Had the 2021 F1 season started as intended in Australia last weekend, Mick Schumacher would have made his grand prix debut at the age of 21, and turned 22 the very next day.
The delay to the start of the season means he will instead start his first race aged 22, just as his father Michael Schumacher did at the Belgian Grand Prix in 1991.
That adds one of few points of similarity between the father and son’s pre-F1 careers, which have otherwise been very different. To an extent, this was always going to be inevitable: Mick Schumacher had the benefit of his father’s incomparably successful F1 career when he made his start in racing. But it also reflects changes to the structure of the championships beneath F1 over the past three decades.
Arguably, there are much stronger points of comparison between the early career of Michael Schumacher and that of the driver who went on to eclipse his achievements in F1: Lewis Hamilton.
Both came from humble backgrounds and lacked the budget to fund their karting careers. Anthony Hamilton worked multiple jobs to fund his son’s karting, while Schumacher attracted backing from local businessmen Gerd Noack and Jurgen Dilk. The latter, the father of one of Schumacher’s karting rivals, helped fund his move into Formula Ford, and agreed a deal with Schumacher under which Dilk would keep the trophies he won.
Having moved up from karts to cars, Schumacher’s abilities impressed a man who would become an extremely significant figure in his career: Willi Weber. Schumacher’s future manager spotted him tearing away from the field in a rain-lashed Formula Konig race at Austria’s Salzburgring in 1988, his first season after moving up from karts, and offered to fund his move into the significantly more expensive German Formula 3 series.
In that thrillingly close 1989 season, Schumacher won twice but finished third in the standings, tied with second-placed Heinz-Harald Frentzen and a point behind Karl Wendlinger. He returned the following year to clinch the title, though by then another significant development had occurred which seemed to offer a path into Formula 1.
In a further parallel with Hamilton’s careeer, a decade later Mercedes also played a role in propelling him towards F1. Already backed by McLaren, Mercedes’ F1 engine clients at the time, the two collaborated on a joint project to place Hamilton and Nico Rosberg in the ‘Team MBM.com’ (Mercedes-Benz McLaren) karting squad.
Schumacher impressed with how quickly he adapted to the ferociously powerful five-litre twin-turbo C11, and its successor the C291, with its F1-style normally-aspirated 3.5-litre flat-12. Reliability problems with the latter throughout 1991 denied Schumacher a string of results, though he and team mate Wendlinger closed the season with victory at Japan’s Autopolis circuit.
By then, however, Schumacher was already a Formula 1 driver. Not with Mercedes – despite constant speculation they were planning an entry – but through a chance to substitute for Bertrand Gachot at Jordan following his arrest over an altercation with a taxi driver in London.
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Schumacher was already a two-times world champion when his wife Corinna gave birth to Mick 15 days after the start of the 1999 season. While his father had to rely on the assistance of others to progress through the junior categories of motorsport until Mercedes came calling, for Mick his father’s huge fame meant he wanted for little in his karting career.
