere on a list," he replies. "I just want to race and have fun. I'm not completely fixed on the race weekends, I have different problems during the week, and that works for me because I'm not thinking all the time about the last race or the next race."

Asked if he's motivated by achieving the status of a works driver, his answer is telling. "To get a factory drive would be nice," he says. "But if I get one, it would be not the same like a normal factory driver because I can't spend 100% of my time on racing. It would be limited on races that I still can do my [day] job."

It's a matter-of-fact response from a matter-of-fact driver. Perfect material for a matter-of-fact company like Porsche.