I think it was only rumour in the end. It is about this islands:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/ar...ling-apart.html
http://www.privateislandsblog.com/2007/11/...sland-in-duabi/
But, he can afford hotel I guess. Or he has something in the city because he stay there a lot I think. Skydiving.

All this staff are bullshit. His the same guy. And no his age doesn't make him much slower ether. It doesn't matter how old you are in F1. All that matters is if you are able to keep your condition while racing so your performance won't drop because of exhaustion. It doesn't seem like his half-dead when he gets out of the car to me. He seems quite fine actually.
It's simply that people had this crazy ideas(especially his fans) that Schumacher could win championships even with a Minardi simply because he has 7 titles.
He ain't a miracle man and Rosberg could very well fight him even if he was 10 years younger, lets not forget the guy never really drove against a good teammate or a team mate that even got the same attention.
His biggest power wasn't his amazing speed(am not saying the guy is slow, his a good driver but no he never was particularly faster than other good drivers) but the ability to make a whole team focus around him. Combine that with the luck of having the best cars and rules that fitted him perfectly and he was doing wonderfully.

Sorry, but this is bullshit

Of course it does. In every sport it does.
And it´s not just fitness in F1 that´s linked with the "problem" of age. Racing requires a wide area of cognitive demands.
In simple terms: Many of these are way more related to your brain than to your body, and some of these brain functions just slightly degrade with age.
In another 25 years MSC might not be able to park his road car safely and that would´ve nothing to do with fitness.

Look at the age Schumacher is any degradation from the brain is completely irrelevant. Brain functions hardly lose much until you get really really old. In most sports the reason age matters is because of the body. Do you really think all the sportsmen that retire couldn't keep up if you gave them the body of a 20 year old but left the brain the same? In F1 is the same, it's the body that affects you first and it mostly has to do with your stamina and how strong you feel after driving for many laps. Schumacher seems to still be good so it doesn't really affect him that much.

1. No it isn´t. Just one example: Your reaction times already slow down in your 30s compared to your 20s.
2. Let´s take chess for example: In the history of this "sport", there are only very few great players (about two or three...), which were still close to their "peak" once they were in their 40s....And that´s a discipline, in which you just sit on a chair and think.

Fangio won his 5th WDC at the age of 46.

Yeah and Emil Zatopek won the 5000m, 10000m, and the Marathon (which he never ran in his whole life before) at the olympics in 1952.

I guess that means somebody could also do that today, right?


Comparing these "pioneering days" with todays world of professional sports leads to nothing.

Cool the perks of a 7 * WDC with a private plane, test in Jerez with your team and be home in Switzerland in time for dinner, while jetting off the next day to go Skydiving in Dubai.

I'm not comparing a thing, Fangio at age 46 was competing against drivers half his age and still was able to put in stellar performances, witness the 1957 German GP.
I'm saying that it is well within the realm of possbility for Schumacher, given the tools, to do the same. Clear enough?

F1 was slightly different then, i think you may be the only person i have to 'ignore'.

I am not sure Fangio compete against many 23 year old drivers when he was 46? I also think that,if MS was driving RBR he can put a stellar performance. I don't think that in Canada he was the reason why he lost two places in the end. Last year MS actually put a stellar performance. To match NR is not easy thing I think.

Yes you´re comparing the GP-Circus of the 50s with todays F1. Otherwise you couldn´t deduct from Fangio´s success to MS potential future success nowadays.

However even if i would agree with a direct comparison, it would still say nothing about Fangio´s (potential) abilities in his 20s or 30s and about the question whether MS was better ~15years ago than at the moment.
"Success" is a result of competing against other individuals...not your (former) self.

Not exactly half his age, but nonetheless:
In 1957
Moss 28
Collins 26
Hawthorn 28
Musso 32
Castellotti 27
Von Trips 29
Jack Brabham 31
Tony Brooks 25
Jo Bonnier 27
Stuart Lewis-Evans 27

Yes I know F1 was 'slightly different' then. I am curious though, why would you put me on your ignore list if all I am saying is that if Fangio could do it at 46, then I think that at age 43 Schumacher is more than capable of doing it. Do you think that the cars of the 50s were so easy to drive that anyone could win races and championships?

That make no sense whatsoever unless you are saying that Schumacher at age 43 no longer has the capabilities to be successfull in F1. Is that it? I am of the opinion that if Fangio a 5 x WDC could do it, then I think that Schumacher, given the tools, is more than capable of the same. I make no reference anywhere to how either man drove when they were younger.
I think many of you think that driving an F1 car in the 50s was more akin to a leisurely Sunday drive in the countryside.....

What does that have to do with the drivers and their respective age and abilities?

The olympic long-run distances (5k, 10k, Marathon) stayed exactly the same and are always exhausting, yet i don´t expect nobody to achieve the "Hattrick" like Zatopek did...

Of course my words made sense.
I can say "MS was better 15 years ago" and still say that he can be successful nowadays given the right "tools" (=car).
It can happen. Prost didn´t look as good in 93 as he did in the 80s, but he won the championship due to a superb car.

What jj is saying is right, given the best car, like Fangio, why is there no chance of Schumacher winning an 8th WDC?

He's better than Rosberg and the car advantage would negate the performance deficit to Alonso, Vettel & Button.

And there was also other drivers close to Fangio age. Driver over 36 were normal then. For sure 1957 cars were not so demanding, not such G forces.

On the other hand, the cars had worse handling, had no power-steering, manual gear-boxes, the races were longer, etc. So it wasn´t necessarily any less demanding.

But all this doesn´t tell anything about the professionalism in the respective era.
E.g. Professinal cyclists of the 50s or 60s weren´t necessarily better skilled or trained, just because the stage distances were much longer and more demanding than today. And i can´t imagine a current or future cyclist winning a single TDF-stage by 8mins over the next guy as Merckx once did...

But, they were demanding in a different way. No there were not the G forces that the drivers of today experience, but the physical strain was just as tough and demanding and add to that the fact that the smallest mistake could result in tragic consequences, then you have a combination of factors that made them demanding, but as I said in a different way.

Yes there were drivers closer to Fangio's age in 1957, but none of them were close to competing for wins or close enough to challenge him and the other front runners. Only Harry Schell at age 36 finished in the top 10 in the driver's championship standings at the end of the season. San Hanks I don't include because none of the other top drivers competed in the Indy 500 which was considered for WDC points.

You are wrong.
You are right.
You are wrong.
You are wrong.
There is no such thing as luck. Everything comes about as a result of somebody's actions.

You are all talking this Fangio/Schumacher situation like this was a sport.

This is F1,and best car wins.

Schumacher on the best car would again win many,and fight for the wdc and do "great" things with his age.

Uhm.....what?

yep

How old are you to make this comment?

I'm certainly old enough to call your proposal rubbish.




You know very little about period cars and driving in general.

Your Mum's Toyota Corolla can lap the Nurb faster than Fangio's car, the skill back then was finesse and feel for grip at a much lower limit, more like a modern ice racer than any relevance to a current F1 car. 650kgs on 4" wide 16" tyres does not send a lot of force back through a steering wheel, especially a large diameter steering wheel.

For a reality check, Sabine Schmitz took a diesel Ford Transit Van around the Nurb only 30 seconds slower than Fangio went round.

The Martin Brundle series driving the Maserati 250F through to a more modern F1 (at the time) gives an insight to how they were to drive - listen to his commentry, the effort in his voice as he goes through the cars (note too the Maserati has modern historic tyres offering much more grip than the day). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_A4WjcJ6DQ

I thought you had me on your ignore list......maybe you shoulda kept it that way.
I'll respond to an insult with the opinons, (get that? opinions) that I've voiced so far and it all started out by me saying that Fangio at age 46 won his 5th WDC and that I feel that Schumacher given the tools could do the same thing. Then people assumed I was making a comparison. I was not. I wonder why it is that his drive at the 1957 German GP ranks as one of the greatest of all time.
I could'nt give a rat's ass less about Sabine Schmitz and the transit van, yes I've seen the video but it has little relevance to the discussion at hand.
Tell you what, find yourself a Maserati 250F, take it at racing speeds around any track with little or no room for error for say 3 hours or so then tell me how you feel at the end of it.
You're an expert driver and I know very little about driving and period cars so it should be no problem for you, right?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vULk0D2a1o...feature=related

Seems to be a very good lap, give him the right car he will be back on top. He hasnt lost any of his speed or reflexes, he may have lost a few % but nothing that would make him look weak compared to the current crop of drivers in equal machinery.

I dont want to agree or to disagree on your conclusion, but you can't tell from the video. What exactly do you see in there? It was a quite ok lap, yeah. But I can't see anything special, acutally he misses quite a few apexes. Far from perfect.
Most drivers laps look like this, so what?

Right. So because Fangio won a world championship in the 1950's at the age of 46, it means that if Michael at 43 is not as good in 2012 spec F1 as he was 20 years ago he has always been rubbish.

Pathetic argument.

He doesn't drive like THIS anymore...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSDh11uzenA...;feature=relmfu

Firstly, who said that? If you'd been following what I've been saying, or trying to say without it being interpreted every which way, you'd see that the point I have been trying to make is that if Schumacher has the tools, ie., the car, capable of taking him to the front, then I have no doubt that he still has the talents to win races. And those that think he can't are deluding themselves.

How do you know? What's to say that he's no longer capable of a lap like this? If anything, and as I've repeatedly said, given the tools, he's more than capable IMHO of doing so.

Well actually beating Rosberg would be a good way to start

thanks for sharing your wisdom with us. You seem an extreme expert on all those things.

Curiously, I already posted in this thread(or the RosXSchu one) how researches with aircraft pilots demonstrated how everybody loses reaction/reflexes with age. And this was related to "eye reaction" not to mention body reaction which is very important in fast car such as F1s. Maybe you don't know but drivers reacts to understeer/oversteer not by seeing it but by feeling it first with their bodies attached to the car. As you get older, your feeling for motion/forces gets slower and slower.

If you think Schumacher never showed to be much faster than almost all drivers he ever driven against, then you never watched F1 in his old days.

The "luck" he had for having dominant cars only occured to him in 2001,2002,2003(not that dominant),2004 and parts of 2006. In 2000 it was even a bit slower than Mclaren, I would say.

rules that fitted him? omg, cry-babying at it's peak. Yeah Schumacher had specific rules to make him seem better.


bingo


Yeah, when cars had bicycle tires_with same grip as tires made of rock_, no aerodynamical development whatsoever and instead of having downforce, the cars in 50's had lift, which means they had even less grip at high speeds.

As a consequence, braking zones were huge, speed in corners were ridiculously slow and reflexes needed to cope with this slow machines are much much less than todays.

Today's Nascar cars reacts very slowly and that's why older drivers can be succesfull there. Driving there is more like antecipating things than reacting to the car. That's why Montoya, a much more talented guy than say 90% of Nascar drivers, couldn't set the world on fire there.



I agree with Nigol. The lap is ok and that's it. It's worthy mentioning that he was confortably the faster on this qualifying than anybody outside the TOP 3 teams. This lap does not represent some of the very poor qualifying performances Schumacher showed sometimes in 2010/2011.

Schumacher was faster than Button and Hamilton(Top drivers of today driving a Mclaren with more downforce than Mercedes) through Degner 1 corner but that's it, he can show some glimpses of old form in one corner but will not do that in the entire lap.
In this thread you can see that he was faster than the Mclarens in the corner I mentioned:
http://forums.autosport.com/index.php?showtopic=155676

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HRW6IO4MTs

Video + top comment =

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jcIJ2PlS04...feature=related

0:47, when the hate for Schumacher began.

FANTASTIC videos

You should check out the 1954 Mercedes Benz Streamliner if you think there was no aero development and if the cars had less grip at high speed, then you'd agree that they were inherently more dangerous back then, correct? And don't delude yourself into thinking that just because the cornering speeds were slower back then that the cars themselves were slow or that the reflexes of the drivers back then were any less slow than those of todays' drivers, that's rubbish.

And no driver has since even come close to this feat. Which leaves either five subsequent decades of f1 pilots utter sh*t or your hypothesis, boy.

Mansell was a race winner at 41.

Mansell was gifted a race win at the age of 41.

...and looked poor that season against Hill for the most part -and also against Hakkinen the year after. A good example of a driver which wasn´t as good as he was before.

So you feel that if Schumacher was given the best car of the field, an advantage of 2-3/10ths, he wouldn't have a good chance of winning the WDC?

You're describing Schumacher's 2010.

If i do, would that be anyhow contradictory?

We won't know until you try.

and what was the age average at that moment in time?
(not asking you for data, of course, just a thought)
recently we've had youngest race winner, youngest wdc, double wdc...the trend is clear

A race win is a far cry from a championship and in this particular case Nigel achieved it amid a lot of uncompetitive drives in 94 and 95. A perhaps better example would be his 1992 championship at the age of 39. Or Brabham's last WDC at the age of 40 in 1966. But still far away from Fangio's 46.