Victory at their home race would enable Ferrari to close the gap with Renault and Fernando Alonso in the battle for the world championship, but talk in the paddock and grandstands will not be of winning. The real focus will be directed towards the announcement by Ferrari of their 2007 driver line-up, which, it was hoped, would resolve the sport’s burning question: will Schumacher call time on one of sport’s greatest careers? Having stated that they would announce their drivers for next year at Monza, Ferrari are in a tricky spot. Fighting hard for his eighth world championship means that Schumacher will not want to be distracted by any discussion on his future. So what will happen? At the German Grand Prix at Hockenheim at the end of July, the Ferrari team boss, Jean Todt, declared: “I’m happy to be on the podium with my three favourite drivers.” Those drivers were Schumacher, Massa and the McLaren driver Kimi Raikkonen. So the most likely scenario is that Ferrari will announce those three as their 2007 drivers next weekend, especially as it is the worst-kept secret in F1 that Raikkonen has signed a contract with the Italian team. However, three into two doesn’t go.
Massa, fresh from his first F1 race victory in Istanbul, will not be happy to be demoted to test driver. Raikkonen, one of the bright stars of the future, will also not accept a test role. But ultimately the decision will come down to what Schumacher wants to do. One doesn’t let go a driver with seven world championships, 89 grand prix victories and 68 pole positions to his credit.
All the signs are that the racer is still very much part of the man. In the three-week break before Istanbul, while his colleagues were sunning themselves around the Mediterranean, Schumacher headed home to Switzerland and straight to the car track to do some racing because “he couldn’t bear not to race for three weeks”.
He is as hungry for his eighth championship as for his first and is not ready to leave a team that revolves around his work ethic and talent. Since Schumacher joined in 1996, Ferrari have become Team Schumacher, and therein lies a conundrum. Time waits for no man and racing is a young man’s game, so Ferrari is looking to the future.
The old guard is moving on. Ferrari’s chief designer, Rory Byrne, is tipped to retire to Thailand at the end of this year. Technical director Ross Brawn will most likely take a year’s sabbatical to enjoy his twin passions of gardening and fishing. That leaves Todt, the Frenchman who heads the team, and the 37-year-old Schumacher of the group that secured six consecutive constructors’ and five successive drivers’ titles in the past seven years.
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It appears that Luca di Montezemolo, Ferrari’s president, has persuaded Todt to stay on for an extra year to oversee the transition, which leaves Schumacher the option to continue for another year too.
But it is a decision that he may not even have made yet. As Brawn once said: “One day Michael will wake up and say that’s it — it won’t be a long, planned thing.”
We were once sitting in the Ferrari motorhome at Silverstone and Schumacher was looking wistfully out of the window. His thoughts? “I wish I could go out and meet people, but it would cause a riot. Maybe one day.”
Maybe that day is coming soon. Only he knows.