With seven world championships to his name, Michael Schumacher is arguably the greatest driver ever to race in F1. However, he wasn’t Flavio Briatore’s first choice when his team was scouting for talent. While the German made the switch to Benetton in 1991 after just one race with Jordan, it was far from a smooth transition.
“In 1991, I started looking for a driver. But we didn’t have the money to pay drivers [like] Senna, Prost,” Briatore admitted in a recent interview with Monaco Weekly News.
At this point, the Benetton boss tasked all his engineers and other team personnel to attend every feeder series race they could. In two months, he learned about four young drivers, including Karl Wendlinger, Heinz-Harald Frentzen, and Michael Schumacher.
Given that all four of those were under Sauber’s tutelage, Briatore approached the team boss for his opinion. Peter Sauber picked Frentzen as the strongest of the lot. That was enough for Briatore to open negotiations with Frentzen, but a twist in the tale was yet to show itself.
How Schumacher became Briatore’s prime target
Jordan driver Bertrand Gachot saw himself on the wrong side of the law after an altercation with a cab driver in London. Gachot allegedly sprayed the cab driver with CS gas after the two crashed into each other. The act got him arrested and subsequently in jail, days before the Belgian GP.
In their bid to get a replacement for Gachot, Jordan picked Schumacher. The young driver put up a strong performance in qualifying and put himself in P7. Luck, however, ran out during the race as Schumacher retired on the first lap owing to clutch failure.
25 AUG 1991: Michael #Schumacher‘s #F1 debut. He started a superb 7th in Spa but retired on lap 1 with clutch failure pic.twitter.com/z0NVC0wmmv
— Formula 1 (@F1) August 25, 2015
Briatore recalled, “We arrived in Spa and everybody told me, you know Schumacher, the guy you are looking for, he is driving for Jordan. Yes, because it’s one race, Gachot is in jail, the Federation authorized [him] to have the license. So he did a very good qualifying, in the race, two laps and the accident, out.”
The contractual roadblocks in Schumacher’s contract
Schumacher became an overnight star in F1 despite his premature retirement at Spa. He had done enough by outqualifying his teammate Andrea de Cesaris to grab Benetton’s attention. While the path was set for a five-year deal, there was an element of time constraint involved.
Briatore recalled there being a clause that required Benetton to sign Schumacher within two months. Failure to do so would have resulted in Schumacher landing back at Jordan. In those two months, the team had to convince the sponsors to pay one million euros to Jordan. That was difficult to achieve given the two-month stipulation.
“Again, we have a problem because Jordan put in the contract, ‘If you don’t sign [Schumacher] in two months for Formula 1, Schumi will go back to Jordan.’ And we paid 1 million Euros because at the time, the sponsors paid for the drivers,” Briatore revealed.
The team ultimately managed to get the sponsors on board in time. Briatore let go Roberto Moreno to make way for Schumacher, who drove for Benetton for five races in 1991 and won the first of his seven championships in 1994.
