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Michael Schumacher may have turned fortunes around for every team he ever drove but during the final leg of his driving career, with the now-dominant but then-nascent Mercedes squad, there was something missing: a win.
It's a void that Mercedes rues to this day, according to their chief strategist James Vowles. During an appearance on the Beyond the Grid podcast, Vowles felt that the 2012 Monaco Grand Prix weekend, when Schumacher qualified on pole, was their best shot at winning a race with the seven-time champion. Nico Rosberg had already bagged the team’s first win three races earlier, at the Chinese Grand Prix.
However, a five-place grid penalty from the previous weekend’s Spanish Grand Prix essentially scuppered any chance of a win on the sinewy track notorious for its lack of overtaking opportunities.
“I was over the moon and I think it was one of the best laps he’d probably ever done in his life,” Vowles told Beyond the Grid. "But I was heartbroken, truly heartbroken for him that this is a guy that we all wanted to win a race, because he deserved it frankly, and he put so much effort into the team and so much of his life into the team that it was payback for him and that was his opportunity through the year.”
Michael Schumacher helped pave the way for Lewis Hamilton at Mercedes
One of Schumacher’s greatest strengths was lifting up teams that had fallen by the wayside and making them shipshape again. After scoring two world titles with Benetton between 1994-95, Schumacher signed up for a poorly-performing Ferrari in 1996 and went on to bag five titles with them.
Similarly, while Mercedes may have dominated the better part of the last decade, with Hamilton going on to eclipse Schumacher’s win and championship tallies, it might not have been entirely possible had the German not helped lay the foundation for the team when he joined them on their return to the sport in 2010.
Mercedes’ sporting director Ron Meadows, who was also a part of the podcast, said: “Given how he helped us improve, I think certainly my biggest regret was not seeing Michael win a race for us because he was a different level of driver we’d ever worked with at that point.”
“I really believe we all wanted him to win. It didn’t happen,” added Vowles, as he backed up Meadows. “A couple of years later we couldn’t stop winning and he deserves some of that because the reason we’re winning today, a lot was down to him because he made us better.”
The 2012 Monaco Grand Prix was eventually won by Red Bull Racing's Mark Webber, who inherited pole position after Schumacher’s grid penalty. Rosberg started and finished second for Mercedes while Schumacher was forced to retire with a fuel pressure issue after 63 of the 78-lap race distance.
