Video: Michael Schumacher inch-perfect in his Benetton at Adelaide
01st March 2024
Simon Ostler
It’s always good fun to watch the great Michael Schumacher at the wheel of a Formula 1 car, even at this early stage of his career he was busy shifting the limits of what it ...
The 1993 season represented the peak of electronic driver aids in F1. Following on from the Williams dominance in 1992, the entire grid was forced to get its act together and implement all manner of performance-enhancing tech. Active suspension, power steering, anti-lock brakes, traction control and semi-automatic gearboxes that could even be programmed to become fully automatic were all widely used by the leading teams throughout the year.
It made the cars hugely complex, and hugely impressive there’s no doubt, but arguably some of the easiest F1 cars to drive in the history of the sport. It’s little wonder that the FIA stepped in to eventually ban almost all of this technology before the 1994 season.
Cars such as Schumacher’s Benetton B193 were perhaps easier to drive from a technical standpoint, but they were enormously fast, which meant the physical strain on drivers was perhaps as high as it had ever been.
Schumacher excelled that year finishing on the podium in every race he contested and regularly competing against the far superior Williams FW15C. In this video we join him onboard at the Australian Grand Prix in Adelaide. Among several interesting details, you can see him programming the automatic gearbox to downshift for each corner. It’s a fascinating era of F1, and who knows where all this tech would have ended up if it hadn’t been banned.
