Michael Schumacher had several bitter rivals during his F1 career (Image: Getty)
One of Michael Schumacher’s old Formula 1 rivals has claimed he was “a little better” than the seven-time world champion. The only person in the sport’s history to match that feat is Lewis Hamilton, who has also surpassed Schumacher’s old record of race victories and pole positions.
While their F1 careers did overlap, they were never title rivals. Hamilton made his F1 debut with McLaren in 2007, after Schumacher had already retired for the first time. When the German returned to the sport to help the new Mercedes works team establish itself on the grid, Hamilton was already a world champion but spent a few years in the shadow of Sebastian Vettel before winning his other six titles with Mercedes after Schumacher had retired for the second and final time.
Instead, it is one of Schumacher’s older on-track rivals who has made the remarkable claim that he was the superior driver. Schumacher’s first two titles came in the mid-1990s with Benetton, before he was lured to Ferrari where he would become champion again and cement his status as the first and, to date, only driver ever to win five championships in a row.
It took a few years for all the pieces to fall into place at Ferrari, though. And during that period there were titles won by Damon Hill and Jacques Villeneuve at Williams, before McLaren came to the fore. The ’90s were rounded off with Mika Hakkinen winning back-to-back championships, before being knocked off his perch by Schumacher in 2000.
Double F1 world champion Mika Hakkinen has claimed he was ‘a little better’ than Michael Schumacher (Image: Getty)
Reflecting on his years of battling Schumacher on track, Hakkinen told the High Performance Podcast that his old rival was “an incredible racing driver”. But he also went on to add: “I followed him many times, studying his lines, why he’s doing this, where he’s using steering, understanding all of this.
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“But it was nothing too special, in my opinion. I think I was a little better.” Asked by host Jake Humphrey to clarify that he felt he was a better driver than Schumacher, Hakkinen chuckled as he doubled down: “Oh absolutely, of course… But he was very strong with the car – physically very strong.
“How he was able to use the tyres, tyres and the suspension, the loading a car, using just physical power to drive the car. And then his talent included, and how he was thinking about the balance in a car. The car control that he had was amazing.”
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While things sometimes got out of hand when Schumacher was battling a rival on track, such as with Damon Hill in the controversial finale to the 1994 season at Adelaide which saw them collide, there was always plenty of mutual respect between him and Hakkinen. The German once described the Flying Finn as “the best opponenty I have had in terms of quality” and, after an incident in Formula 3, Hakkinen said they had both agreed to keep things clean going forward.
He explained: “We didn’t start verbally fighting, publicly blaming each other. We thought, let’s fight on a track, let’s leave the bull***t out of this. I think that those were the things, a little bit maybe what influenced his attitude towards me. After the Macau incident, I understood that way what kind of philosophy he has in his racing. So, every time when we raced, we played little tricks, but we didn’t touch.”