Motor Racing: Driver on the fastest track: A dynamic young German represents the most serious challenge to Ayrton Senna's supremacy: Richard Williams talks to a rare racer who makes it obvious that he enjoys his sport

WHEN they're squirting champagne over each other, he's the one who looks genuinely pleased to be there. Pleased to have finished in the top three. Pleased to be getting yet another absurdly grand trophy to clutter the mantelpiece back in the apartment he shares with his fiancee, Corinna, in Monaco. Pleased to be in the gaze of a billion-strong worldwide television audience. Pleased to be earning a few hundred thousand pounds for his weekend's work. No, the more tiresome little

niggles of earlysuccess haven't managed to spoil Michael Schumacher's fun.

For the rest of them, it's all fear and politics and little stratagems designed to undermine other egos. Not Schumacher, though. His raised-arms salute and boyish, openly joyful smile haven't changed since he exploded on the grand prix scene three years ago, a talent seemingly already matured at 22 years of age and one of only half a dozen men since the war who have looked absolute certainties for the world championship from the moment they stepped into a Formula One car.

Nobody as successful as Schumacher in such a specialised and demanding sphere of human activity as Formula One racing can possibly be described as uncomplicated, but the young German at least gives the powerful impression of straightforwardness. Even when his astonishing debut at the 1991 Belgian Grand Prix - seventh place in the unregarded Jordan- Ford - led to an unseemly struggle for his services, and to angry charges of contract-breaking, somehow the brown stuff never adhered to his racing overalls.

For now, Michael Schumacher's life looks gloriously simple. Next week, the 1994 grand prix season starts in Sao Paulo. The clear favourite - the clearest favourite in many years - is Ayrton Senna, at the wheel of a new version of the Williams-Renault, the car that took Nigel Mansell and Alain Prost to the last two titles. The best driver, in the best car. The only man with a real chance of challenging him, people are saying, is Schumacher, third in the rankings in 1992 and 1993, and now ready to prove what many observers suggest: that he might be even faster than Senna.

'It's nice to know that people have that trust in me,' Schumacher said one day last week, sitting in the bright green Benetton motorhome in the infield of Silverstone's South Loop and pondering his response to the question of whether he's ready to take on Senna for the title of undisputed number one. 'But I think it's not possible to answer the question in that way. The only thing I can say is that I've got another year more experience, that's now the third year of experience I have, but there's no way for me to say, 'Okay, I'm behind this driver or in front of that driver.' You can never really say that unless you have all the drivers in the same team, with the same car.'

Outside the windows of the motorhome, it was what generations of English motor racing fans have come to think of as a real Silverstone day: bright blue sky, angry black clouds, frequent downpours, brilliant sunshine, a sudden hailstorm. Small groups of men in co-ordinated anoraks and radio headsets stood in clumps between the trucks and the temporary marquees, listening to a solitary car wailing at full throttle down the distant Hangar Straight.

Schumacher was hanging around, waiting for something to happen, which is what usually happens at Silverstone testing sessions. In the Benetton marquee, the dozen members of the full-time test team were fussing over the new car, the B194, some of them rectifying a fault in its gearbox. If the rain and the hail permitted, they were planning the car's first test over a full race distance: an hour and a half's flat-out running.

Testing had been going on at various warm-weather circuits around southern Europe - Barcelona, Estoril, Imola - for five or six weeks. The previous week, during the last day of formal testing at Imola, Schumacher had established a considerable psychological advantage by ending up almost a fifth of a second faster than Senna. During what was reported to be a furious final assault, neither Senna nor his team-mate, Damon Hill, could match the pace of the Benetton - a result which would have been impossible last year.

'It was a good week,' Schumacher said. 'We improved the car. It's already quite good, basically - we saw this from the first test we did here at Silverstone. We've continued, looking for reliability, so that everything is right for the beginning of the season. Which is good. You have to do this. But now we have to look at developing the car.'

To the layman's eye, the B194 appears to differ from last year's car only in its paintwork, which now shows a change of allegiance from an American to a Japanese brand of cigarettes. The truth is very different: designed to a completely new set of technical regulations, this is a brand-new vehicle, all of its systems requiring practical proof of the qualities they showed on the computer-simulation screens in the team's flat white factory block, 20 miles away.

No active suspension, no ABS, no traction control. Even Benetton's unique innovation, four- wheel steering, has gone. Of the computer-controlled systems - which Schumacher refers to collectively as the technik - only the semi-automatic gearbox remains, operated by two little black fingertip paddles under the steering wheel. Yet, astonishingly, at Imola the B194 was three whole seconds faster than Schumacher's qualifying time for last year's race at Imola, set in a car bristling with driver-aids. Weren't we expecting to see the cars going slower?

'Ah,' Schumacher said, 'but the point is that with the technik I believe we would have gone another one or two seconds quicker still] I'm sure of that. I'm happy that we're running with the technical situation as it is now, because it's going to make the competition more even. Hopefully, anyway. With the technik, for a lot of teams it meant new things - and with new things you have to experiment. Sometimes that was difficult, and it was more difficult for teams that didn't have the money to make it work as well as we did.'

When he first drove the new car, had he missed all the automatic bits and pieces which presumably made his life easier?

'As a driver,' he said, 'you have two things in mind. One is to drive as quick as possible and to enjoy it and to make a gap between yourself and your team-mate, or the other drivers. You have to prove yourself. The other is to make the car as quick as possible, to set it up in the best way without compromises. With all the technik, it was a lot easier to do this. You didn't have to make too many compromises. Now, without technik, there are things on which you have to compromise - and maybe driver potential counts for more.'

Schumacher is one of the few drivers - like Jean Alesi and Johnny Herbert - who makes it obvious to the paying customers in the grandstand that he actually enjoys the real business of racing, the white-knuckle ride of outbraking and overtaking. Do the new non-technik cars put that sort of thing higher on the agenda?

'I think we won't see a different overtaking situation. The aerodynamics are still so important, and the point is that if you drive up close behind somebody, you lose the downforce. So you have to let the gap open, and you don't get the overtaking situation. That could still happen, like last year. I enjoyed go-karts . . . I enjoyed them because you drive wheel-on-wheel, you drive bumper-to-bumper, and this is real racing, which I enjoy very much. Some of this we do miss in Formula One. I don't know if it's possible on that level. It might not be.'

Nevertheless, his feeling is that the rule changes will compress the field, and that this will bring back a measure of excitement. 'I can't say the racing between the first team and the second team will be more fun, but I think the whole field, from the first to the last, will be closer than in the years before.'

His father and mother run a go-karting centre in Kerpen, near Cologne, which was where the boy Michael first sat behind the wheel of a racing machine. At 15, he was the national junior karting champion; at 18, he had the German and European senior titles. Right from the beginning he wanted to race wherever and whenever he could, whatever the conditions - which was how he acquired his phenomenal speed in the wet, a talent that brought him his first grand prix victory, in a rain-affected race at Spa two years ago.

'When I was something like 10 or 12 years old, I couldn't do serious racing, because I was too young. And the point was then over the weekend when other people were there and it was raining and nobody wanted to drive, I always said, 'Come on, let me drive, let me drive.' I always enjoyed driving in those conditions, playing with the car, making 360 turns. That's the best way of getting the feeling for a go-kart or a car. Racing in the rain is difficult, that's true, but you just have to be careful and handle the situation. If you can't see, you have to back off. I'm not a driver who still goes flat out when you can't see anything. I don't want to risk my life, or even other lives.'

That first win, with its carefully planned tyre stops, also emphasised his strategic flair. Back at Spa a year later, a botched start called on other qualities: a combination of aggression and patience that saw him climb through the field from last place to second, only a few seconds behind Hill's Williams, at the finish. In terms of raw heroism, it was a drive to mention in the same breath as Fangio at the Nurburgring in '57 or Clark at Monza in '67.

''There's some characters you really can fight with. They don't play games, they don't drive with . . . How can I say this? I have to be careful . . . With some people, if you have the feeling that there's the chance to pass them, you really go for it - you brake late, you dive to the inside. And the next lap he might do it with you. But with some people you can't do that, because you don't know what they're like, they're unpredictable . . . You have to be more clever than them, and overtake them in a different way, where they don't expect it.'

Which does he prefer to race against - the predictable or the unpredictable?

'Certainly the predictable. But I've found there's always a way to run around the unpredictable. In fact, sometimes I like to drive against the unpredictable, because they're more difficult to handle, and when you find a way around them it's even more of a pleasure.'

The sky was clearing, and the test beckoned. As prepared to go, Schumacher expressed his confidence that, having overtaken Ferrari to take third place among the constructors over the last two years, this was the season Benetton could push past McLaren into second position. 'Number one would be too ambitious,' he said. 'It's not realistic at the moment. Hopefully we can push the Williams, sometimes stay close, sometimes win a race, but as for the championship, I think we're still one more step away from that.'

So is it inevitable that Senna will win his fourth title this year?

'I think he's the main contender, together with Damon Hill. They have the best package for this season. But that doesn't mean that in some races where they don't find the right set-up, we might find a very good set-up - and we'll be very close, we'll fight together, and then by strategies or stuff we're going to win races. But too many bad things would need to happen to other teams for us really to have the chance to win the championship. Drivers like Senna or Hill, a team like Williams . . . they don't make mistakes.'

Motor racing calendar

Formula One Championship

27 March Brazilian GP (Interlagos)

17 April Pacific (Aida, Japan)

1 May San Marino (Imola)

15 May Monaco

29 May Spanish (Barcelona)

12 June Canadian (Montreal)

3 July French (Magny-Cours)

10 July British (Silverstone)

31 July German (Hockenheim)

14 August Hungarian (Hungaroring)

28 August Belgian (Spa-Francorchamps)

11 September Italian (Monza)

25 September Portuguese (Estoril)

16 October Argentine (Buenos Aires)

6 November Japanese (Suzuka)

13 November Australian (Adelaide)

IndyCar World Series

Today Surfers Paradise, Australia

10 April Phoenix, USA

17 April Long Beach

29 May Indianapolis 500

5 June Milwaukee

12 June Detroit

26 June Portland

10 July Cleveland

17 July Toronto, Canada

31 July Michigan, USA

14 August Lexington

21 August New Hampshire

4 September Vancouver, Canada

11 September Elkhart Lake

18 September Nazareth

9 October Laguna Seca

(Photographs omitted)