In the wake of definitive big-name F1 exits in the early 90s, many feared a talent vacuum. Yet as the sport’s next superstar ascended his throne in 1994 – in the sport’s darkest and most controversial season to date – the timing could not have been better… Braam Peens shares the story of how Michael Schumacher’s rise to prominence was one brimmed with controversy.
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In 2014, the author of the Game of Thrones series of books-turned-TV mega-series, George RR Martin, sketched the Iron Throne as “wrenched from the hands of dead men or yielded up by defeated foes… a symbol of conquest… This Iron Throne is scary. And not at all a comfortable seat … ” F1’s equivalent altar was deserted after 1993, as was the slate that had enabled the then-pre-eminent Williams-Renault team to dominate the two previous seasons. Of those crown-bearing drivers, Nigel Mansell was by then an IndyCar champion, while Alain Prost had hung up his helmet and was replaced by Ayrton Senna for 1994.
In-race refuelling returned, but driver aids (alleged to have been lobbied against by a hapless-on-track but politically persuasive Ferrari) such as active suspension, ABS, traction control (TC) and launch control that were weaponised in particular by the Williams team in 1992 and 1993, would be outlawed from 1994. The conflation of such circumstances could barely better prepare the table for an unconsidered pretender upsetting F1’s stayed order.
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Despite sporadic flashes of dynamism in the preceding seasons since it came to existence in 1986, the Benetton-Ford team was seldom considered a technical, financial or sporting threat to F1’s apex triumvirate of McLaren, Williams and Ferrari. But its managerial dream team of engineering director Tom Wilkinshaw (of TWR sportscars), technical director Ross Brawn and South African designer Rory Byrne, recognised the 1994 rules reset as a clean sheet worthy of early investment to ensure competitiveness under the new regulatory framework. No sooner had the B193 turned a wheel when work began on the analogue B194 (as on the Cosworth engine) – an outlandish approach for its time that has become common practice in modern-day F1.
The 3.5-litre, Ford EC Zetec-R V8 wasn’t conceived to out-power F1’s dominant engine of that era, the Renault V10. Rather, it targeted driveability and ease of packaging, which were pivotal for optimising race performance around smaller tanks brought about by refuelled race stints.
As Ayrton Senna consistently nailed pole position but failed to score, conversely Michael Schumacher’s brace of triple victories that kicked off the season in Brazil, Japan and Italy surprised even the Benetton team itself. The Brazilian’s Williams-Renault FW16 was, up to his fatal crash at Imola, a crude and unstable conversion of its dominant 1993 predecessor that even caught out F1’s deftest car conqueror – and would only be righted successively for his unfancied teammate Damon Hill to take the fight to Schumacher later in the season.
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However, the V8 in the back of Schumacher’s Benetton had barely cooled from Interlagos’ post-race parc fermé before the season’s first of a successive avalanche of controversies emerged. Although the fleeter-footed Benetton strategically humiliated the rest of the grid, Schumacher’s consistently cleaner starts and leap-frogging of Ayrton Senna during the refuelling pit stops furrowed the paddocks’ collective brows at Senna’s home race. Fuel was added to the fire when at the subsequent Pacific Grand Prix, early retiree Senna sat trackside and noted the blitzing Benetton’s off-beat exhaust note during corner exits, suggestive of some sort of power-manipulating voodoo…
As an unchallenged Schumacher roared relentlessly towards what appeared to be a slam-dunk debut driver’s title, the absence of credible early-season competition was more than made up for by boardroom brawling. Suspecting the use of TC, after Imola the FIA demanded samples of the source codes from that race’s top three finishers – Benetton, Ferrari and McLaren – of which only the Italian squad immediately complied. In a woefully incriminating course of (in)action, the other two teams missed the deadline and were fined $100 000 each.
As the investigation dragged on, Schumacher’s barely believable third-to-first blast from the lights at the French Grand Prix didn’t help his team’s cause. A little-known fact around Benetton’s TC conundrum is that they were willing to comply with the FIA’s demands. Ross Brawn told Motorsport Magazine in 2004 that it was Ford, using intellectual property as a defence, that refused to supply the code.
In its conclusion the FIA confirmed the presence of launch control in Benetton’s ECU software, and that the now-infamous “Option 13” (with nothing between that and the tenth entry) could be activated via laptop. Benetton maintained the feature was inaccessible to the driver; only implemented in testing and could not be used without first recompiling the code. What most likely got them off the hook was the technicality that the rules disallowed the use of launch control, but not the existence of its enabling software. Because the FIA couldn’t prove that launch control was being used, no guilty verdict could be handed down.
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One controversy down, plenty more to go. At the same weekend in Hockenheim, Jos Verstappen (Max’s dad) as a teammate to Schumacher – was engulfed in a sea of flames during a refuelling stop, fanning the rumour of Benetton having removed the filler’s filter to speed up fuel flow by 12.5% from the start of the season to gain precious seconds during pit stops. Following a series of hearings and an admission of guilt, Benetton again escaped punishment as several other teams confessed to the same crime.
On to Silverstone as the mid-season marker, by which time Schumacher had won all but one of that year’s 16 races, leading Damon Hill by an almost insurmountable 37 points. Faultless, hyper-competitive and with an otherworldly focus on detail – Schumacher rewrote F1’s rulebook on driver excellence. He moved fitness and data analysis into another dimension, and on race days where rivals were struggling with fatigue, the young German didn’t even bother to take a drinks bottle to save weight. Many of his performances that year were overshadowed by contention, but his finest came at Barcelona where he raced and pitted – twice – when stuck in fifth gear, to finally finish second behind Damon Hill.
Only divine intervention could stop Schumacher from winning that year’s title. And it came. Ross Brawn maintains that the F1 establishment – McLaren, Ferrari and Williams – had grown fed up of being humiliated by a flamboyant Italian T-shirt maker that happened to own a whipper-snapping F1 team and pressurised the FIA into actions that were as unprecedented as they were tyrannical.
Benetton had ruffled plenty feathers in the pitlane (and above it in the corridors of power), inviting scrutiny and schadenfreude that had become impossible to ignore. Schumacher’s Silverstone disqualification for overtaking a pole-sitting Hill (as part of gamesmanship but nevertheless disallowed) on the parade lap came after a bout of self-confessed Keystone Cops style marshalling over the timing of serving of his resultant penalty. This was contrasted to Benetton’s interpretation of it – but to seal the deal, topped by a $500 000 fine and a draconian two-race suspension for ignoring the blag flag – that the team appealed.
Schumacher struck back in fine form with a 21-second win over Hill at the next race in Hungary; though at the following round in Belgium, the FIA enforced another disqualification for 1 mm of excessive wear on the Benetton’s FIA-issue 10 mm-thick skid block after spinning across a curb, which was introduced from Germany onwards that year to reduce ground effect and prevent cars from bottoming out.
The two-race ban was upheld, allowing Hill – by then embroiled in a media-fuelled mud-slinging match with Schumacher – and the Williams team, still reeling from the loss of Senna but finally making progress with the recalcitrant FW16, to make the most of Schumacher’s absences, clawing back 40 points to eke to within one point of Schumacher’s tally, with three races to go.
A disgruntled Hill – carrying more fuel than necessary owed to a faulty fuel valve – ceded what he thought was certain victory to his arch-enemy at Jerez. Benetton had an answer for whatever Williams could devise. Yet three weeks later at a soaked Suzuka, Hill delivered the drive of his life. Citing Senna-like out-of-body moments as he traded aggression with adhesion against aggression in impossible conditions, he barely kept ahead of a fast-closing Schumacher. Chasing a pit stop deficit and taking seconds per lap out of his arch-enemy, it was Schumacher’s first notice of his god-like wet-weather skills the world would be privy to enjoy throughout his career.
Hill’s unlikely Japanese triumph set up the perfect nail-biting finale, with Schumacher now just one point ahead for the season finale in Adelaide. The incident of Schumacher running wide on lap 35, Hill attempting to nip through only to be clumsily rebuffed by his rival; the contact bending the Williams’ front left wishbone and sending the Benetton flying into barrier was a perfect, if wholly unsatisfactory, precis of a tumultuously litigious season.
The moment cemented Schumacher’ status as F1’s eternal anti-hero; playing out most notoriously once again in 1997 (crashing into Jacques Villeneuve to block a title-sealing overtake) and 2006, where he parked his Ferrari on track during qualifying in Monaco to ruin Fernando Alonso’s pole-setting lap.
Both attempts ended in disqualification.
F1 has seldom witnessed such a fiery will to win; a killer-like glint whereby in the heat of battle the sacrosanct line of acceptable conduct is temporarily traded with fate in the unyielding pursuit of glory. The merciless Ayrton Senna – with whom Schumacher only ever shared four podiums and none in 1994 – would have approved. Michael Schumacher came. He saw. And, boy, did he conquer – then and thereafter.
Find the full feature in the May issue of CAR Magazine.
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