Gerhard Berger has backed Michael Schumacher amid a climate of continuing criticism of the seven time world champion’s performance so far in 2010.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Four races into 41-year-old Schumacher’s F1 comeback at the wheel of a Mercedes, the critique of pundits has ranged from a verdict of disappointment to a harsh denigration of his skills after three years of retirement.<\/p>\n
“I find all the talk about Michael a bit tedious, because it is always with a negative slant,” 10-time GP winner Berger, who raced in Schumacher’s era until retiring in 1997, said on Austrian TV ‘Sport und Talk aus dem Hangar 7’.<\/p>\n
“Michael has come back and is doing what he wants.\u00a0 I think you cannot change the status of someone who is a seven time world champion,” added the 50-year-old former Ferrari and McLaren driver.<\/p>\n
Austrian Berger backs Schumacher to improve his pace in the forthcoming races.<\/p>\n
“We know his ambition.\u00a0 We know that if he does something, he does it right.\u00a0 I think we must take him seriously again in the future,” he said.<\/p>\n
After the initial three races of 2010, Berger admits that Schumacher’s performance in China was a setback.<\/p>\n
“It was weak, but that can happen,” said the former teammate of the late F1 great Ayrton Senna.<\/p>\n
“I think he has done an excellent job so far — except for the last race.\u00a0 In the first three grands prix he was in the top six of the championship.\u00a0 That is a great achievement,” added Berger.<\/p>\n
Also defending Schumacher is his countryman and friend Sebastian Vettel, who until the great German’s struggle in 2010 was nicknamed by the German press ‘Baby-Schumi’.<\/p>\n
“He is yet to exhaust the potential of his car and will therefore get better from a driving point of view from race to race,” the Red Bull driver told Switzerland’s Motorsport Aktuell.<\/p>\n
“I wouldn’t write him off for a long time,” added 22-year-old Vettel.<\/p>\n
Force India’s Adrian Sutil also sees nothing odd about Schumacher’s comeback to date.<\/p>\n
“I had counted on it being difficult for him.\u00a0 Formula one has changed to the extremes in the past few years so that you can lose half a second and not know exactly why,” he told spox.com.<\/p>\n
“Plus it would have been funny if Schumacher had beaten us all after three years of being retired — then he really would have been the god of F1.<\/p>\n
“That doesn’t mean he’s doing badly; on the contrary, he’s always in the top ten.\u00a0 He only needs time,” added Sutil.<\/p>\n
\u00a9 RIF|GMM<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Gerhard Berger has backed Michael Schumacher amid a climate of continuing criticism of the seven time world champion’s performance so far in 2010.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"categories":[3],"tags":[1512,5311,5262,5261,5340,258,92,164],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4985"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4985"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4985\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4986,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4985\/revisions\/4986"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4985"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4985"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4985"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}