Schumacher exclusive: Going back to the start

There was a brief period exactly 20 years ago when only two people could say they had been at all of Michael Schumacher's World Sportscar Championship races, all of his Japanese F3000 races, and all of his grands prix. One of them was Michael, and the other was me.

I lost that record when he went to do his second F1 race at Monza for Benetton. In those days my focus was mainly on the WSC, so I didn't go.

Covering that series allowed an insight into Schumacher's progress with Mercedes through 1990 and '91. It was a total coincidence that I then saw him do his one and only F3000 race in Japan in July 1991. I went to Sugo just to get a flavour of the series, and it turned out that at the last minute Michael's management did a deal for him to take part.

The previous year he had combined F3 and sportscars but in '91, he was only doing the latter, and the idea of Japan was for him to get a handle on a powerful single-seater.

We ended up travelling there from Tokyo on the train together, along with his temporary team-mate, Johnny Herbert. Michael finished a remarkable second that weekend, and just a few weeks later - after the jailing of Bertrand Gachot - Mercedes ushered him into a Jordan F1 seat alongside Andrea de Cesaris.

I also went to Spa, mainly to cover the Jaguar XJR15 race (see this week's magazine for an in-depth piece on F1's sometime supercar support race). And as history relates, Michael was the big story of the weekend. Everyone wanted to talk to him, but even at his first race, it was not easy. Thanks to an ongoing relationship with him in the middle of a fraught weekend, his manager Willi Weber let me sit down with him for a one-on-one interview. It ran in AUTOSPORT that week, and again on this website last week.

Schumacher was a Mercedes driver then and now © LAT

Last weekend at Spa Michael was again the focus as celebrations for his anniversary kicked off. And to 'complete the circle', as his current manager Sabine Kehm put it, he found time to sit down with me for an exclusive anniversary chat. We sat in the Mercedes motorhome, probably 30 metres or so from where Eddie Jordan's bus was parked all those years ago.

The saga of the summer of 1991 and how he ended up in the Jordan (and subsequently of course went to Benetton) could fill a book. Does he remember everything that happened?

"Certainly not day-by-day, not in all details, quite honestly," he says. "I certainly do remember the progression and how those final moments happened, when Willi sort of gave me the message, 'We want to be in England on Monday to do a seat fitting because you're going to go out on Tuesday in the car.' It was, 'Oh, cool!' I remember what happened from there on.

"I wish Eddie would remember all the details, he keeps saying funny things recently! Nevertheless it's been an unusual circumstance, like most of the things in my career, quite honestly. Because I mean I didn't have money, I didn't have anything special outside, I just had the love for the sport. I had obviously some talent, and was able to excite people around me to support me. And that was my big moment in many moments in life."

Schumacher's first run in an F1 car was on Silverstone's South Circuit on the Tuesday before Spa, an event witnessed by very few people. He went so fast so soon that he was called in and told to take it easy.

"There were a couple of other teams, I'm sure McLaren and Arrows were there. Nevertheless it was a small test, a small group, and driving the car for the first laps was pretty shocking. Then things went pretty well. I still remember [team manager] Trevor Foster coming to me and saying, 'Michael, calm down, slow down, this is the car you're going to race on the weekend, so don't break it!'"

Schumacher is proud of his 20 years © LAT

Schumacher's trip to Belgium was organised so late that he and Weber ended up staying in budget accommodation in a sort of youth hostel ("We were in a place like that, but I didn't really mind, for me it didn't matter too much!")

His first job was getting to know his way around Spa, something he did by bicycle on the Thursday. Famously Jordan was under the impression that Michael had raced there before, when in fact he hadn't. EJ repeated the story on the BBC and elsewhere last week, but Michael denies that it was a deliberate lie.

"This is where Eddie has lost memory," he insists. "Eddie mentioned that he called Willi and he called me to ask whether I'd driven here, and we both said 'Yes'. It's completely wrong.

"He called Willi indeed, and Willi seriously thought I had raced here in sportscars. He didn't even ask me, he just said, 'Sure yeah, he drove there'. It was only when I took my bicycle on the Thursday Willi said, 'What are you doing with the bicycle?' I said I have to go round the track, I have to see it. Then he sort of picked up that I didn't know the track!"

It seems unbelievable now, but Michael insists that he was lacking in confidence, and wasn't sure that he'd be able to make the step.

"That's how I've always felt. In all the categories I went through I always had a certain percentage of doubt about myself. But then in the right moment I always had enough confidence that I could do it."

Given that he'd won everywhere he went - he had just made a big splash in the competitive Japanese F3000 series after all - it seems strange.

"I know, but still that's me. I always was doubtful whether that was good enough, what I could deliver. In a way I think that's my engine for my motivation, for my spirit, for my motivation to improve."

Was it just the shock of suddenly being on the same track as the likes of Ayrton Senna, Alain Prost and Nigel Mansell?

"Those big guys, and F1 itself - it is the pinnacle of motorsport. And never having driven the car, how can you be confident to say that you are going to beat them? You cannot. Yes, you've been in other categories, you've been successful in other categories, but then there's another step.

"I simply thought it was a realistic approach. And maybe a kind of protection at the same time - that if things wouldn't have gone too well, I wouldn't be too disappointed either. But on the other side I was overwhelmed and overexcited as things turned out."

It didn't take long for Michael to get over any issues he had: "After the first laps and seeing the comparisons to [Andrea] de Cesaris, setting up the car and improving the car, pinpointing the right areas, and sorting it out, obviously I took confidence very quickly..."

He certainly did. From the start of the first practice session he was at the sharp end of the field. In Friday qualifying he got stuck behind Prost ("I lost half a second in that lap because of Alain") and again had traffic on Saturday. He still took eighth, which became seventh when Riccardo Patrese was penalised for a technical infringement.

Michael Schumacher and Eddie Jordan - complete with clutch! © LAT

Sadly we never got to see what he could do in the race, as Michael's debut was over almost before he started as he trundled down the hill from La Source with a broken clutch.

"It wasn't initially so disappointing. Remember in 2006 when I retired in Japan because of the engine failure, when I was close to taking the lead of the championship?

"Yeah, you're disappointed to a degree, but it's part of racing. And it was the same there. The clutch went, nothing I could do differently, other than to convince Eddie to invest another few hundred pounds, and things would have been different!"

Here is where Michael's own memory might be playing tricks. His clutch had been changed after the Sunday morning warm-up - Force India sporting director Andy Stevenson, then a mechanic, says he personally did it.

Both Stevenson and Force India technical director Andy Green insist that Schumacher dragged the clutch off the line (it was uphill remember), and burnt it out. Given that he hadn't done a proper practice start, and aside from Sugo had been doing rolling starts in sportscars all season, it was perhaps not surprising.

The bottom line is that he was unlikely to finish anyway. Cosworth had made some changes to the HB V8's engine spec and had failed to inform Jordan that oil consumption would go up over a race distance. Later in the race de Cesaris had a shot at victory when his engine failed, and the likelihood is that would have happened to Michael.

Schumacher was still fast through Eau Rouge last weekend, as he was 20 years ago © LAT

Given that his race only lasted 500 metres, is Spa 1991 a special memory for him, or has so much happened since that it doesn't really register? He has no doubts.

"No, it is a very special memory. Not so much the race, because I didn't do much in the race. I had a good start, and was actually pretty excited, picked up another position, got a big shock when I hit the brakes because the front tyres were too cold and I locked up straight away, and I was thinking, 'Oh I'm going to hit the guy in front now.' I managed to stop. And then it was over..."

He does have one more fascinating observation. Schumacher is not the sort of guy who wastes times pondering 'what ifs' or 'maybes'. But as we were to find out over the next fortnight, he left Spa that Sunday night without a watertight contract to stay with Jordan.

To this day he believes that had he got a good finish, EJ would have scrambled to ensure he couldn't go elsewhere any time soon. In which case history might have turned out differently. What would Schumacher have done in a Jordan-Yamaha in 1992?

"In hindsight what I think about it is that maybe it was luck, because maybe if I had actually done the whole race and finished the race, I certainly would have been on the podium. I don't know what would have happened then with the whole development, if then it would have been easier or more difficult to get out and get into Benetton and do everything I did.

"I don't know. In a way it's fate, and things have to come and will develop the way that life has dedicated it or written the story basically for you..."