Absentee: The Hole Left by Michael Schumacher, Two Years Later
A room never feels so empty as when a piece of it goes missing.​
By Sam Smith
IT'S BIRDLIKE. A long, drooping nose and light enough to be pushed around by a child. With the engine off and the car's tiny power-steering rack asleep, the wheel is liquid—you can turn it with a finger, this surreal combination of fluidity and heft. The only way I can describe the sensation is to compare it with what happens when you crack an egg into a mixing bowl and you accidentally drop a small piece of eggshell into the white. You know the slippery friction of the white between your fingers when you're trying to pick up the shell? That's the parked steering feel of a 16-year-old Ferrari Formula 1 car.
How often do you get to discuss something like that? Even at this magazine, it's a rare privilege. Last year, shortly after the second anniversary of the 2013 skiing accident that nearly killed Michael Schumacher, we arranged to photograph one of the man's championship F1 cars. It was a kind of pilgrimage, a quiet homage to an individual who has spent the last two and a half years fighting for his life. I was lucky enough to sit in the car, wedging my hips into its tub in the owner's garage. Maybe it was the color—acres of Rosso Scuderia—and history playing tricks with my head, but I've never felt anything like that wheel.
Schumacher had, of course. The most revolutionary driver of the last two decades spent the red-hot core of his career in a Ferrari. The Italian marque wasn't Schumacher's first F1 drive, but it was the one that mattered. Everyone knows the plot: The German lifted the Scuderia from a laughably uncompetitive era, rebuilt its people—Jackie Stewart once labeled this Schumacher's greatest skill—and redefined racing dominance. From 1994 to 2004, Schumacher became world champion a record seven times. Five of those were with the Prancing Horse and consecutive. He still holds records for F1 poles, wins in a season, and wins in a career. He was criticized for being cold in public, but he turned car feel and team building into war-hammer science, solved the motorsport equation more completely than anyone ever had.
Our photo car helped Schumacher take his third F1 title, and his first for Ferrari. Like all modern open-wheelers, it's most interesting from the rear, where the air exits, math gone organic. The various intersecting lines and shapes make staring into the gearbox like looking up the skirt of a giant squid. Any 2016 F1 car will look similar without a degree in aerodynamics, but the Ferrari's rear wing says "Marlboro" in letters visible from space. Tobacco advertising, that motor sport lifeblood, banned since 2006.
I couldn't help dwelling on the contrast. This is a man who raced against both Ayrton Senna and Lewis Hamilton. Like Hamilton, he drove on more than emotion; like Senna, he could be a petulant twit. At Monaco in 2006, after ripping off a flyer in qualifying, he parked in the middle of the track, apparently to prevent Fernando Alonso from completing what looked like a faster lap. In a controversial decision, stewards labeled the move deliberate. All that matters is the accusation, because no one was surprised. We want our heroes to be ethically clean, but like Pete Rose, Schumacher was a little more complicated.
I'm reminded of Michael Jordan. Another titan in red. Enter an old sport, change it, dominate. Jordan retired three times. He couldn't stay away, and neither could Schumacher—the latter retired twice. Once in 2006, and again in 2012, from Mercedes. Like Jordan, he aged out of his prime but was pulled back to work by the force that produced that prime to begin with. You could see it in his eyes in a press conference, sharp enough to slice the lens from a camera. It was a reminder of the strange paradox of the famous athlete, where their passion is both public and private, personal and not. Also that Thomas Wolfe line about going home again.
Still, can you blame the guy? If you helped set one of the brightest fires a sport had ever seen, wouldn't you want to relight it when the wood turned to ash?
Not that middle age made the man slow. It takes remarkable skill to drive a modern F1 car at speed, let alone weaponize one in traffic; driving for Mercedes, Schumacher did both. But from 2010 to 2012, he was basically an also-ran, limited by multiple factors. Not the least of which was age in a business where youth is currency. Accepting the inevitable, Schumacher bowed out. Then he went skiing, hit his head on a rock, and disappeared.
He turned 47 this year, likely in a bed somewhere in Europe. Waiting to get back to his wife and children in a capacity that doesn't involve perpetual nursing. The family has made little information public. Rumors of his condition are scattered across the Internet, none worth repeating. Maybe Michael Schumacher wasn't the man he could have been, but one way or another, he was here. And we're told that he still is.
Sitting in his place, surrounded by red and carbon fiber, my hand drifted to the wheel. As a species, we aren't given a lot of people who can move the needle. They don't enter our lives predictably, and they rarely exit when we'd like. But most deserve more time than they get.
I levered myself out of the car and looked around. The Ferrari seemed smaller than it had been, crouching in the corner of a vast concrete floor. As we turned out the lights and packed to go home, the car shrank into the shadows. Walking out, the door shut behind me with a hollow click. A room never feels so empty as when a piece of it goes missing.
http://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/a29240/smithology-july-2016/ 
