In the Beginning

What is there left to say about Michael Schumacher? Billions of words have been written about the man, most of them in the last fortnight, it seems. Every aspect of his career has been explored.

So for a little personal insight I'd like to take you back to 1991, a pivotal year in Michael's career. For a brief period that season, I had a little claim to fame. As of the end of August only two human beings could claim to have been present at all of Schumacher's World Sportscar Championship races, all of his F3000 races, and all of his F1 races. One of them was Michael. And the other one was me...

In those days my journalistic focus was mainly on sportscar racing, so I first got to know Michael when he arrived as part of the Mercedes 'L-team' in 1990 (although I had actually first written about him when he was in Formula Ford two years earlier).

At the end of 1989, Mercedes announced that it had picked three youngsters for its Group C programme, who would take turns to race alongside Jochen Mass. The man behind the scheme was Jochen Neerpasch, who in the past had successfully pushed junior programmes with both Ford and BMW.

There was no great mystery as to how the lucky coming men were chosen. Neerpasch simply took the top three finishers from the 1989 German F3 championship, and these were Karl Wendlinger, Michael Schumacher and Heinz Harald Frentzen. When the programme was launched, I was no great fan of it, in part because it meant that my mate Kenneth Acheson had been squeezed out of the team to make room.

Group C did not seem the right place to be putting F3 drivers, and I said so in a column in Autosport magazine, which I headlined 'Three appointed stars'. Neerpasch read it and was equally unimpressed with my negative analysis. It would come back to haunt me...

All three dovetailed their sportscar commitments with their usual single-seater programmes. Michael stayed in F3 while the others moved up to F3000, and at his second attempt he won the German title, adding international successes in Macau and Fuji at the end of the year.

I'd be the first to admit that as far as the Group C programme was concerned, Schumacher did not stand head and shoulders above the others. It was hard to judge as they took turns to share the car, so they only did a few races each, and never competed against each other as such.

Michael found controversy even in sportscars. During practice at Silverstone, he stopped at the side of the track with a problem, and then got going and returned to the pits with his seat-belts undone. That led to a penalty, although I seem to recall that he denied any wrongdoing, despite eyewitness accounts from officials. Shades of things to come?

He only actually raced three times that year. At Dijon and the Nurburgring (where Michael had a big practice crash in the wet) he and Mass finished second behind teammates Jean Louis Schlesser and Mauro Baldi. Then, in the Mexico finale, Michael and Jochen were quicker, only to lose out to the sister car by delaying a switch to wet tyres. But when the winning car was excluded for an infringement, they were handed the victory. Schumacher had impressed in the wet conditions.

The programme stepped up a gear in 1991. Frentzen had decided to go his own way, leaving Michael and Wendlinger to share a car for the whole season, with no single-seater distractions. What's more, the category had moved from lumbering, heavyweight turbos to a new era of 'two-seater F1 cars'. Like the Peugeot 905 (managed by Jean Todt) and the Jaguar XJR-14 (designed by Ross Brawn), the Mercedes C291 was a fabulous machine, but it was let down by the unreliability of its oddball flat-12 engine, which would sometimes - I kid you not - blow up as it left the pitlane.

Michael didn't even drive in the season opener at Suzuka as the car didn't get beyond Wendlinger's first stint. He ran well for a while at Monza before retiring, and then for once the thing hung together and the pair finished second at Silverstone. Then came Le Mans, where Mercedes had opted to run the old turbo car.

Schumacher and Wendlinger were joined for the occasion by DTM junior Fritz Kreutzpointer, and since Mercedes had missed the 1990 race, it was the first appearance for all three men. They were to have a dramatic weekend. After leading early on, Schumacher hit a slower car, Wendlinger crashed, Kreutzpointer was slow, and there were various mechanical dramas. Despite all that, they still finished fifth. But what really caught the eye was Michael's pace as he tried to recover ground after the various delays, and he was especially fast during the night, which is always a test of real ability. By now he was clearly a step ahead of Wendlinger.

There was a break in the calendar in July, and I found something else to do, arranging to travel to Japan for a couple of weeks to see a local Group C race at Fuji and then an F3000 event at Sugo. After I'd booked, it became rather more relevant when Mercedes found Michael an F3000 drive with the Le Mans Company team - a deal brokered through AMG's connections with Bridgestone, who knew Schumacher anyway from his karting days. It was clear at that stage that there was a desire to get him into a single-seater with a view to preparing him for a move to F1 in 1992.

Many of the overseas F3000 drivers were also at the Fuji sportscar event, and I was hanging out with them at Tokyo's President Hotel the following week when Michael arrived from Europe. I'll never forget the incredulous look on his face when we met outside the hotel - "What are you doing here?" he said. Any plans to have a low-key run far away from the eyes of the media were now out of the window...

I travelled from Tokyo to Sendai on the bullet train with Schumacher, Johnny Herbert and a couple of other drivers. I seem to recall going straight to some sort of downtown PR event where the drivers were interviewed on an open-air stage, and I'm sure nobody had a clue who this new German bloke was.

They soon found out. Where Michael lucked in was that Sugo was a one-off race in a series dominated by four outings at Suzuka and four at Fuji. Had he gone to one of those events, he probably would have struggled to get anywhere near drivers who had tested there endlessly. Everyone had done fewer miles at Sugo, so he was at less of a disadvantage.

Bizarrely, the Le Mans Company team ran a works Reynard for Ross Cheever, and the works Ralt for Herbert. The Bridgestone influence was evident when Michael was given Johnny's car and mechanics, and the Briton was relegated to a worn-out spare car. We reminisced about that at Monza the other week, and Johnny could still remember his surprise and shock - no one told him until the last minute that Michael was in his car...

Whatever the background, Michael did a great job in an unfamiliar environment. He had of course never driven an F3000 car in Europe, and had to get used to qualifying tyres that were worth three seconds! He qualified second in his group behind future F1 no-hoper Naoki Hattori, and made his mark in the race by passing championship leader Ukyo Katayama round the outside of Turn 1. He then got by Hattori and a misfire-troubled Thomas Danielsson to claim second, behind teammate Cheever.

It was a great performance, but somehow everything seemed to fall into place for Michael. And that included the presence of yours truly, which could have backfired for him. Usually Japanese F3000 races went unrecorded overseas, earning just a few column inches, even in Autosport magazine. But since I was there, this one got a full two-page report, complete with my photo of a grinning Michael sitting on the pitwall.

I called it a 'stirring performance', and I gave him an extra plug in the news pages under the heading 'Schumacher impresses in Japanese F3000 debut.' Folk who hadn't paid much attention to his exploits in sportscar racing soon knew all about an appearance that might otherwise have passed unnoticed.

It's illuminating to look back at what he told me at the time: "The race was crazy hard for me. It was the first time when I must give 100% for myself - sometimes over. The car is not easy to drive. You suddenly have oversteer, suddenly understeer. The car is not really consistent.

"Obviously I want to do F1 next year, but whether I can or not is another question. Mr Neerpasch has a lot of experience, and I think he can help me..."

Schumacher then went to a test at Fuji with a view to doing a race at the track later in the summer, but this time he was well down the order.

Meanwhile, the WSC kicked off again at the Nurburgring in mid-August. Michael blotted his copybook in qualifying when he felt he was blocked by Derek Warwick. In a moment of apparent road rage, he thumped into the Jag as he drove past, before heading back to the pits. Now, this was Derek's comeback to racing just a few weeks after the death of brother Paul in an F3000 race at Oulton Park. It was already a heavy weekend for him, and the last thing he needed was this sort of provocation.

Chased by his mechanics and Ross Brawn, he marched to the Sauber pit to find that Michael had already escaped to the safety of the truck. Undeterred, Derek followed him in, with Jean Louis Schlesser and Jochen Mass also now in tow.

Anything might have happened next, but thankfully Warwick did not resort to physical violence, and simply walked out. He told me later what had persuaded him not to pursue the matter: "The only thing that saved me a $10,000 fine and taking the guy's head off was that when I got hold of Schumacher all I could see was a kid. I could see Paul..."

Michael admitted what he'd done, but initially refused to apologise and was reprimanded for "misbehaviour and dangerous practice". Most thought he had a lucky escape. Later that afternoon, I went to find him for an interview, but his manager Willi Weber told me that he was busy - something about a meeting they had to go to. I accepted the excuse and wandered off.

It was only in the days that followed that I found out what that was all about. In fact Michael, Willi and Neerpasch had disappeared to a nearby hotel to meet Eddie Jordan. Bertrand Gachot was in legal limbo, a seat was available for the upcoming Formula One Belgian Grand Prix, and, well, you know the rest.

So a few days later Michael was at Spa. I didn't go to all the Grands Prix in those days, but I did go to this one. In those days, Michael hardly knew any of the German F1 journalists, never mind the others, so to him I was a welcome familiar face. I spent a lot of time hanging around the Jordan garage, observing what was going on. He soon began to make his mark in practice. At one point Murray Walker wandered up and joined me. With great foresight, he said: "So you also like being present when history is being made?"

On Friday night, I went to a very ordinary restaurant in the centre of Spa with a few colleagues. The place was mostly packed with fans, but a couple of tables away were Schumacher and Weber. I went over to say hello and chat about his day. Nobody else in the place had any clue who he was...

The next day Michael qualified an extraordinary eighth on a track he had never driven on before, behind Ayrton Senna, Riccardo Patrese (who later had his times disallowed for a technical infringement, thus promoting Schumacher to 7th), Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell, Gerhard Berger, Jean Alesi and Nelson Piquet. That is an extraordinary collection of names, and who could have imagined that he would eventually eclipse all of them?

At some point I bumped into Neerpasch in the Jordan motorhome. "Do you remember that article you wrote?" he said, reminding me of my critical 'Three appointed stars' story. I could only smile and admit that he was right all along.

After qualifying, I sat down with Michael to do a lengthy interview for Autosport (the full transcript of which appears in this issue). In retrospect, I suppose my best question was the one where I suggested that he might have the same impact on motor racing in Germany that Boris Becker had had on tennis. Michael laughed it off...

On Sunday I settled down to watch the race at the Bus Stop chicane, hoping to see something special. But after the formation lap we never saw him again. I caught a video of the start on German TV the other day, and it reminded me that he was already fifth as he ducked and dived his way into the first corner before a broken clutch stopped him on the run down the hill.

One of the great unknowns about his career remains what might have happened had he kept going that day. It was a race of high attrition, and with a few laps to go, his Jordan teammate Andrea de Cesaris - who started four places behind - was second, and catching an ailing Senna. Michael really could have won his first Grand Prix.

It was at this point that I could make my claim of having been the only person to join Michael at all of his sportscar, F3000 and F1 races, even if in the last two cases the figure was just one! But two weeks after Spa, Michael went to Monza for the Italian GP, and I didn't. By then he was wearing the colours of Benetton and not Jordan, and how that came about is a story in itself. That was the real start of the madness that has followed him for the last decade and a half.

After his F1 career kicked, Michael never returned to Japan to do that F3000 race at Fuji where he might have struggled, but he contested three more sportscar races. In the last one, at far-flung Autopolis, the C291 held together and he and Wendlinger won. Aside from karting and the Race of Champions in Paris, that was his last race outside Grand Prix racing.

I can't claim to have forged a lifelong friendship with Michael during 1990-1991, but he's never forgotten the fact that I was around in the early days. From time to time over the years we've hooked up in social situations, usually more through chance than planning, and away from the paddock he remains entertaining company. But those are the stories I shall save for my grandchildren...

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- The Autosport.com Team

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