Michael Schumacher

Before the seven Formula 1 titles there was a kart built from discarded parts at Kerpen-Horrem. Michael Schumacher was the club's youngest member, the son of the man who ran the track, and a club champion at six years old. No future great ever squeezed more out of less.

The karting years

It began at four, when Rolf Schumacher bolted a motorcycle engine to his son's pedal kart. The experiment ended against a lamp post in Kerpen, and his parents responded by signing him up at the Kerpen-Horrem circuit instead. The family ran the operation on fumes: his father took a second job renting and repairing karts, his mother worked the track canteen, and when a competitive engine cost 800 Deutschmarks the Schumachers did not have, local businessmen covered the bill.

The results justified every pfennig. Too young for a German licence, Schumacher raced on a Luxembourg one from the age of 12, with Germany finally issuing his home licence in 1983. He won the German Junior Kart Championship in 1984 and defended it in 1985, adding a runner-up finish at the world junior finals, then linked up with Eurokart dealer Adolf Neubert for the senior classes of the 100cc era. By 1987 he was German and European kart champion — the summit of his first karting life. He promptly left school, worked as a kart mechanic, and moved into cars in 1988 via Formula König and Formula Ford.

There was a second karting life, too. In 1996, by then a double F1 world champion, he returned to top-level competition and won the Monaco Kart Cup in Formula A plus the Masters at Paris-Bercy. The old speed had not gone anywhere.

What made him different

Economy. Schumacher famously won races on worn tyres thrown away by wealthier rivals, and he liked it best when it rained, because rain neutralised equipment and rewarded the one thing he had in surplus: precision. The Kerpen years drilled in a mechanic's understanding of the machine — he could set up, repair and explain a kart as well as drive one, a habit of total involvement that later became his F1 trademark.

The other separator was appetite. Club title at six, junior national champion at 15, continental champion at 18: each step arrived early and none of them satisfied him.

Legacy

Kerpen became German karting's holy ground, and the scene Schumacher headlined fed the entire 1990s F1 pipeline. Sebastian Vettel took his own first racing laps at the same Kerpen track, which tells you what the place came to mean. Schumacher's 1996 cameo also did karting a rare favour: a reigning-era F1 star choosing to race karts at Monaco and Bercy, on merit, in public. In cars he won seven world championships and 91 grands prix. In karts he remains the standard German story — a track-canteen kid who out-drove every budget in Europe, the way Senna had before him.