Pardon me for waxing Tolkienesque here, but I’m just beside myself counting the seconds before the five red lights go out in Melbourne this March to signal the start of the 2010 Formula 1 season.
To say that this year will be a humdinger of an F1 season is a gross understatement.
The off season, in fact, proved to be almost as dramatic as the whole 2009 racing season itself. We lost major players like BMW and Toyota as well as 2007 world champion Kimi Raikkonen (who defected to the World Rally Championship for 2010) and Renault F1 big boss Flavio Briatore (in a lifetime ban handed to him by the FIA for race-fixing at the 2008 Singapore GP).
We were already looking forward to the four new teams, the influx of which will create a mammoth 28-car grid (up from 20). But the big news isn’t from the new teams (Virgin Racing, Campos, US F1, and the Malaysia-owned Lotus).
The big news might have been the mesmerizing prospect of the hard-charging Fernando Alonso behind the wheel of a red Ferrari; the Spanish two-time champion having made the jump from Renault after last season.
The big news might also have been the prospect of seeing the two most recent world champions (both of which come from the same country, Britain) going head to head under the same team – McLaren-Mercedes.
Speaking of Mercedes, this brings me to the real big news: Michael Schumacher will come out of retirement to make a sensational Formula 1 return with Mercedes GP this year.
The deal reunites the legendary German with Ross Brawn, the man who masterminded all seven of his world titles with Benetton and Ferrari and who now runs Mercedes GP – after selling a majority of his Brawn F1 team to the German luxury carmaker late last year.
It is a spectacular coup for Mercedes-Benz, for which Schumacher drove sports and endurance racing cars just before entering F1 in 1991. It’s now an all-German team, with Schumacher, who turns 41 this month, partnering 24-year-old Nico Rosberg.
German newspaper Bild reports that Schumacher stands to earn approximately US$9.6 million in 2010. The deal is believed to be for just one year but is likely to include options to extend it if the comeback goes well.
Although he has always denied regretting the decision to hang up his helmet at the end of the 2006 season, it wasn’t long before he was testing Ferrari’s F1 cars again and dabbling in motorcycle racing, as well as remaining closely involved in the Scuderia as an F1 consultant.
When Felipe Massa was sidelined from the second half of the 2009 season after his qualifying accident at the Hungarian GP, Schumacher enthusiastically accepted Ferrari’s request that he substitute for his former team mate.
Unfortunately he had to abandon that comeback due to a lingering neck injury sustained in a motorcycle accident in February, leaving him “disappointed to the core.”
It was plain to see that Schumacher’s hunger for Formula 1 had been rekindled by the episode, and he was soon linked with Mercedes after the latter bought Brawn GP and new world champion Jenson Button created a vacancy by moving to McLaren.
What makes all these ominous to his F1 rivals – old and new – is that this father of two is not just “testing the waters;” the man is absolutely convinced that he is in contention for the world title this year. (He’s driving last year’s championship-winning car, remember?)
And despite having been on the sidelines for three years, Schumacher has already set his sights on an eighth title. “Mercedes GP represents a new challenge for me both in a sporting and a personal context,” he said.
“I am convinced that together we will be involved in the fight for the Formula 1 world championship next year and I am already looking forward to getting back onto the race track,” he said on his website in December.
“It is a new chapter in my racing career and I am really looking forward to working with my old friend Ross Brawn and my companions from my days with the Mercedes Junior Program,” he added.
Schumacher will be aiming to repeat what multiple world champions Niki Lauda and Alain Prost accomplished. Both retired from F1 only to return and win a further title apiece (in 1984 and 1993, respectively).
Mercedes played a key role in the formative stages of Schumacher’s career – signing him up to its young driver program in 1990, entering him in the world sports car championship and financing his F1 debut with Jordan in 1991.
But Schumacher’s meteoric rise once he made it into F1 meant he slipped out of Mercedes’s grasp and instead achieved most of his record-breaking feats with Ferrari.
Norbert Haug, who was the manager of Mercedes-Benz’s competition department when the company talent-spotted Schumacher, understandably took deep satisfaction from the announcement that the seven-time champion will leave retirement to race for his former patrons in F1.
“I am very much looking forward to working with Michael and everybody at Mercedes-Benz and Daimler extends a very warm welcome to our ‘apprentice’ of 19 years ago,” Haug said.
“That apprentice is now the most successful racing driver of all time,” he added.
Recalling Schumacher’s F1 debut in 1991, Haug said: “Mercedes-Benz helped him to this point and the rest is history: seven world championship titles, more than any racing driver; 91 grand prix wins, more than any racing driver. Michael has more of everything than every other driver.”
As part of the Mercedes Junior Program, Michael had raced in Group C sports cars and competed in a few DTM races.
Haug admitted Schumacher had proved elusive for Mercedes, alluding to three specific occasions when efforts to lure him back into the fold had failed. “We often joked about it after the races and discussed the prospect seriously several times during the last 14 years in Formula 1,” Haug said.
“It didn’t happen in 1995, it didn’t happen in 1998 and it didn’t happen in 2005.
“I am delighted that it will now happen in 2010.”
For me and perhaps a billion other F1 and Schumacher fans, “delighted” is an understatement.
Bring on Melbourne!
Here are a couple of your Backseat Driver reactions to last week’s “Of tricycles and highways”…
It’s good that you wrote an article about tricycles on the highways and traffic enforcers hiding and prowling instead of guiding unfamiliar motorists on avenues. These are also my concern when I go out on streets and highways. How long would our LGUs enforce the law and keep these tricycles out of the highways? I understand they are afraid to make the drivers angry and lose their votes. Could you raise our concerns to our friends in Congress? As to the greedy traffic enforces, I hope I could bring hitmen to exterminate these pests! – political will
This is a very old problem. There are tricycles on Laguna National Highway. There are tricycles from NLEX Sta. Rita exit up to the Cabanatuan stretch. Aside from their slow pace (around 20 to 30 kph), most of them are not well lit. Worst, some of them have defective headlights and tail lights. You’d consider yourself lucky to avoid them during night time. – dyekiboie
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