1970-01-01 02:00:00
Dec 29, 2021, 10:56 am ET
Fate is a book that changes history from one page to another without warning. For Michael Schumacher it was a career at the top for 45 years until suddenly a “glitch” stopped his march.
The seven-time Formula One champion who will turn 53 on January 3 and will do so “detained in the pits”, with an uncertain future and in the midst of total secrecy about his state of health.
The German who had participated in his last Grand Prix in Brazil on November 25, 2012, to put an end to one of the most brilliant and, certainly, the most winning careers of a driver in F1, would not take long to face the most dangerous curve of his life.
His seven world titles, 91 victories, 68 pole positions, 155 podiums in 306 GP’s disputed create an incredible record, to date and waiting for what Lewis Hamilton can do.
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But what never happened to him on the track paradoxically happened on an alpine descent in Meribel, France. There the prodigal son of Kerpen suffered a serious mishap with some rocks and brain damage, which until today keeps him under medical care at all times.
It was barely a year and a month, on December 29, 2013, after saying goodbye to the circuits that Michael found misadventure, an almost incongruous tragic fate, totally absurd, something that is not new among F1 champions, before others they had experienced tragedy, after having tasted glory.
It happened to Mike Hawthorn, champion of the Maximum Category in 1958. The Englishman decided to retire after the Moroccan GP where he was crowned, after seeing his colleague Stuart Lewis-Evans on fire due to an accident. Lewis Evans would die six days later and with him Hawthorne’s wishes to continue in motor sport. Also the death of his friend Peter Collins, in a race mishap, was a hard blow for the first British F1 monarch.
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But no one suspected that just three months later he would die in a car accident while drag racing with Ken Walker. What was truly unusual was that Hawthorn, it later emerged, suffered from end-stage renal disease and had a life expectancy of a few months.
Another case of fatal coincidence was that of the first and only Italian to have been world champion with Ferrari: Alberto Ascari.
Son of Antonio Ascari, also a driver, Alberto had a feeling that his fate was linked to that of his father who died on July 26, 1925 in a race accident at the French GP.
And so it was, when on May 26, 1955, 30 years later, Alberto, 1952-53 F1 champion, crashed in Monza and lost his life. At the time of his death they were both 36 years old, had won 13 GP’s and left a widow and two children.
So other champions such as Graham Hill, who died in a plane crash or the Austrian Jochen Rindt, F1’s only postmortem monarch, who was killed in Monza and at the end of the 1970 season was the driver with the most points.
Fate plays macabre jokes, let’s hope that with Michael Schumacher everything ends in a nightmare and we can see him again in some circuit waiting for someone besides Lewsi Hamilton to surpass the numbers he left.
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