'Brilliant! No driver has ever been so clear of the field' - Schumacher's greatest F1 victory

However, on Sunday, the heavens opened. Actually, ‘opened’ is far too gentle a word, for Barcelona was violently assaulted by rain that day. It hammered the circuit; it flooded the asphalt; and it transformed that most dependable of racetracks into a treacherous skating rink. In the morning warm-up – during which visibility was almost non-existent, the spray generated by 80 fat Goodyears rising in towering white plumes – drivers and cars disappeared entirely into aquatic oblivion. The session was stopped, and never restarted, when Heinz-Harald Frentzen destroyed his Sauber against the pitwall.

Today there is absolutely no way that the FIA would permit a grand prix to be run in conditions such as those. The start would be delayed for hours while social media pullulated with furious proclamations from keyboard warriors denouncing aquaplaning as a phantom invented by snowflakes. Even in 1996 there was nervousness. At lunchtime, as the rain continued to beat down on Catalunya, there was serious discussion about imposing a rolling start behind the safety car. Yet ultimately the old instincts prevailed, for F1 in the 1990s was still flecked with traces of the gladiatorial recklessness that had defined earlier eras, in the end the 20 cars lined up on the grid as usual, and away they went into the murk.

The result was mayhem: in the first 10 laps eight drivers spun off and/or crashed, and three more would do likewise over the next 30 laps. It was not racing so much as survival. The quest was not for speed so much as for vision. Drivers returned to the pits unable even to identify whom they had collided with because visibility had been so catastrophically poor. Giancarlo Fisichella, then a 23-year-old Minardi rookie, spoke for many when he said afterwards, “Maybe it wasn’t very wise to let us start under those conditions. On lap one I crashed into a car in front of me – it could have been my team-mate Pedro Lamy’s, I don’t know for sure – then another car crashed into me straight after that, but again I couldn’t see who it was.”

At the front Jacques Villeneuve initially led for Williams, from a fast-starting Jean Alesi (Benetton) in second place. Damon Hill, looking uncomfortable from the get-go, was running third, his Williams twitching and slithering beneath him. He ran wide once, twice, three times – until on lap 10 he finally spun off for good. Afterwards he seemed almost pleased about it. “I’m just relieved to be in one piece,” he said. “It was impossible to see anything.”

Behind them Schumacher had made a poor start – but, once he had found his rhythm, something truly extraordinary began to take place. Gerhard Berger (Benetton) was dispatched on lap five. Alesi fell on lap nine. Then, on lap 12, Schumacher swept past Villeneuve to take the lead. From that moment on, the race ceased to be a contest and instead became a demonstration.

Watching Schumacher that afternoon reminded me irresistibly of Gilles Villeneuve at soaking-wet Watkins Glen in 1979, another Ferrari virtuoso operating on some supernatural wet-weather wavelength inaccessible to anyone else. Gilles, the father of Jacques, had danced through the rain throughout the 1979 United States Grand Prix East weekend with a level of commitment and artistry that had bordered on madness, albeit wondrously controlled madness. Schumacher’s 1996 Spanish Grand Prix performance had the same quality. He seemed not merely comfortable in the conditions but invigorated by them, as though every additional millimetre of standing water was not only hardening his resolve but also burnishing his bravado.

In front of our disbelieving eyes the timing screens began to tell an increasingly improbable story. On lap 14 he set the fastest lap of the race, more than two seconds quicker than anyone else would manage all afternoon. On some laps he was as much as four seconds faster than the field. Moreover, the manner of it was almost more astonishing than the speed. While others were wrestling their fiercely jitterbugging cars like jumpy cowboys clinging onto runaway broncos, Schumacher’s driving appeared almost impossibly neat; whenever he slid his Ferrari, which he did often, he did so deliberately, and the result was a graceful arc rather than a jerky convulsion; his steering inputs were delicate, almost economical; the red car flowed through standing water with a serenity that defied logic; he found grip where for everyone else no grip appeared to exist; and he carried speed through waterlogged corners that looked entirely incapable of supporting it. His lead ballooned to well beyond a minute before he eased back in the closing stages, eventually winning by ‘only’ 45 seconds.

F1 history has been enriched by many great wet-weather performances: Jim Clark at Spa in 1963 remains almost mythic, the great Scot slicing through an Ardennes deluge with brutality so elegant that witnesses have spoken of it in reverential tones ever since; at Nürburgring in 1968 Jackie Stewart transformed the ‘green hell’ into his personal fiefdom, winning by more than four minutes while the mist and rain were rendering the Nordschleife, formidable even in fine weather, a nightmare landscape for everyone else; at Watkins Glen in 1979 Gilles Villeneuve performed a miracle, as I have said; at Estoril in 1985 Ayrton Senna announced his genius to the racing world in a Portuguese monsoon, then he repeated the trick in equally electrifying style at Donington in 1993, carving through the field on the opening lap with predatory genius; at Silverstone in 2008 Lewis Hamilton produced what is still one of the finest wet-weather drives we have seen this century, lapping all but two other drivers while the rest spun helplessly across the Northamptonshire asphalt; in the same season Sebastian Vettel conquered a real rarity – rain at Monza – with astonishing composure and maturity; Jenson Button’s victory in Montreal in 2011 was a thrilling triumph of resilience, skill, and opportunism; and at Interlagos in 2016 19-year-old Max Verstappen raced with breathtaking car control and unflappable courage, declaring to the watching world that here was a driver who could drive an F1 car in a way that seemed to defy the laws of physics; if I have forgotten to include your favourite, I apologise.

Schumacher in Barcelona in 1996 belongs at or near the very top of that exalted list – but he produced many other masterpieces during his long and glittering F1 career. Barcelona 1994, when he somehow finished second despite being trapped in fifth gear for much of the race; Budapest 1998, the now famous showcase of Ross Brawn’s strategic audacity and Schumi’s relentless ability to drive qualifying laps in race trim; Suzuka 2000, where and when he finally delivered Ferrari’s first F1 drivers’ title in 21 years; Magny-Cours 2004, won via a scarcely believable four-stop race strategy executed with metronomic perfection; Interlagos 2006, his last great charge for Ferrari – indeed what would and should have been the last race of his magnificent F1 career had he not made that ill-considered comeback in 2010 – scything through the field after a left-rear puncture with indefatigable effrontery; again, if I have forgotten your favourite, I apologise.

Yet Barcelona 1996 still stands apart – as Michael Schumacher’s greatest race – and perhaps the most compelling proof point came from a watching Stirling Moss, a man not given to careless hyperbole. Moss admired racing greatness wherever he saw it, certainly, but he could also be wickedly critical of modern drivers. Yet in Barcelona in 1996 he shook his 66-year-old head and said: “That wasn’t a motor race. That was a demonstration of brilliance. The man is in a class of his own. There’s no-one in the world anywhere near him. In fact I don’t think there has ever been a driver so far clear of the field in terms of ability.”

Perhaps that remarkable quote encapsulates better than any other description I have ever heard why the 1996 Spanish Grand Prix still glows so brightly in F1 memory 30 years later. It was not merely a victory. No, it was a marvel, a phenomenon, and a revelation, because Ferrari was at or near its lowest ebb, its car was not competitive, and the conditions were so treacherous that they defeated or diminished every other driver. Yet amid all that chaos and mayhem Schumacher drove not only much faster than all his rivals but also much more stylishly. He looked serene while others seemed overwhelmed, spooked even. Or, to put it another way, very great drivers sometimes appear to inhabit dimensions unapproachable by even very good drivers, and, on that rain-lashed afternoon in Catalunya, Michael Schumacher seemed to occupy an entirely different universe. Thirty years on, I remain convinced that no other victory among his 91 was finer.