Ralf Schumacher

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Ralf Schumacher

Tuesday 14th February 2006

As the younger brother of multiple championship winner Michael Schumacher, Ralf has had a lot to live up to, but he's now established himself in his own right. And like his brother, Ralf may also be entering retirement in the not-too-distant future.

He has followed an almost identical path to his brother within motorsport, through karts, F3 and then breaking in to F1 with the Jordan team in 1997.

A podium place arrived in only his third race - at Buenos Aires - but his race was marred by a collision which took out team-mate Giancarlo Fisichella on lap 24.

In fact he had five further accidents, including one with his brother, that season, although when his impetuosity did not get the better of him he did well with six points finishes.

The first half of the 1998 season was dreadful for Jordan with the car either unreliable or uncompetitive - coupled with some poor performances from Ralf.

However, as the season progressed, Jordan's and Ralf's performances progressed culminating in top six finishes. At Spa, Ralf finished second behind team-mate Damon Hill although team orders had instructed him not to challenge for the lead.

He followed that up with a solid third at Monza a fortnight later.

Unhappiness at the team orders at Spa, as well as two retirements towards the end of the 1998 season, caused Ralf to look for another team. After much wrangling, he managed to extricate himself from his Jordan contract and secure a move to Williams for 1999.

He immediately began to repay his new team with some excellent drives in the early half of season, including two podium spots at Melbourne and Silverstone. Later, in the European GP, he was desperately unlucky not to take his first GP win.

2000 brought a new Williams team-mate for Ralf, rookie Jenson Button, and the German found himself outqualified by the youngster on more than one occasion.

Despite this, Ralf had a reasonable season, finishing 'best of the rest' in the drivers' championship, fifth behind the Ferrari and McLaren drivers.

Ralf was keen to keep his 2000 team-mate a bit longer, but had to contend with Juan-Pablo Montoya from 2001 onwards.

Ralf started the new season well with a win in San Marino after which his canny manager Willi Weber negotiated an extension to his contract. But the second half of the year proved frustrating as Ralf fell into the rut of the previous season and started to get outqualified at circuits where Montoya was driving for the first time.

However, he had stepped firmly out of his brother's shadow and was a different driver to the one who found getting off the line so difficult in 1998.

He scored three wins at Imola, Montreal and Hockenheim - something his brother had yet to achieve - and finished the season fourth overall with 49 points.

In 2002 Ralf found it more difficult to keep up with Montoya, especially when JPM put together a run of five successive pole positions.

Unlike previous years, though, he came back strongly - a little too strongly in races where it seemed the two Williams drivers were involved in their own personal battle. Ralf's win in Sepang was the team's only race victory of the year, but it came courtesy of a first-corner accident between Michael and JPM.

For the first time at Williams he had been outscored by a team-mate, finishing fourth with 42 points.

Shock of the year came in Austria where Ralf turned up with blond hair - something he explained away as "a very bad mistake" by a hapless hairdresser.

Although it ended in disappointment, the 2003 season was far more profitable affair for Ralf.

Having steadily accumulated points in the early half of the campaign in a struggling car, the FW25 was a class apart in mid-season and Ralf took full advantage, winning back-to-back races at Nurburgring and Magny-Cours.

Suddenly Ralf had emerged as a leading contender to win the world championship but a high-speed accident in testing ruled him out of grands prix at a crucial stage and a crash at his comeback race, the US GP, ended his title aspirations.

2004 was to prove even more disappointing.

Williams were woefully off the pace and Ralf only made any sort of impression other than with a series of crashes which earned him the Planet-F1 title of Ralf Shuntmaker.

But his crash at the US GP was no laughing matter.

Slamming into the wall at an estimated 200mph, the accident left the Williams a wreck and Ralf with a cracked spine.

The result was that the German was ruled out of most of the second half of the season until finally making his comeback at the Chinese GP. It rather summed up Ralf's season that he was promptly forced out of the race when David Coulthard crashed into him.

Yet it was far from doom and gloom for Ralf at the end of 2004. A move to Toyota had long been mooted and it was finally confirmed in September that he had indeed joined the Cologne-based outfit, where he would partner Jarno Trulli.

And although his team-mate got the better results in both qualifying and the races, it was Ralf who produced the more consistent season, finishing 14 of the 19 grands prix in the points, including third-placed finishes in Hungary and China.

The latter podium achievement was enough to ensure Ralf finished the year sixth in the Drivers' standings, two points ahead of his team-mate.

2006, Ralf's second in his three-year deal with Toyota, saw him have the upper hand over his team-mate Jarno Trulli for most of the season. However, that was more to do with Trulli's unreliability than with Ralf's fabulous performances.

In fact, nothing about Toyota's season, despite the Cologne team being F1's biggest spenders, was fabulous.

Ralf bagged just 20 points in '06 and only one podium finish in what was another disappointing season for Toyota.

Ralf earned Toyota their first point of the 2007 season by finishing in eighth place in the Australian Grand Prix, one place ahead of team-mate Jarno Trulli. However, Trulli then finished in seventh place in both of the following two races in Malaysia and Bahrain while Ralf failed to score in either.

In the Spanish GP, he was involved in a collision with Williams' Alex Wurz, dropping him to the back of the field. He eventually retired with a mechanical problem. Monaco proved to be another struggle for Ralf, as he qualified 20th and finished the race in 16th, 0.9 seconds behind Trulli.

Ralf scored his next point by finishing 8th in the Canadian Grand Prix, coming up from only 18th on the grid, however, he lost control at the first corner of the next race, removing himself from the race as well as the cars of Rubens Barrichello and David Coulthard. He retired from top 10 positions in both the British Grand Prix and the European Grand Prix. The first was due to mechanical failure and the latter was caused by a collision with the BMW of Nick Heidfeld.

A change in fortunes seemed to occur at the Hungarian GP where Ralf started fifth on the grid. He held off Fernando Alonso for much of the race until the third sector and went on to finish sixth. This fortune, however, was short lived as at the Turkish GP he put in an inexpicably poor qualifying performance to start 16th for the race while Trulli was up in 9th. Ralf finished 12th and ahead of his team-mate but only after Trulli was punted off the track at the first corner of the race by Giancarlo Fisichella.

A string of three point-less races followed before Ralf Ralf announced on October 1st that he would be leaving Toyota at the end of the season, going in search of a new challenge.

Unfortunately, though, he didn't leave the team on a high note as his final two races, China and Brazil, pretty much summed up his Toyota career - point-less and disappointing.