Ten years ago, Michael Schumacher got as close to racing perfection as possible

Exactly ten years ago to the day, the blood-red car swept into view, rounding the final bend and accelerating onto the start-finish straight towards the chequered flag. Out of sight of the Ferrari, the black-and-silver McLaren, just moments earlier, had already crossed the line to take the win. He had finished ‘only’ second, but that was remarkably just the second time out of 14 attempts that year that he had failed to win. The majority of the photographers’ lenses were trained on him as he unfolded his five-foot-seven frame from the confines of the cockpit and punched the air. Kimi Raikkonen, having just scored his first win of the season, stood on the nose of his car, waving, ignored but for a few snappers clicking the customary stock photo before turning their attention back to the man emerging from the Ferrari. [caption id=“attachment_1687989” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Michael Schumacher was all but unstoppable in 2004. AFP[/caption] The day clearly belonged to Michael Schumacher, who, on 29th August, 2004 – ten years ago to the day – raced to his seventh and last world championship triumph. The floodgates had opened for Schumacher and Ferrari in 2000 when, after five years of trying and failing, the German had finally restored the lustre of the sport’s most celebrated marque, becoming the first driver to claim the title at the wheel of the Prancing Horse for 21 years. The 2004 season had been their most dominant, when the combination was at its most potent. Heading into that historic weekend, fittingly at Spa-Francorchamps – the circuit where Schumacher had made his Formula One debut and scored his first win – the German had won all but one of 13 races. He had amassed a total of 120 points and the only reason Schumacher hadn’t yet clenched the title – which had seemed an inevitability following the opening series of races – was because team-mate Rubens Barrichello was still in mathematical contention having followed Schumacher home in seven one-two finishes. He qualified second in Spa – the circuit he referred to as his ‘living room’ – behind Jarno Trulli’s Renault in tricky conditions after the typically fickle Ardennes weather moved in. But despite the track being much wetter when Schumacher went out than it had been for Trulli, the Ferrari managed to get to within seven-hundredths of a second of the Renault’s pole time, missing out in the end by just 0.072 seconds. Sunday’s race was dry but, strangely, Schumacher’s Ferrari wasn’t the class of the field. He made a poor getaway and lost out to the third-placed Renault of Fernando Alonso and McLaren’s David Coulthard. Schumacher had opted for the harder compound Bridgestone tyres which in the cool conditions were more difficult to warm up than his rivals’ Michelins. As a result, in a race that featured multiple safety car interruptions, he was constantly on the back foot, losing out every time the safety car came in as he waited for his tyres to come up to temperature. At one point, following the first safety car which was deployed on the opening lap, Schumacher fell back as far as sixth, having been overtaken by Raikkonen and Williams’ Juan Pablo Montoya on the same lap. But he clawed his way back up through the field and, also benefitting from some luck, lay second to Raikkonen as the race reached its closing stages. A safety car in the very dying laps of the race closed the pack up, leaving the cars with a last-gasp three-lap sprint to the flag. But the McLaren was able to pull away. Raikkonen kept his lead to the end and 3.3 seconds later, Schumacher swept across the line to take an unprecedented seventh world championship and complete his rewriting of Formula One’s record books. The achievement, which ranks as among the greatest in sporting history, marked the pinnacle of a career stretching back some three decades to the time when a bricklayer called Rolf Schumacher from the rural German town of Kerpen fished a moped out of a lake and fitted its engine to his son Michael’s pedal kart. It also marked the peak of a run of success unprecedented in Formula One and not seen since as, for five years, Schumacher and Ferrari held sway over the sport, straddling it like a colossus, and establishing new benchmarks. Not content with matching Juan Manuel Fangio’s haul of five world championships, a record which had stood for 45 years, Schumacher bettered it not once but twice. That race in Belgium and the 2004 season – in championship terms – was Michael Schumacher’s last hurrah. His form tailed off towards the end of the year, the German taking just one win and one podium from the final four races of the season. But he ended 2004 with a tally of 13 wins, two podiums and eight pole positions. He won 72.2 percent of the races held that season, a win percentage even Sebastian Vettel couldn’t match when he equaled Schumacher’s haul of 13 race wins last year. Never in the 13 years that he had so far raced in Formula One had the German been so dominant and, as he sat there in the post-race press conference, he was strangely subdued. The young boy from Kerpen, who he had never lost touch with despite his success and who had never expected to race in Formula One let alone dominate it, was coming to terms with his achievement and was perhaps wondering if he would ever get so close to perfection again. He would. Though he would go on racing and come close to snatching an eighth world title before eventually fading into retirement for good at the end of 2012, Schumacher had scaled his peak.