Schumacher’s documentary: his trauma with Senna, his hunch before the accident and why there are no current images of him

Figure of Michael Schumacher gives for a documentary series, at least, but Netflix He has condensed it into little more than an hour and a half in which in a very brief way (too much depending on what aspects) a general review of his entire career is made.

The documentary on Michael Schumacher can now be seen on Netflix

From its beginnings to its last moments, from a very respectful and tiptoeing through its most controversial moments (Not a word about his treatment of colleagues like Massa or Barrichello at Ferrari, much less his 2005 when Fernando Alonso ended his reign, mess in Monaco included), the statements rescued from interviews and especially those he makes Corinna schumacher, his wife, as well as other close associates (Jean Todt, your ex-partner Eddie irvine or his great rival Mika Hakkinen) give a very global vision of who was the best driver in Formula 1 by titles until Lewis hamilton matched him.

The documentary can be divided into five key elements:

Its beginnings until reaching glory

Although he was not from a humble family far from it, he did not live a full-blown childhood either. Proof of this is how his father, Rolf SchumacherHe had to figure it out so that Michael could compete in the karting that he himself drove. With wheels salvaged from landfills and parts welded over and over again, the one who would later become king of world motorsport started racing with Luxembourg license because that way it was free.

“He didn’t even have 500 marks to make it to the end of the month, to ask him for the 600,000 that the entire season cost,” he says. Willi weber, who later became his manager and the one who bet on him for the first time. A stroke of fortune (the Belgian Bertrand Gachot had a trial for hitting a taxi driver in London) gave him his first chance in Jordan (from his time in the F3000 or the sportprototypes with Mercedes, nothing is said) and from there, to glory: his signing for Benetton.

The trauma of Senna’s death

Ten phrases that explain why Ayrton Senna is the greatest legend in the history of Formula 1

Although they did not become friends, far from it, the admiration that Michael Schumacher felt for Ayrton senna it was directly proportional to the respect that the Brazilian immediately felt for the German. The accident that cost the legendary ‘Magic’ his life was precisely to prevent the young German talent who came to snatch his reign from overtaking him in the 1994 San Marino GP.

The documentary rescues an interview that Schumacher gave at the time in which he remembered what happened. “I spent several weeks sleeping three or four hours. I couldn’t believe something serious had happened, I thought the champion was going to miss at most one or two races. ”

That trauma always accompanied him, and years later, already in Ferrari, left one of the most iconic images of his career: the heartbroken cry when he equaled Senna’s number of poles.

The challenge of bringing Ferrari back to glory

Although it was the part in which he achieved the most successes, Ferrari’s period between 2000 and 2004 is treated in this documentary far above. Not so the first years, between 1996 and 1999, when Schumacher brought his way of being to the Scuderia.

Details like staying late into the night to support his mechanics, or how he ended up admitting he was wrong in the fight with Jacques villeneuve in 1997, for which they ended up excluding him from that World Cup, derive in a slight criticism of the authoritarian and sometimes arrogant character of the ‘kaiser’, with episodes such as the attempted fight he had with David coulthard after the accident they had in Belgium’98.

The withdrawal, his return and the feeling before the accident

Although his return to competition was by no means successful, Michael Schumacher’s impasse among his departure from Ferrari and his return to Mercedes helped him to spend more time with his people, especially with Gina maria and Mick, their children.

“I always saw him and respected him. He entered the room and there was silence. Now I would give anything to be able to talk to him, our relationship would have been very different because we could talk about motorsport,” says Mick Schumacher, now a driver of Haas F1.

Without getting to the morbid and everything that surrounded that accident in December 2013, Corinna tells how those tragic vacations in Méribel were. “It is the worst possible bad luck,” admitted the wife of the ‘kaiser’, who relates a forecast she had before the coup. “We could go to Dubai to skydive”, Michael asked the family, but in the end they opted for the Alpine resort.

The look of Corinna Schumacher

Of all the new statements that this documentary has, the one who is on screen the longest is Corinna schumacher, his wife. The fundamental support of the driver when he was growing up, when he was the absolute king of Formula 1 and long afterwards.

Now that she is being singled out for the zeal with which she guards Schumacher’s privacy, she explains it very eloquently. “The private is the private, and so it always was. He protected us and now we protect him.”, he argues at the end of the footage, in tears.

She is, at heart, the great protagonist of this documentary, which without discovering great things about Schumacher will help those who are less fond of understanding how a young German became one of the greatest athletes of all time.