Many Schumacher apologists have said this year's car was too soft in the front for MSC to adjust to, which is why Rosberg fared so much better almost all season. I recently read an interview with Nico in which he set that record straight. He stated plainly that he also preferred a car that oversteers, and he'd struggled with the W01's ploughing as much as had MSC.
Brundle and Scheckter's thoughts on his return last season.
Martin Brundle made one statement in that video that is positively false. He said, "...all the great champions are ruthless." Until about 1970, most of the "great ones" were true sportsmen. Fangio undeniably was a pure sportsman. There were any number of drivers from that era who valued fair play over ultimate victory, Stirling Moss and Jimmy Clark and Mike Hawthorne, just to name a few. If Jackie Stewart ever was unsportsmanlike, he still never rose to the level of ruthless. Maybe it's the nature of the modern cars that forces the drivers into this hyper-aggressive driving style, who knows? However, MSC exercises his ruthlessness even when there's nothing at stake, which says much about his character.
Opinion on Rosberg / Schumi fair enough. I believe that Schumacher will be much better next season than he was this - I don't care what anybody says (because they ARE wrong if they say otherwise - it's not an opinion, it's a fact) about him not jumping back in and winning immediately, because nobody would do that after 3 years out of competitve driving in a F1 car. Nobody. With a full season behind him, some testing, and a hand in setting up the car he will definitely be a different beast in 2011.
I also believe that Rosberg would be a dominating champion in the right car, he is and always has been so much better than a lot of people have given him credit for. He got nowhere near the credit he deserved for his performance in the '09 Williams. If it weren't for (from memory two) some silly driver errors that stuck in some people's memories naturally, I believe he may have had more realising his talent earlier than the past year. This isn't a new opinion for me - you'll see that I have started threads about Rosberg for the past two years on the forum, each time I've stuck my neck out and pointed out my opinion on how good I think he potentially is, often in the face of others disagreeing. So you can be sure that my opinions on Schumacher are not clouded or biased in any way.
Sure Schumacher in particular has indeed gone beyond 'necessary' aggression several times, and has been rightly punished (though wrongly let off for Adelaide '94), I don't think many would dispute that. Others up and down the grid have also done similar things but not under the same spotlight as those that are leading races and winning championships.
What I DO have an issue with is the nonsense about the new generation being super aggressive and the old generation being all gentlemen. This is because it is absolute nonsense. People can believe that if they want, but they are deluded. There's a very simple and obvious reason why drivers were more more cautious and played 'fairer' if you like in the past - death.
In the 50's-70's, a questionable move could result in not just the death of a fellow competitor but your own death. Tight tracks, low safety requirements, tiny or no run-off areas, trees, bollards fencing etc. at the edge of tracks, no gravel to slow cars before hazards, cars that weren't specifically designed to avoid landing on a driver's head if it flipped, poor helmet design etc.
This (true) scenario FORCES caution, and meant that those 2-3 generations of racers COULDN'T push to the max all the time, and HAD to relent before going too far. Death was commonplace, every driver on that grid had lost friends, team-mates, fellow competitors and so directly saw the results of pushing too far, thus didn't want to make the same mistakes.
These days our tracks have massive run off areas (save tracks like Monaco which are comparatively low speed in any case), tyre walls, major hazards removed, slow down materials etc. The safety standards on the cars are SO much higher they're not even comparable in literally every single way. Every driver on the grid knows that with all of this, death is an unlikely outcome of even the worst crash as demonstrated by Kubica in Canada (2007?) (I was certain he was dead when that happened!), even Donnelly in the Lotus as far back as 20 years ago showed perfectly the way the car was designed to disintegrate to transfer the energy away from the driver. He was badly injured, but when you look at what was left of the car, by all rights in any other car than a F1 car, he would have been dead instantly.
I could go on, but I've made my point - in short how I would sum it up? All of these drivers whether they were in the 1950's, 1980's or today in 2011 had/have the potential to be aggressive to the maximum. I guarantee if you could have plucked all those 'gentlemen' drivers from the 50's and 60's and put them in the cars of 2011, they would act in EXACTLY the same way as those drivers we currently have. Why? Because they are not stupid people. They wouldn't do it back on the day because they didn't want to die. They would do it now because they know that same result is unlikely. Their potential for aggression was always there because they were competitive, they just couldn't show it as often for the reasons I've given above, It really is as simple as that.
Favourite racing series: F1, Indycar, NASCAR, GP2, F3, Formula E, Trophee Andros, DTM, WTCC, BTCC, World Endurance... etc. etc.
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he didn't say exclusively,