World Champion 1994

„I never thought I would win my first World Championship that year. No one could have predicted that. The winter tests turned out to be extremely difficult. The car had tons of potential – we recorded times we couldn’t believe, we just rubbed our eyes in amazement – but the engine had performance problems, and even worse a serious reliability problem. I think it was on the last test day before the season started. I drove it down a stretch at 300 kilometres per hour for the first time, and right afterwards the thing fell apart. In the races it was often like that. But the car was fantastic, it made up for everything. The season was an unbelieveable mix of successes and hard setbacks. And of course, the weekend in Imola when Senna and Ratzenberger died was really bad. Then after I won the World Championship title at Adelaide, I couldn’t quite grasp it for a long time. Everything was so chaotic that year. It took a while until I reached the point where I was able to accept myself as world champion.“

Michael Schumacher became the first German world champion in the history of Fomula 1 and set off a boom that had never been thought possible.