VARIOUS: MOTOR RACING - Michael Schumacher takes part in his last Formula One race on Sunday with a chance to take an eighth world title

Record ID: 335228

  • Title: VARIOUS: MOTOR RACING - Michael Schumacher takes part in his last Formula One race on Sunday with a chance to take an eighth world title
  • Date: 22nd October 2006
  • Summary: (FILE - NUERBURGRING, GERMANY)(FILE - 2003)(REUTERS) MICHAEL SCHUMACHER WAVING TO FANS AT FERRARI CELEBRATION MEETING AT NUERBURGRING TRACK WIDE OF CROWD AROUND SCHUMACHER CLOSE UP OF SCHUMACHER SIGNING AUTOGRAPHS MICHAEL SCHUMACHER CLIMBS INTO HIS FORMULA ONE FERRARI SCHUMACHER DRIVING FORMULA ONE FERRARI AROUND TRACK
  • Embargoed: 6th November 2006 12:00
  • Keywords:
  • Topics: Sports
  • Reuters ID: LVAB7255L7MFCX1WBYVQOQFMDETX
  • Story Text: Michael Schumacher still has two fights on his hands as he drives in his last Formula One race before retiring.
    The Ferrari great says he is treating the last race of his record-breaking Formula One career in Brazil on Sunday (October 22) as "business as usual".
    Schumacher bows out at the Interlagos track with a real chance of a 92nd career victory and, if he does that and Renault's Fernando Alonso fails to score, an unprecedented eighth title.
    Alonso is 10 points clear in the drivers' championship, with both men having seven wins each this season after the German's engine blew while he was leading at the last race in Japan.
    Ferrari and Renault are also fighting for the constructors' championship, the combined total of each team's two drivers. Renault are only nine points ahead of Ferrari with ten points for a win, eight for second, six for third and five for fourth. There are many permutations of the outcome. An example is that Ferrari could score 18 points for a 1-2 but Renault would still take the championship if Alonso and his team mate Giancarlo Fisichella finished third and fourth.
    After the last race of the season Michael Schumacher retires, Kimi Raikkonen leaves McLaren and joins Ferrari in his stead, while Fernando Alonso leaves Renault to move to McLaren.
    Schumacher made a similar move to Alonso's at the end of 1995, leaving Benetton at the age of 26 and after two titles in a row to join Ferrari, then a slumbering giant that had won only two races in five seasons.
    Since then, the German has won 72 times for Ferrari, clinching an unprecedented five titles in a row from 2000 to 2004 to stand as the only seven-times champion. If he wins on Sunday, it will be the 92nd of his career.
    Michael Schumacher is one of the greats, a figure who transcends his sporting arena. A generation of fans has grown up watching Schumacher win.
    There are plenty, however, who feel that the 37-year-old German's career has been too chequered for him to be due the worship accorded to Fangio, Jim Clark or Ayrton Senna -- even if the latter was no angel himself.
    This year's Monaco Grand Prix, when Schumacher was punished for deliberately impeding rivals to ensure he took pole position, was the latest in a list of controversies to have enraged rivals over time.
    Schumacher is an intensely private character, shielding his family from the public gaze, but he will not just disappear once he stops racing.
    At the same time, with everything he does on the track subjected to the most detailed scrutiny before a global audience of millions, the fame and hero worship make him uneasy.
    The German, so often depicted in the media -- particularly in Britain -- as a cold and ruthless driver who would do almost anything to beat his rivals, has been a winner like no other.
    The bare facts are incontestable: a record 91 victories, five successive titles for Ferrari and more points, pole positions and podiums than anyone else in history.
    The son of a bricklayer, who now owns a go-kart circuit in Kerpen near Cologne, Schumacher was born in Huerth-Hermuelheim on January 3, 1969.
    The man who would go on to become Germany's first and so far only Formula One world champion started karting at the age of four in a machine built by father Rolf and powered by a lawnmower engine.
    The former garage mechanic took his first win at Spa in 1992, followed by his first championship with Benetton in 1994 after Brazilian Senna was killed at Imola.
    Senna's death robbed Formula One of an enthralling battle, the young pretender against the triple champion. Only later, with the emergence of Alonso as Formula One's youngest champion in 2005 and Kimi Raikkonen winning with McLaren, did that generational showdown emerge.
    Instead it was with Briton Damon Hill, stepping into the breach at Williams after Senna's death, and Mika Hakkinen that Schumacher fought the duels that lit up the championship in the mid-1990s.
    A collision with Hill in the 1994 title-decider in Australia handed Schumacher his first title. In 1995, he clinched his second and left for Ferrari to seal his fame and establish a new era for the glamour team.
    Hill won in 1996 and then came the debacle of 1997, when Schumacher tried to run Villeneuve off the road in the title decider. "If there is anything in my career that I could undo, it would be that episode," he said later.
    In 2000 he secured Ferrari's first driver's title in 21 years and the pressure came off with four more in a row. In 2006 he began badly but came back to win seven races out of seventeen run so far.
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