What’s up with Michael Schumacher, where is the driver we all like to love and hate?
This season Michael Schumacher the most successful driver to ever grace F1 returned to the sport after three years out. And he returns not to his seemingly lifelong home at Ferrari but to Mercedes who supported him in his early career. With the Mercedes team effectively being reigning world champions he must have hoped for more than has been achieved so far. The young Nico Rosberg also has the measure of Michael at Mercedes at the moment and it seems that he, Michael is the bearer of the back luck for the team something that was always reserved for a Schumacher teammate.
So why this shift in fortunes, there were not many people predicting that Schumacher would be beaten so solidly by the younger German? For the first few races we could blame rust but I think that time has come and gone, if that is still the reason then he shouldn’t be driving in F1. In China Schumacher was complaining that he couldn’t set the car up, whereas Nico had it flying around the track. There could be some mileage in that as the cars will be very different to those that Michael drove just three years ago because of all the rule changes, but that also seems a rather lame excuse for the seven time world champion.
I wonder how much of it is team orientated? Michael Schumacher didn’t dominate at Ferrari straight away, it took some years to build the team up around him and more importantly get the car built around him. Every driver has a style and different requirements for a car, when they can have input from early in the design phase these requirements can be built into the car, if the driver comes to the team quite late on he has no such input and has to rely on setting up the car within the parameters he can alter to match his style. I wonder if Schumacher is still searching for this sweet spot, if that is the case Nico Rosberg should enjoy his time out front.
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