Former Michael Schumacher race engineer reveals the 7-time World Champion’s requirements were usually bane for his teammates

Tanish Chachra | 19/01/2023
Former Michael Schumacher race engineer discloses Michael Schumacher's requirements were usually bane for his teammates

Michael Schumacher is argued to be the best driver ever to grace Formula 1. If not that, he’s at least one of the greatest ever. And to that, every athlete needs to be somewhat deviant from the rest of the crowd.

The more the risk, the higher the reward and the bigger the legacy. That’s what Ayrton Senna used to do, Lewis hamilton still does, and of course, Schumacher wasn’t holding him back from being different to achieve greater heights.

The 91 wins and seven-world championships are a testament to that, and it wouldn’t have been possible if Schumacher wasn’t someone who wouldn’t be scared to take a risk.

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Michael Schumacher had cars that made his teammates’ life hell

Pat Symonds, a renowned member of F1, who has worked with Senna, Fernando Alonso and Schumacher, talks about how the German race driver liked a certain way, but the other drivers always suffered that way.

“Michael [Schumacher], for example, he liked a very unstable car. It may make the car very quick, but you must be a damn good driver to drive this. We used to set his car up in quite an unstable manner, and his teammates often struggled with that because of how it was,” he said to PlanetF1.

That probably was why Schumacher was always ahead of his teammates during his peak. To be away from complacency, that’s how Schumacher immortalized his name in the sport.

Why was Schumacher different to work with

Symonds worked with Senna in the 80s, with Schumacher in his Benetton days and Alonso when the Spaniard was in Renault during the early years of this millennium.

In his remarks on how working with all these stars was different, Symonds claimed that technology played a huge difference. He claims in Senna’s days, Symonds claims that technology was in its infancy stage, so the data was limited, and the driver played the biggest role in a race.

In the next decade, when he was working with Schumacher, it developed a bit, but still, the weightage was more at the driver’s behest. But in Alonso’s time, the technology had a good grasp over the sport, and the strategy team could be more involved in the game than ever.

Therefore, in a way, he said that the three drivers, who were at their peak at the different decades of F1, couldn’t be rated, as they didn’t share the same basis of data. So overall, who is naturally fast can’t be told. He remarked that a decade in the world is a century for F1.

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Post Edited By: Tanish Chachra
ferrari Michael Schumacher

About the author

Tanish Chachra

Tanish Chachra is the Motorsport editor at The SportsRush. He saw his first race when F1 visited India in 2011, and since then, his romance with the sport has been seasonal until he took up this role in 2020. Reigniting F1's coverage on this site, Tanish has fallen in love with the sport all over again. He loves Kimi Raikkonen and sees a future world champion in Oscar Piastri. Away from us, he loves to snuggle inside his books.

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