'Michael Schumacher would have been a very good team boss'
F1 News
- Ludo van Denderen
With Michael Schumacher's skiing accident exactly 10 years ago this month, friends, family members and colleagues have been looking back at the career and life of the seven-time world champion a lot lately. Timo Glock also has special memories of Schumacher, whose exact state of health has been unknown for a decade.
Probably few people know that Schumacher was not only a top car driver, the German was also an avid chess player. "I spent quite some time with him going cycling and when he came back to Mercedes, and I was driving for Virgin and Marussia, we played a lot of chess," Glock told BettingSites.co.uk. "I had never played chess in my life and he taught me how to play. We played endless games on flights."
Glock laughs when he thinks back to those chess matches: "I really liked it when I got into a position to beat him because he hated losing. At one time I got into a good flow in chess and had this period around the Singapore GP where I won nearly every match. It was quite funny."
Would Schumacher have ever left Formula One?
Michael Schumacher quit Formula 1 after the 2006 season but returned in 2010. With Mercedes, the German no longer had the successes as earlier with Ferrari and Benetton, but he did have fun with the sport. A year after his second retirement, there was a dramatic accident, from which Schumacher never fully recovered.
So nobody will know what the future would have brought if this drama had not happened to Schumacher. For example, would he still have been seen much in the F1 paddock? "He would always have been around the F1 paddock but whether he would have been a pundit, I don’t know," says Glock.
"He would not have been the F1 expert in front of the cameras. Yes, he would have done interviews but I think he would have worked for the sport he lived for. That would have been his position if he had decided to stay in the paddock. Maybe not in the first part of his retirement (a team principal), maybe later on. But he would definitely have been a good person in that position because he knows exactly what it needs."