Michael Schumacher member of sports team Scuderia Ferrari
Ferrari (1996–2006)
In 1996, Schumacher joined Ferrari, a team that had last won the Drivers' Championship in 1979 and the Constructors' Championship in 1983, for a salary of $60 million over two years. He left Benetton a year before his contract with them expired; he later cited the team's damaging actions in 1994 as his reason for opting out of his deal. A year later, Schumacher lured Benetton employees Rory Byrne (designer) and Ross Brawn (technical director) to Ferrari.Ferrari had previously come close to the championship in 1982 and 1990. The team had suffered a disastrous downturn in the early 1990s, partially as its famous V12 engine was no longer competitive against the smaller, lighter and more fuel-efficient V10s of its competitors. Various drivers, notably Alain Prost, had given the vehicles labels such as "truck", "pig", and "accident waiting to happen". Furthermore, the poor performance of the Ferrari pit crews was considered a running joke. At the end of 1995, although the team had improved into a solid competitor, it was still considered inferior to front-running teams such as Benetton and Williams. However, Schumacher declared the Ferrari F310 good enough to win a championship, although afterwards, his teammate Eddie Irvine labelled the F310 "an awful car", a "piece of junk", and "almost undriveable", while designer John Barnard admitted that the car "wasn't very good". During winter testing, Schumacher first drove a Ferrari, their 1995 Ferrari 412 T2, and was two seconds faster than former regulars Jean Alesi and Gerhard Berger had been.Schumacher, Brawn, Byrne, and Jean Todt, have been credited as turning the struggling team into the most successful team in Formula One history. Three-time World Champion Jackie Stewart believed the transformation of the Ferrari team was Schumacher's greatest feat.
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