Newsgroup: it.sport.formula1.moderato
Titolo: [ENG] Ruminations on Michael Schumacher

Source: 
grandprix.com
http://www.grandprix.com/gt/gt17446.html
One of the jobs that I do in Formula 1 is to be the Grand Prix
correspondent for a wonderful publication in Australia called Motorsport
News. I have done the job for 12 years (I think) and I like the magazine
very much because it remembers that motor racing is a sport and should be
treated as such. Deadlines are always a little bit difficult because out
there in Australia they are living life eight hours before we do. Thus on
a Sunday evening when we journalists are hammering away on our keyboards,
the Australians are already well into Monday morning and printing presses
are waiting for words to reproduce. Formula 1 may be a media sport but
the numbskulls at Ferrari do not understand that the world runs on
different time zones and so last weekend I ended up writing two columns:
the "Michael Schumacher retires" column and the "Michael Schumacher stays
on" column. This meant that whichever one proved to be correct could be
slotted into the page 10secs after the announcement was finally made and
sent off to the printer.
And then came a phone call on Friday morning.
"Forget about Schumacher," they said. "Brockie's been killed."
In the world of Formula 1, they will never understand that Peter Brock
could be a bigger story than Michael Schumacher. They just don't get it.
Most of the F1 circus likes to visit Australia but very few of them
really understand how motorsport Down Under works. In the self-obsessed
world of Formula 1, nothing else matters apart from what the people in
the business are doing. But think on this for a moment: when Peter Brock
died Channel 7's lead news story was about Brockie and it monopolized the
first eight and a half minutes of the national news. The following day
tabloid newspapers led with pages and pages about Brock. The Prime
Minister and Leader of the Opposition both spoke about the man and this
week he will be given a state funeral.
For the rest of the Monza weekend, I was incredibly busy, talking to
people about Brock, getting reactions in F1, and trying to deal with all
the Schumacher stuff, the qualifying scandal, plus all the usual race
weekend work. It was not until I got home late on Monday evening that I
had a chance to think about putting Michael Schumacher into some kind of
historical perspective.
I saw every single one of Michael's victories. In fact I have seen every
F1 race he has done. In the early years I interviewed him many times but
I never succeeded in breaking down the walls he had built up around
himself. I never got to see Michael the man, at least not how he saw
himself. From years of watching I concluded that he was a fundamentally a
good man, a man who gave much to charity, a family man who was intensely
loyal to his wife and family. And yet, all too often, when he was out on
the race tracks, he seemed to adopt a completely different personality;
becoming a man who was capable of pretty much anything. Even in Formula 3
he was ruthless, sending Mika Hakkinen into the wall at high-speed in
Macau when the Finn tried to overtake him.
In F1 we saw that unsporting streak with Damon Hill in Adelaide in 1994
and again at Jerez with Jacques Villeneuve in 1997. We saw it most
recently at Monaco this year.
These were the dramatic moments but behind them there was more. Michael
had contractual clauses about the status of his team mates and the men
who raced alongside him at Ferrari accepted large sums of money but
always had to help him. Sometimes they would lift off a fraction early to
give him the lead at a first corner, sometimes they did the donkey work
for him, using up their supply of tyres so that he would be able to use
the knowledge to his advantage, sometimes they acted as hares to break
the opposition in races. Once or twice he handed over wins when he no
longer needed them, to say thank you, but when all was said and done
Michael had an unfair advantage.
Perhaps it was his acceptance of this and the fact that there were other
allegations in his early career that Benetton used illegal
traction-control systems in 1994 that led some in F1 to conclude that
every car he ever drove was somehow illegal. Perhaps this was a
reflection of his apparent acceptance that there was nothing wrong with
having an unfair advantage over his team mate. Where the theory breaks
down is that intellectually-speaking, any intelligent person knows that
cheating is really only cheating oneself. Ayrton Senna, the man who
should have been Michael's rival for longer, would insist that any system
he did not think was legal should be taken off his car. He wanted to know
that he was the best and would not accept that winning was enough.
Michael is an intelligent man and should have reached the same
conclusions.
In a lot of respects Michael was the victim of his own success. There
were simply too many Sunday afternoons when they played the German
national anthem. Things would have been different if Senna had lived.
After Ayrton's death, Michael was like Gulliver in Lilliput. He towered
over the opposition for years. Damon Hill and Jacques Villeneuve won
World Championships against him but those Williams-Renaults were awesome
racing machines and the Ferraris he drove were not very good. For a long
time Mika Hakkinen's challenge was blunted by the after-effects of his
accident in Adelaide in 1995 but eventually it was the Finn who emerged
as Michael's main real rival. And then, when Hakkinen was ready, Michael
broke his leg and so we did not see the two men go head-to-head until
2000. After that Ferrari's investment in people and infrastructure was
such that no-one could get close to this industrial machine. Michael was
supreme and often magnificent. The ultimate irony of course was that when
the other teams made the same investment as Ferrari, the Italian team
whinged about the need for cost-cutting.
Michael broke all the records in F1 history and yet his critics argue
that greatness is not about statistics. It is about character and
integrity - and about the people that one is competing against. Stirling
Moss is still seen as one of the absolute greats of the sport but he
never won a World Championship.
At the start of an F1 career, people are usually willing to give the new
boys the benefit of the doubt but Michael's controversies in the early
years never ceased and in time the older observers came to see that these
elements were not youthful errors but rather part and parcel of the man.
His retirement was an interesting point. Ferrari needed to look at the
bigger picture and had the opportunity to sign Kimi Raikkonen. The Finn
would not accept being number two to Michael - why should be? - and
Ferrari could not risk missing Kimi or Fernando Alonso and being stuck
without a star if Michael retired suddenly. But the team made it clear
that Michael could have stayed on and raced alongside Raikkonen. He chose
not to. And thus his chance to prove that he did not need the unfair
advantage has gone.
People who do not remember the sport before Michael look for a new hero
to take his place but those who remember the late 1980s will recall the
magnificent era when there were four great champions fighting one
another: Alain Prost, Ayrton Senna, Nelson Piquet and Nigel Mansell. All
had strengths and weaknesses. All were great characters. Much will depend
on the machinery of course, but the disappearance of Michael Schumacher
could lead to a new golden age of F1 with a new gang of heroes.
Copyright 1988-2006, Inside F1, Inc.
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lungo ma carino.
-- 
www.beppegrillo.it

 lungo ma carino.
Lungo ma scritto al pub. Dopotutto lo dice lui stesso: non è mai riuscito 
a penetrare MS. E non scordiamoci la pappardella su Brooke.
MS è lì, che piaccia o meno, e ha ottenuto quello che voleva ottenere. Il 
resto sono semplicemente chiacchiere da bar.
ivan
-- 
By 1977 or so, PLATO was featuring real-time multiplayer dungeon games,
not to mention real-time spacewar, IM, chat, email, netnews, and a host of
other things we now take for granted. All this on high-resolution plasma
panel terminals connected at 1200 baud to twin Cyber 6600 supercomputer.
Now you understand why I was kicked out of Cornell for a year; PLATO was
crack for computer nerds. (Robert Woodhead, co-creator of Wizardry)

 Il resto sono semplicemente chiacchiere da bar.
Che sono quelle che ci competono, stante che siamo in un bar virtuale;
anche se ogni tanto ci scappa qualche rissa con tavoli sfondati e
bicchieri lanciati...
: )
marloc
-- 
sapiens nihil affirmat quod non probet
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 bicchieri lanciati... : )
Beh, anche quello è il bello dei BAR, IMHO.


 Beh, anche quello è il bello dei BAR, IMHO.
Per alcuni e' una "fogna"... me ne dispiace perche' io ci sto
relativamente bene; saro' un roditore dellla famiglia dei muridi?
: ))
marloc the mouse
-- 
War does not determine who is right, only who is left
B.Russell
