Written by:
Kevin Krefting
11/08/2007
Valencia, Spain
It may have been "just for fun," but Schumacher was going all-out.
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Next week, seven-time F1 World Champion Michael Schumacher will come off the sidelines, step out of retirement for a short spell, and test Ferrari's 2007 World Championship-winning F2007 at the Circuit de Catalunya in Barcelona, Spain. 38 years in age and the winner of 91 career F1 Grands Prix, the consigliere to the Ferrari F1 organization should have no problems climbing into the F2007's carbon fiber and honeycomb composite structure, slipping the car's semiautomatic sequential electronically controlled gearbox into first gear, launching the 1,323-pound machine forward and getting its 32-valve, 8 cylinder, 750-horspower 056 engine up and screaming in a 19,000 rpm wail of sound. Schumacher should have a blast driving the car that carried Kimi Raikkonen to the 2007 World Championship around the brilliant Catalunya circuit.
But perhaps not as much of a blast as he did riding Casey Stoner's World Championship-winning Ducati Desmosedici GP7 around the Monday after the 2007 Gran Premio Bwin.com de la Comunitat Valeciana. A 320-pound motorcycle built around a tubular steel trellis chassis (with a press aluminum swingarm), the 800cc, 200-horsepower V4 four-stoke motivated machine capable of 192 mile per hour speeds, the Desmosedici GP7 with Stoner at the controls placed second in the Spanish Grand Prix, finishing off an epic season for the young Australian. But on Monday morning, he handed his beloved machine off to one Michael Schumacher.
Schumacher completed 58 laps on the GP7, his fastest lap on the tight, sinuous circuit (many compare it to Formula 1's Monaco circuit) being clocked at 1:37.89 seconds. Astonishingly, the lap was just a nick above five seconds slower than Repsol Honda rider Dani Pedrosa's new lap record at the circuit, a lap he set while winning the Valencia MotoGP Grand Prix.
Dressed in a non-descript orange Alpinestars riding suit and sporting a plain, egg white helmet, Schumacher who once tested a 9900cc Desmosedici at the Mugello circuit in Italy in 1995 looked like a genuine MotoGP rider, fully leaned over in the corners and hauling ass.
"I remember the last time I was riding and I was about 15 seconds slower than what you could do, so I thought maybe I could run within 10 seconds, that would be nice," he told MCN. "But I'm just doing this for fun. I don't want to race."
And when asked to compare MotoGP with Formula 1, Schumacher replied: "It's like being on the Earth and going to the moon."
