Formula1: Who Will Be The Next Schumacher?
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Jul 18, 2008
Shell
Hands up if you miss Michael Schumacher. Come on, even if you despaired of those processional, consecutive title-winning years when it was impossible to defend the ‘sport’ to your mates down the Frog ‘n’ Crown. You don’t have to be ashamed. You can stand up and say: “I’m a formula one fan and I want Schuey back.”
There have been rumours that the seven-times world champion has admitted he left Ferrari at the end of 2006 to ‘save’ the career of his friend Felipe Massa. Kimi Raikkonen was on his way to the Scuderia and it was going to be Massa or Schumacher taking him on. Schumacher, so the conjecture goes, wasn’t scared of taking on the Finn but chose to hang up his steering wheel so that the young Brazilian wasn’t left in the lurch. Aaahhh.
That could be complete tosh, of course, and after the British grand prix you’d think Schumacher would have been slapping his forehead were it true. If the German had been racing that day would he have done what no one else was capable of and beaten Lewis Hamilton? It would have been fascinating to see, but we’ll never know how Hamilton would have measured up against Schumacher in that race or others.
If formula one misses Schumacher then we’ll know about it this weekend when the circus rolls into Hockenheim. This is the place above all others that would feel the loss of the man, the country that gave birth to formula one’s most successful driver ever. It only hosts one grand prix a year now and even this has competition - a DTM (German touring car) meeting can pull a formula one-capacity crowd.
But it’s easy to overlook that a quarter of the formula one grid is German. Nick Heidfeld, Tim Glock, Adrian Sutil, Sebastien Vettel and Nico Rosberg. OK, so we all count the latter as Finnish (and he’d probably be a lot better supported if he was), but it’s an impressive tally for the nation. The question that will no doubt be asked this weekend is which one of these is going to be the next Schumacher? When the masses assemble on Sunday, who will they be cheering on? Out of that bunch there’s one driver that stands out as having the potential to win a world championship (to even think of someone else racking up seven sounds preposterous) and that’s the man who has just been announced as David Coulthard’s replacement in 2009.
