Tuesday, May 30, 2006

Never ever give up…You don’t know what’s coming your way!!!

If you missed yesterdays stunning performance by Michael Schumacher in Ferrari at Monaco Grand prix, then you have lost the opportunity of seeing one of the most sedulous and inspiring performances from him. It was truly a checkered race for him.

Although he had secured the pole position on Saturday, he was stripped of his position and penalized for stalling other cars on the racing line during the critical last stages of the race during qualifying when others were trying the make the best use of last few minutes available for deciding the racing positions on Sunday.

I am not writing this to discuss whether Schumi did it deliberately or not. Neither am I interested in discussing whether the FIA junta was correct in punishing him by making him to start from the end of the grid even though he is perfectly capable of doing what he was accused of doing. Whatever it is I wanted to drive home the point as to why Ferrari are ready to pay millions of dollars extra in comparison to other drivers in F1 to make sure that he drives a Ferrari. Each of these manufactures spend millions of dollars to improve the speed of the car by 1/100th of a second year on year and there is this guy who can actually go half a second faster then the rest by his sheer determination and talent…. Don’t you think it’s a better investment?

The talent was in full display on Sunday when he had to start from the pit lane as the 22nd car on the grid but still managed to attain the fifth place. True that he got a lot of help from the safety car getting deployed when a car broke down on the track, but he was there to take advantage of this. If he hadn’t made 10 places during the course of time from 22nd to 12th he wouldn’t even be in a position to take the opportunity. Those who are familiar with the Monaco circuit will know how difficult it is to overtake there.

The race, which was virtually lost even before it actually started, was won on sheer determination and talent under circumstances where even a small error would have costed him dear.

The lesson to be learnt here is to never be torpid. Never to derogate from your aims and what you want from life even if the entire world is against you. The tables might turn anytime and you must be there to cash on it.

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