Sauber F1 team principal Jonathan Wheatley considers Michael Schumacher a friend having worked together in the 1990s at Benetton and has opened up on that experience

Michael Schumacher won his first F1 titles with Benetton(Image: Bongarts/Getty Images)

A friend and former colleague of Michael Schumacher has opened up on what it was like to work with the seven-time Formula 1 champion. Speaking to Pit Lane Chronicle, our new FREE weekly F1 newsletter , Jonathan Wheatley opened up on his “tremendous” experience of working with a true sporting great.

Now team principal at minnows Sauber, Wheatley is best known by F1 fans for his 18 years spent as a key member of the leadership team at Red Bull. First as team manager and then sporting director, he was a key lieutenant to Christian Horner right up until he departed last summer.

But he has been in F1 for more than 30 years in total, starting out in the early 1990s at the same time as Schumacher. The German famously made his debut for Eddie Jordan but was then snapped up by the Benetton team where Wheatley, in his early 20s, was working as a mechanic.

“I did one race with Roberto Moreno and then the next race I was carrying a seat out for this guy called Michael Schumacher and that was at Monza,” he told Pit Lane Chronicle.

Schumacher wasn’t yet the global megastar he would go on to become but, already, he had a presence that inspired those around him. Wheatley said: “It was a pivotal part of my career, I think.

“You suddenly realise if you had a talisman, you had a driver of that ability in the team, you just saw this team that wasn’t super well connected suddenly just joining up, having this person that you wanted to do your absolute best for.”

His presence helped to galvanise Benetton and that led to back-to-back drivers’ title wins for Schumacher in 1994 and ’95, the latter also yielding a constructors’ championship victory. He then joined Ferrari and added five more titles between 2000 and 2004.

But Schumacher was also at the centre of plenty of controversy, such as in the manner of that first championship success. He won the 1994 title by appearing to deliberately collide with rival Damon Hill in the final race in Adelaide, causing race-ending damage to both cars – though Schumacher always maintained his innocence.

Sadly, he is no longer able to speak publicly about his past endeavours after suffering life-changing injuries in a skiing accident in December 2013. Few details of his condition have ever been shared with his family fiercely protective of his privacy, though it is known that he continues to require full-time care more than 11 years on.

“Michael was a tremendous person to work with, but also I consider him a friend,” Wheatley said of his stricken former colleague. “I haven’t seen him for a while, but he still checked in. And actually, that’s one of the things with most of the great drivers is they’re nice people as well, you just don’t always see it.”