The Business of Sport: Formula One When you’ve won the Formula One world championship seven times by the age of 37, what do you do next? You could play golf for a while, do the school run, get under your wife’s feet. Or you could follow the lead of three-times champion Sir Jackie Stewart and turn yourself into a corporate whirlwind. Sir Jackie signed up with Rolex, LVMH and Ford and shuttled round the globe representing them, developing new Ford road cars and lending his winning brand to some of the world’s most prestigious labels.
Michael Schumacher is doing something similar. He dedicates a substantial amount of time to the road safety campaigns of the International Automobile Federation (FIA), the governing body of F1, and works with, among others, the parent company of Ferrari, with whom he won five world titles.
But the big difference between Schumacher and Sir Jackie is that the Scot had lost the desire to drive racing cars to the limit, largely because of the death of many close friends among the drivers.
By contrast, Schumacher’s fire has not gone out yet. Last month he was in Barcelona at an F1 test, alongside today’s young guns, such as Lewis Hamilton. Schumacher drove the current Ferrari for a day, evaluating the new package of slick tyres and reduced aerodynamics that F1 will use in 2009. His input on the direction of development continues to be vital to Ferrari and it is obvious that he still gets a buzz out of driving the cars.
This activity is a surprise to many people, including those who worked with him most closely. Speaking shortly after Schumacher announced his retirement in September 2006, Ross Brawn, the engineering brains behind all of Schumacher’s championship wins, was adamant that the German would not become a “super tester” for Ferrari. He felt that Schumacher would not want to maintain the level of fitness required, nor have the desire to take risks driving experimental prototype cars.
I thought the same. Schumacher is an “all or nothing” kind of person. As a racer, his dedication to finding every last fragment of competitive advantage over his opponents bordered on the obsessive. He was willing to go to places none of his rivals would contemplate.
Why would he bother driving a car on the odd test day, knowing that he would not be the one ultimately to benefit from the work?
But, in fact, that turned out to be the very reason why he would keep driving. He quit because he could no longer find the energy and motivation to compete in the only way he knew how: “total racing”. He did not stop because the fire had gone out. And so, within months of quitting as a racer, Schumacher was back behind the wheel, giving the team direction.
Schumacher’s mentality was forged early in his childhood, when he was forced to accept sponsorship, equipment and support from people outside his family because his father was penniless. His rise to glory, on the back of other people’s patronage, left him with a feeling of always owing others. That is why he took his work so seriously.
His successor at Ferrari, Kimi Räikkönen, also came up the hard way but has the opposite attitude. He turns up and drives the car extremely quickly and then gets on with the rest of his life. No one owns him and he owes his team nothing more than chasing the best results possible with the car they give him.
Räikkönen does not much appreciate having Schumacher hanging around and retaining the ear of Ferrari’s engineers – but he has learnt to live with it. And it is a winning formula. The Finn won the 2007 title in his first season with Ferrari and looks set to do so again this year.
Schumacher takes pleasure from that. He views Ferrari as a family and his commitment to the team goes way beyond the normal business relationship between a company and its employee. As a racer he wanted to have it all, and he seems to have found a way of doing so in retirement, too. How many people can say that?
James Allen is the author of Michael Schumacher: The Edge of Greatness
