Sorry to drag things back a little but I had to quiery this.WhiteBlue wrote:Sure, Senna was the best qualifier in F1 historie. To put it into perspective one has to remember that he had low fuel quali only. Most of Schumachers time they did race fuel qualifying which invited drivers to compromise qualifying for optimum race speed and set up. Had F1 continued with pure low fuel quali the statistics would look better for Schumacher than they are. Not really important but I just don't like race fuel quali. It takes away from the experience of pure qualifying. Bad for the show. Same goes for the blimming tyre rule they have made now. Absolutely stupid.marcush. wrote:I rate Schumacher as the all time best really ,but Senna was on a different planet.
A small but fascinating detail :If I remember correctly ,Schumacher never could grab a pole position before Senna died.But now he has the top count of poles .
I'm sorry, whiteblue, the bit I've highlighted in bold is simply not true. The old, "Low Fuel - Drivers get 12 laps to complete in the 1hour session" Quali was scrapped only in 2003 after Ferrari ran away with everything in 2002.
After this they introduced the system where quali was split over Friday & Saturday where each driver got one flying lap on their own on the track. Crucially this was also on low fuel. Albeit it they did introduce the parc ferme rule which was implemeted after the final runs on saturday.
In 2005 this changed slightly in terms of scheduling but the technical aspects remained the same in 2006 (Schumachers last season). In fact drivers were only forced to qualify with race fuel as of the 2007 season, by which time Schumi had retired!
The fact is Schumi always had low fuel quali, but I do conceed that for four seasons (2003, '04, '05 and '06) he had a setup compromised quali.
However that was for only four seasons, schumi's first full season was 1992 (no point counting the handful of races in 1991), meaning he had 11 seasons of quali where the rules were the same as what Senna had to abide to. Which is in fact one season longer than Senna's entire carear. (not counting the three races from his tragically cut-short 1994 season)
I hope you don't feel I'm attacking you or your point, I'm not, I just saw a glaring error in your post (probably completely inoccent) and wanted to clear it up. The rest of your post I completely agree with though