Schumacher's overlooked early brilliance

To be successful as an elite athlete requires skill, dedication, mental strength, physical excellence and backing from the right people. It's necessary to have all of those things to be an all-time great, and, on top of that, something extra still. They must also be a transformative force, redefining what it is to be the best in their chosen discipline and influencing those that follow.

Michael Schumacher had that extra something in abundance, which he proved with five consecutive world championships with Ferrari from 2000-05. But his double title success with Benetton in 1994-95 is too often relegated to the status of little more than a prequel to those glory years. It shouldn't be, though, because this showcased something remarkable about Schumacher that's too often overlooked when we rightly celebrated the galvanising effect he had on Ferrari.

Prior to Schumacher's arrival, Benetton had grown from the days when it failed to qualify 90% of the time in its first season as Toleman back in 1981, to an occasional race winner that was only intermittently a thorn in the side of Williams, McLaren and Ferrari. But it was Schumacher's arrival that led to that changing.

"We were a team that were finishing third, fourth, fifth in the championship," says Pat Symonds, Schumacher's race engineer for those two titles, in an interview on the Autosport Podcast.

"We were an independent team, we weren't a particularly well-financed team, we were proud of what we were doing. But all of us wanted that step on and it wasn't obvious to us what we needed. Then Michael came along and we suddenly realised that was a very large part of what we needed.

"I'm not saying the team was perfect and we just needed a good driver, because that's disingenuous to the drivers before Michael, some of whom were very good indeed. But Michael showed us that it's not just that ability he had, but the whole approach to racing that all of us needed to change. Certainly, on the engineering side we did make those changes in the same way that Michael had done with the driving aspects."

An emerging team signing an established champion as a final piece of the puzzle is not unusual. A top-liner who has been there and done that is often the crucial ingredient that makes a good team into a great one. But Schumacher wasn't that, at least he wasn't when he joined the team in late 1991 after a one-off appearance for Jordan.

Yes, he had experience with the Sauber-Mercedes sportscar team and was clearly a very fast racing driver, but Schumacher wasn't anything approaching that kind of 'crucial ingredient' driver back then. Or at least, he shouldn't have been because he didn't have that grounding - he was just a quick 22-year-old with a strong CV from outside F1, albeit one who had caught the eye of those who were looking closely enough as something special.

This is at the crux of the remarkable story of Schumacher at Benetton. He didn't simply take what he'd learned in another established team and capitalise on it, he was able to look at a good, effective unit such as Benetton and help to make it better while simultaneously making himself better.

He had the vision, that understanding of what needed to be done, over and above what he'd already picked up during his career - as well as learning everything an already very effective Benetton team had to offer - to act as a driving force. Once he'd done that, he had the confidence to drive like he'd been winning in F1 for a decade.

Schumacher redefined the way a driver could build a team around themselves and some of the outstanding personnel he worked with at Enstone also made their way to Ferrari

It's easy to forget Schumacher went into the tumultuous 1994 season with just two grand prix victories - and not a single pole position - under his belt. Yet suddenly, once Ayrton Senna was lost, he instantly became the one true megastar in grand prix racing. And he was equal to the challenge.

Regardless of what you think about the controversies of 1994 and the way he clinched the title on the streets of Adelaide after hitting Damon Hill's Williams, Schumacher was outstanding. And he did so without the benefit of experience in the other car after two seasons during which the contributions of Martin Brundle and Riccardo Patrese to Benetton might have made up for any deficit in Schumacher's game. In '94, an injury-compromised JJ Lehto and rookie Jos Verstappen shared the second Benetton for the majority of the season.

This period set the course for Schumacher's career. It's inevitable he'd have got into F1 sooner rather than later because he was under contract to Mercedes and at the latest he'd surely have made his debut with Sauber in 1993. But he found an opportunity and his stunning pace in the Jordan at Spa earned him his move to Benetton. Almost immediately, he became a driver you expected to see on the podium, one capable of snatching the odd win.

That's another Schumacher strength, seizing a single opportunity. You can draw a straight line from that moment to becoming central to the building of the Ferrari superteam that went on to achieve great things. Why? Because he redefined the way a driver could build a team around themselves and some of the outstanding personnel he worked with at Enstone also made their way to Ferrari.

There was another aspect where he raised standards as well. His fitness was exemplary and that's another defining factor of Schumacher's contribution to F1 - other drivers had to follow his lead and the expectation of what a grand prix driver was physically changed beyond recognition during his time. It wasn't as if drivers before Schumacher were overweight, chain smoking layabouts - they were athletes - but he saw a way to give himself an edge and pursued it. This too was already in evidence during the Benetton years.

He also exhibited his ability to improvise in races. The 1994 Spanish Grand Prix is rightly celebrated, as he finished second in a car stuck in fifth gear. But it wasn't simply that he was fast in a restricted car, it was the fact he quickly adapted to that limitation and found the way to exploit the maximum lap time from it. Many drivers would have eventually worked it out given enough running, but Schumacher did it in a live, high-pressure race situation - and in a handful of laps.

That skill surely contributed to his ability to be so consistently quick in races. It's a myth that great racing drivers are simply fast, most good drivers can be that on a given lap - and in fact qualifying, despite all his pole positions, isn't one of the two or three aspects of Schumacher's game that immediately leaps to mind. What Schumacher was able to do was be quick in all circumstances, regardless of the situation.

His big weakness was also first laid bare at Benetton. There's no disgrace in having such a weakness, even the greats have those. But what happened in the 1994 Australian GP did reveal that Schumacher, under extreme pressure, could crack. He was only in a position to hit Hill because of running off the track and hitting the wall - an unforced error - and later in his career we saw similar things going wrong at Jerez in '97 and in his error-ridden drive to nick the title at Suzuka in 2003 (below). Such examples are few and far between, and probably stand as the only real chink in his armour.

So, everything that made Schumacher such a genius in a red car was already there in a yellow, green or blue one from 1991-95. He had a profound influence on those around him, one that stretched well beyond what he did on track. He was, in every way, a gamechanger.

This capacity was something that was within Schumacher, rather than given to him from the outside. That's what the greats do, they don't simply become vessels for conventional ideas and aggregate the marginal gains. That's part of what they do, but they also bring new methods, approaches and thinking and impact those around them. They have a clarity of vision that the ordinary driver lacks. Schumacher did this at Benetton, in the process helping to transform it from a very good team into an unlikely championship-winner.

Even a Schumacher in his formative years produced some of the greatest feats ever seen by a grand prix driver

Let's say, hypothetically, Schumacher had retired at the end of 1995 and the Ferrari era never happened, how would we see him now? Aside presumably from bafflement at exactly what would make a 26-year-old at the top of his game stop rather than move to Ferrari and thrive, there was already a significant enough body of work to consider him among the all-time greats.

While he wouldn't have been in the debate for number one, which he clearly is today, he'd have done enough to be in the second group of greats just behind the true legends. And in just a fraction of his career.

The Schumacher of the Ferrari era was objectively a better driver. He had more experience, continued to raise his game, smoothed out the rough edges and therefore became greater than the Schumacher who won two titles for Benetton. But he was a driver magnified, augmented, rather than transformed.

Everything that made Schumacher arguably the greatest of all-time when at Ferrari was there in the early years. Perhaps it was a less refined, rawer, version of Schumacher, but it was a formidable one who stood above any of his contemporaries.

That's why this part of his F1 career deserves to be remembered beyond the odd reference to what happened in Spain or Australia. Maybe it wasn't Schumacher at his very best, but even a Schumacher in his formative years produced some of the greatest feats ever seen by a grand prix driver.

Subscribe to Autosport's podcast feed, available on iTunes and all good podcast suppliers, to listen to our special edition on Michael Schumacher's early years featuring Pat Symonds and Gary Anderson - available on January 3