1,000 Greatest Drivers: Ralf Schumacher

Overrated due to inexperienced teammates or underrated due to injuries and nepotism accusations?

I competed in LearnedLeague season 109 (LL109) from May 18-June 23 and I thought I’d go over my answers five matches per day as I did last time. After I just barely avoided getting relegated in LL108, I was moved to the lower division in the D Rundle. It looked like I was going to do better this time for most of the month, as I was closer to being promoted than relegated for most of the round, but I had a disastrous finish, and again, just barely avoided getting relegated in the end. I’m not sure how interested my subscribers are in this. Probably not very, but I certainly have a driver update attached.

Glockenspiel and Argentina were lucky educated guesses. I thought they were the best answers but I definitely wasn’t 100% sure on those. The other two I was more sure. I don’t think I have ever seen the word monotreme in my life and I know that didn’t come up in any of my science classes. I just put raptors, but I knew that was wrong. For Question 5, I put the Progressive Era. That was hardly a bad guess until the Progressive Era and the Harlem Renaissance did intersect chronologically and obviously they both would have had associated newspapers and periodicals. If I’d realized that the answer literally had to have Renaissance in the title, I’d have probably pulled that one.

I used to love, love, love reading World Almanacs as a very young boy. I never quite read them cover-to-cover or anything like that, but I probably looked at nearly every section in them at some point. The data that enchanted me most back then in those books were the weights & measures tables and the U.S. and world population charts. To this day I can still remember the precise population of New York in 1990: 7,322,564 and Syracuse in 1990: 163,860 from these books, without realizing there’s probably no way to measure populations that large so precisely, as there are probably a bunch of homeless people or maybe even some people who successfully evaded reporting their census data who were never counted. So yeah, I definitely knew that the hectare was the metric equivalent of the acre more or less, so that couldn’t be the answer. Guessed William Howard Taft for #2 since I knew he was from Ohio, but that was stupid because I knew he was President from 1909-1913 and then was Chief Justice after that, which would have made him an obscenely elderly Chief Justice, which is probably unlikely for a portly fellow like him. Didn’t remember McKinley was from Ohio. I was kinda close on #3. I continue to think these math questions are ridiculous since this seems to be the only field where you can’t get the questions unless you’ve done graduate-level work. I think I misread the question, assumed “study of place” was geology, so I altered it and wrote geonomy. If I’d known place was “topoi”, I’d have certainly gotten it. And geonomy did used to be a word. Question 4 I guessed these were islands in the Pacific Ocean that the US and Japan fought over in World War II, so that was my guess there. And for the last one, I put chicken finger. I wasn’t thinking of utensils. But since the first chicken tender was invented in 1974, that actually wasn’t a bad guess.

I have looked at lists of popes before so I guessed right. Antoinette was a no brainer. As someone who eats like ten foods at most almost entirely unhealthy, I’m never going to get the food questions, which invariably like the math questions are things I’d never heard of. I guessed harissa, which I’d also never heard of since the previous LearnedLeague match. I put cricket fo #4. Wasn’t sure about Glenn Miller but guessed right. The others are obvious.

As a racing fan, I probably should have gotten #1, but my engineering knowledge has always embarrassed me. I put friction. Reebok is obvious since no other shoe brands resemble Afrikaans words. I had never heard of Kroenke, so I put Warren Buffett. That doesn’t bother me. I had also never heard of Matched (I mean how many people really follow young adult fiction after they’re no longer young adults), and I put Divergent for that, which was not a bad guess. Obviously, I knew Question 5 was going to be Star Wars, but I couldn’t figure out what. I loved the original Star Wars trilogy as a kid - watched it five or six times and did watch the Special Editions when they came out, but I checked out after The Phantom Menace, and I’m pretty sure I never watched anything Star Wars-related ever since, so it’s been a while. I didn’t think it was one of the worst movies I’d ever seen or anything - just slightly boring - and all those idiots claiming George Lucas “raped their childhood” make me wish I liked it more. But these days, I’m so sick of “franchise art” that my mind hasn’t been in that headspace for a while. Anyway, I guessed wrong and put Millennium Falcon instead of lightsaber, even though it was probably a no-brainer.

I put Mont Pelerin for question #1, which is not a bad guess since that was indeed the other big conference that brought the wrath of neoliberalism down upon this green earth, but I didn’t realize that one was European and not American. (EDIT: I also forgot until I looked it up again that Bretton Woods was actually what mainstreamed Keynesianism; okay, my bad.) My answer for #2 was the most embarrassing in the set. Granted, I didn’t realize murals came from Spanish, and I don’t think I would have ever gotten my brain there. I put telenovela, which I am certain almost no one would call art. As usual, I’d never heard of Cubano, so I put Reuben. I probably should have studied World Cup stuff for this round, since it came up several times and I got every question wrong. Although it’s different now, very few Americans were soccer fans when I was a kid, so it wasn’t the kind of stuff you’d be expected to know at the time, and I just never got into it later like maybe I should’ve. I put Italy, but I saved the game and won by correctly guessing Ulysses. I’ve been doing pretty well on the literature category lately, which surprises me since I never felt I was that avid a reader.

Anyway, five more and a similarly-talented F1 driver tomorrow, and possibly another driver if I have time.

RALF SCHUMACHER………..GERMANY

Born: June 30, 1975

Best year: 2001
Best drive: 2001 Gran Premio Warsteiner di San Marino at Autodromo Enzo e Dino Ferrari

Although he was drastically overshadowed by his elder brother Michael, Ralf Schumacher was pretty outstanding in his own right, as in his first three years at Williams from 1999-2001, he beat three legends in consecutive seasons: Alex Zanardi, Jenson Button, and Juan Pablo Montoya. After winning the Macau Grand Prix and finishing second in German Formula 3 in 1995, he won the Formula Nippon (now Super Formula) title in his rookie season for Team Le Mans over his teammate Naoki Hattori in 1996. Schumacher and Hattori also combined to win a season-high three races in the All Japan Grand Touring Car Championship.

In 1997, Schumacher debuted in F1 with the Jordan team, where Michael had also debuted. Ralf earned a podium in his third start to become the then-youngest podium finisher. The next year, he finished second to his teammate Damon Hill at Spa but was deeply upset that Jordan wouldn’t let him past even though he was faster. Michael subsequently gave Jordan £2,000,000 to buy Ralf out of the final year of his contract. He moved to Williams in 1999 as they acquired BMW engines. He became a superstar by obliterating Zanardi 35-0 immediately after Zanardi’s dominant CART dynasty run. He next dominated then-rookie Button in 2000 to lead my open wheel model, but the cars weren’t fast enough to win.

That changed in 2001 when Schumacher won three times. At Imola, he started third and led flag-to-flag to give Williams its first win since 1997. He and Montoya were fairly evenly matched. Although Montoya was generally considered the team leader and was faster and a better passer, Schumacher actually beat him 6-4 in wins. In 2003, he won back-to-back races at the Nürburgring and Magny-Cours, but never won again. A string of injuries at Monza in 2003 and two at Indianapolis in 2004 and 2005 (most notably a 78G impact in 2004) hampered his career, and he could never recapture his speed. He couldn’t find a ride after a lackluster Toyota stint and switched to DTM, where he struggled even more. After retiring in 2013, he became a Sky Sports commentator and married the far-right French ex-politician Étienne Bousquet-Cassagne, making him F1’s first openly gay winner.

Schumacher would probably be better regarded today if he’d had any other brother, but he and Michael did become the only brothers to both win races and earn 1-2 finishes. A cynic might argue he rode Michael’s coattails for his entire career, but his record is nonetheless worthy as he revived Williams’s fortunes and the team was never again a powerhouse after he and Montoya left in 2005. People typically rate Montoya higher, as do I, but that is primarily due to Montoya’s versatility, longevity, and higher peak in his 1999 CART season. At WilliamsF1, they were almost equals. You could argue he was overrated for riding Michael’s coattails and benefiting from inexperienced teammates, but I would argue he was underrated because his injuries made his career look worse than it was.

Open wheel model: #135 of 931 (.153)

Teammate head-to-heads: 48-42 (5-1 vs. Jenson Button, 8-1 vs. Tom Coronel, 3-2 vs. Giancarlo Fisichella, 3-3 vs. Naoki Hattori, 2-3 vs. Damon Hill, 13-16 vs. Juan Pablo Montoya, 11-16 vs. Jarno Trulli, 3-0 vs. Alex Zanardi)

Touring car model: #857 of 1676 (-.077)

Teammate head-to-heads: 21-91 (1-15 vs. Paul di Resta, 4-2 vs. Maro Engel, 4-16 vs. Jamie Green, 5-30 vs. Gary Paffett, 3-23 vs. Bruno Spengler, 4-5 vs. Christian Vietoris)

Year-by-year: 1996: E-, 1997: C, 1998: C+, 1999: E, 2000: E, 2001: E, 2002: E, 2003: C+, 2004: C+, 2005: C+, 2006: C+, 2007: C, 2008: C-, 2011: C