[Closed] Schumacher cheated his way to first title

He had a good crack at cheating his way to the next few, too.

Or reading it another way - Jos wasn't able to get as much out of the car as Schuey and just can't accept that he's not as talented.

But if Schu wasn't cheating then he definitely started later in his career.

As the saying goes - "If you aint cheatin you aint tryin".

Post title launch control and other electronics (remember from the previous years when everyone had to remove theirs/redesign for rules changes) were found in the car but I remember at the time Beneton argued that they were dormant and it would have cost them alot of money to remove so they just let them 'be'.

Oh, I thought this was going to be about him winning championships by deliberately crashing into people.

Which he did twice.

This is the man for whom ironic 'Jos The Boss' flags used to be flown, when he was cantering round in 15th place.

The fact that Schuey never beat him a kart says that Verstappen was a better kart racer than F1 racer. He was certainly crap in an F1 car, a point that few would disagree with given his total points score of 17 points from 107 races and the fact he could never hang onto a seat for more than a year

He's best summed up with Brundle's immortal quote "It takes a [i]very special[/i] effort to get into that gravel trap." I can't remember which race it was for though.

"I always thought it was impossible. I braked at [s]the[/s] my limit and took the corners as hard as [s]possible[/s] I could, so how could Schumacher do it? There was something wrong.

Fixed that for him and, of course, we should all pay attention to this well balanced former driver - [url= http://www.duemotori.com/news/f1/32377_Jos_Verstappen_avoids_jail_over_wife_assault.php ]Jos_Verstappen_avoids_jail_over_wife_assault[/url]

Hmmmmm http://www.motorsport.com/f1/news/benetton-launch-control-fia-press-release/

Then theres the issue of removing a fuel filter that allowed Benetton to refuel quicker...

Schumacher = found guilty of cheating by FIA
Briatore = found guilty of cheating by FIA
Benneton = found guilty of having illegal code hidden in their ECU

Jos is supposed to be one of Schumacher's close mates, with friends like that! Although given Rubens recent comments I think maybe Schumacher has sacrificed friendship in his life for winning.

Schumacher is a cheat, flatterd by always making sure the team disadvantaged his team mate. Yet what did Mansell say - a money could win in the FW14/15 - and they did.

FW14/15 - totally agree but it was within the rules at the time. Theres the difference. In the Senna movie when they showed the remote control racing and lowering of ride height I just 😯

For a team(s) to keep those radical aids beyond them being banned is rude though.

Obviously on a [u]TINY[/u] scale on waaay OT- have you ever jumped into a kart that has been recently fully serviced and taken it on track against other karts? Just leaves everyone else. Then you jump into another and it feels sluggish compared.

Even more OT, anyone ever tried an electric kart?

In theory they should be able to listen to old recordings and with modern technology work out if he had traction control on

But is is worth it? Who came second that year and will re-writing the history books make a big difference?

I have always thought Schumacher crossed the line (Damon Hill, Jaques Villenuve etc) but I think in this case let sleeping dogs lie.

In Jos's case... sour grapes

The first race of Senna's last season he spun near the end. He didn't go back to the pits, though. He stayed on track to listen to the traction control working on the Benneton.

Alonso is a similarly tainted driver in my view. Too close to all the scandals to be completely blameless.

...deliberately crashing into people...

He's still doing that, as Bruno S. found out in Brazil.

lets not forget Senna also crashed into people, he crashed into Mansell's williams after Williams said Senna wasnt going to drive for them next year - was the last race of the season i remember.
and of course
senna v prost!!!!!!!!!!

so lets not all hark on about schumi and crashing - recent commentators have said damon hill need not have tried to pass schumi as he was coming back across the circuit after his crash as he could not go anywhere else with front broken suspension - if he had braked and gone on the other side he would have been fine. Some could say Coulthard's braking on the racing line in the wet at spa stole a title from schumi that year - did McLaren give him a team order? did they cheat? when JPM rammed schumi in the tunnel in monaco - was that delibrate, will we hear in years to come JPM was given a wink and a nod? who knows what goes on!

there's also the thoughts that the FIA was quite willing to let Williams and all its techno gadgetry win for a while because of a beef with McLaren at the time - it was only when ferrari was on its knees and going to leave F1 were things changed and ferrari's power base inside the FIA began to increase.

and of course SPYGATE stuff too!

i'm not defending or supporting anyone, but lets not all get selective memory here just because we dont like someone
and
sometimes for a title, its not just about the driver in the car, or the car, the team, the team bosses, the deals done over dinners, the deals done on the private jet and boats, the politics done around the table, that all in all contributed to some of the modern F1 championship past winners.

Only in le Tour do you see the win taken off of tainted winners. F1 had/has too many big sponsors to please.

Soon to be Contadors turn.....

And yet no mention of Lewis 'The Liar' Hamilton, or Ron 'The Cheat' Dennis. 😆

Get over yourselves you lot. There will always be 'cheating' and rule-bending in sports, in all sports, speshly if the prizes are so great.

Of course it's only the foreigners what cheat, no British sportsperson would ever cheat, oh no...

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I'm surprised that this is considered newsworthy...

Several teams voiced considerable surprise that the B194 seemed to be able to find uncanny levels of traction. The code in the ECU was indeed present, but had apparently been deactivated, as the previous year's regulations allowed for traction control to be used and Benneton did not have sufficient time to completely rewrite the code for the ECU.

There was the incidents which resulted in sanction against the team, namely the removal of a refuelling rig filter and the excessive wear of the "plank" beneath Schumacher's car at the Belgian race I believe. There's no way that the subsequent shunting of Damon Hill at Adelaide was anything other than a desperate lunge, but then Senna had won a world championship using the same tactic on Prost so that precident was already set.

and Benneton did not have sufficient time to completely rewrite the code for the ECU

Win at all costs?

I don't like this one bit. The Senna/Prost interface is in no way racing at all. Not one jot. People paid how much to get into the circuit only for one to ram the other on the first corner.

Racing is close wheel/touching, swapping places, one makes a mistake and goes off. I was never a Mika fan when he first came into F1 however some of his racing craft later on was sublime 😀

And what was far, far worse than any cheating, was the attempt at denying all responsibility for the mechanical failure which contributed to Ayrton Senna's death, by the highly respected British Williams F1 team. Whose boss, Patrick Head, was found guilty of manslaughter in a Court of Law. The actions by Williams in attempting to cover up any errors on their part were disgusting. One of the greatest F1 drivers was killed, yet all they could do was say 'oh it's not our fault'.

Mind you, quite why anyone imagines a sport like F1, with so much at stake financially, to be 'clean', is beyond me...

'cheats' are only labeled cheats when they get caught, they're all looking for any advantage going

Mind you, quite why anyone imagines a sport like F1, with so much at stake financially, to be 'clean', is beyond me...

Driving around for years in basically fag packets alone makes it a murky dirty sport.

1st rule of racing - do anything to win
2nd rule of racing - see 1st rule

Good point Hora. The teams aren't bothered about the ethical nature of their sponsors, that's obvious...

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I had a replica JPS toy car as a kid. Jesus, how bad is that?

Maybe one day people will look back at the athletical event the 2012 Olympics and say 'why was the official restaurant of the Olympics McDonalds'?

Driving around for years in basically fag packets alone makes it a murky dirty sport.

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That is a funny picture 😆

On JPM - my mate used to constantly wind me up saying he looks like he eats alot of burgers etc hence why he crashed or slow......then after he leaves it turns out that he really did have a thing for food

Within Formula One, or indeed any sport which has a complex set of regulations in place there is a very fine line between innovation and cheating. One glance at the TDF will reinforce that.

The point about tobacco sponsorship is very valid, while other sports like Cricket have turned their back on cigarette companies, there are a lot of new racing venues that happen to be in countries where tobacco companies are expaning their markets into because of the lack of legislation and the social acceptance of smoking.

Don't forget that in the early 1970s, the BBC weren't happy about the Surtees cars being sponsored by Durex, yet they were happy to show cars daubed with various tobacco companies' logos.

I had to laugh at Woody's picture... F1 is a murky world of machismo, I can recall that a certain slightly less talented sibling of a German driver had to endure all kinds of allegations about his private life. Women within the sport seeminly only exist to hold the grid numbers or do PR, whilst gay men are conspicuous by their very absence.

Didn't Schumacher nick Frentzen's missus at the time? Bet he wasn't happy!

one day people will look back

Dunno if we need to look back its pretty obvious now

was the attempt at denying all responsibility for the mechanical failure which contributed to Ayrton Senna's death, by the highly respected British Williams F1 team. Whose boss, Patrick Head, was found guilty of manslaughter in a Court of Law.

When faced with a legal system that essentially starts out with 'something happenned and therefore someone has to be to blame, now lets fit the circumstances to find who is to blame' what would you do? Williams were in the position of having to demonstrate innocence. And if this is so correct under Italian law how come Ferrari, a company that surely has killed more drivers than any other, was never brought to task.

recent commentators have said damon hill need not have tried to pass schumi as he was coming back across the circuit after his crash as he could not go anywhere else with front broken suspension - if he had braked and gone on the other side he would have been fine.

...if Damon had known that the suspension was broken in the split second Damon had to decide what to do, he had no idea of course as it happened out of his sight and he had to assume this was his one and only chance to get past Schui. Damon did the correct thing in the circumstances.

When faced with a legal system that essentially starts out with 'something happenned and therefore someone has to be to blame, now lets fit the circumstances to find who is to blame' what would you do?

Here we go. Have a pop at a foreign judicial system.... 🙄

What Ferrari have or jolly well have not done is irrelevant in this case. So why mention them?

Let's instead talk about the Williams black boxes recovered from Senna's car, then inexplicably given to Williams by Charlie Whiting, which were then found to contain no data. Funny, that, eh?

Williams to this day have never admitted they could have bin at fault. Too busy covering their own arses, protecting their own careers and lining their own pockets.

And what was far, far worse than any cheating, was the attempt at denying all responsibility for the mechanical failure which contributed to Ayrton Senna's death, by the highly respected British Williams F1 team. Whose boss, Patrick Head, was found guilty of manslaughter in a Court of Law. The actions by Williams in attempting to cover up any errors on their part were disgusting. One of the greatest F1 drivers was killed, yet all they could do was say 'oh it's not our fault'.

Thing is though, these machines are absolutely at the limits of technology, and the one thing drivers want to do is go faster. Never mind the fact that for most of us, the sheer speed would terrify us beyond comprehension, these drivers are taking all of it and asking for more.

Would they take a risk increase of, say, 20% to go even 2% faster? Almost certainly. Senna [i]definitely[/i] would. So they KNOW that they're in a risky sport, that things are always time-pressured, and that there's every chance that things will go wrong at some point.

I can't tell you how many times I've seen suspension collapse, a rear wing fail, a wheel come off, or see the results of brake failure, hydraulic/oil leaks. It's only in the last few years that F1's become even remotely reliable, but it's still not close to road-car levels of reliability.

Williams shouldn't have denied that they were responsible - they palpably were, at least to some degree - but equally I don't believe they should have been prosecuted for what was, essentially, a pretty standard motor-racing incident. OK, terrible consequences, but the chance of outcome occurring was incredibly low.

Senna had bad luck. If he'd hit the wall at even a degree or two differently, or the steering had failed fifty feet further on, he'd have crashed but not fatally. If you tried to repeat the accident exactly the way it occurred, there's no guarantee that you'd have had the same outcome.

The thing that makes F1 interesting for me is that fine line between finding a loophole in the regs and cheating. Take the RedBulls and their bendy wings last year - they passed every proscribed scrutineering test, but still scraped along the ground at high speed. And I'll bet my bottom dollar that whatever they switch on for Q3 is something that is a unique interpretation of the letter of the law, if not the spirit.

The history of the sport is littered with innovations that were fundamentally dodgy - the past few years we've had bendy wings (on Ferraris as well), double diffusers, mass dampers, 2nd brake pedals, F-ducts etc. - even back in the 80s there were arguments about water injection systems being used to make cars lighter. Every team owner would love to find something that is just on that boundary of legal/illegal and use it to win. And every driver would use it without question.

Senna was one of the first to realise that F1 could be a contact sport and he used it to his advantage as much as Schumi did. Oh and while we're talking about split second decisions that have turned out to be wrong, if Mansell hadn't managed to save the crash when his tyre blew up the race would probably have been stopped due to debris all over the main straight. Points would have been awarded based on their position on the previous lap and Mansell would have been WDC. Hindsight's rubbish isn't it.

On McLarens second brake pedal- did it actual work? Seemed odd!

2nd brake pedal worked as a form of traction control on rear brake. It was selectable side-to-side so that you could minimise wheelspin (on the inside wheel) on the way out of low-speed corners.

It worked really well in 97 - that was the season that McLaren could/should have stormed the title, but for the tiny problem that their engines were hugely unreliable, with Hakkinen retiring from the lead at least three times that I can remember. Flipping Mercedes units.

On McLarens second brake pedal- did it actual work? Seemed odd!

Oh yes, if you read the specs of the new Macca sports car you'll see that they have included an automatic version of it on there.

Incidentally, reason they need to brake is 2WD. Prodrive have developed a 4WD system does the same but with power not braking. So effective it made Clarkwit puke when he tried it

The thing that makes F1 interesting for me is that fine line between finding a loophole in the regs and cheating

Exactly, 6-wheeler Tyrell, ground effect lotus, fan car Brabham, active suspension Williams ?