How a Clothing Brand Dominated F1's Greatest Teams: Alessandro Benetton (E442)

Jake Humphrey (0:03)

So, when did you first become aware of Michael Schumacher?

Alessandro Benetton (0:06)

He was doing the best, and he was telling you, I expect you to do the best. What are we doing here? It's not supposed to be a place where people get killed. Sometimes if you want to find your own space, you have somehow to rewrite the rules.

Jake Humphrey (0:26)

Alessandro, welcome to High Performance.

I want to start with one week in 1991 when an almost unknown 22-year-old called Michael Schumacher arrives in Formula 1, qualifies seventh on his debut, and within days, Benetton, the team that you are running, are trying to sign him. And then just four years later, you're already the world champions. So I want to understand in this conversation what you saw in Michael Schumacher that made you want to sign him, who he really was away from the cameras, how you led that team through the trauma of Imola, but also how a clothing company who were laughed at by some people in the paddock ended up beating the giants of Formula 1 Does that sound interesting?

Alessandro Benetton (1:11)

Absolutely. And brings back great memories.

I think that if we want to give a little bit of background to that, we need to go back to the fact that I was in my 20s.

I was a Goldman Sachs here in London, as a matter of fact. My father comes to London. He gets into my office at Goldman and says, listen, we bought a Formula 1 team. Your uncle is quite worried about how much it's costing us, this thing. And I think that you should take a look at the numbers. You're good at numbers. You are a Goldman Sachs. And in reality, I was, yes, the first Italian ever to do a Goldman Sachs, but I was mostly preparing coffee for superiors, making photocopies. So I mean, but I understood about numbers. So I said, well, are you sure you want me to do that? He says, yes, yes, during your spare time, just get involved with that. So first weekend, take the train, go to Whitney, where we had this so-called factory, which in reality was not something much bigger than, you know, like a little shops or repair shops for cars. It was something very, very, very small. So I get into the office and I find out that actually there was a tag outside of a room and that says Alessandro Benetton, Chairman. So that's how I discovered. How old? I was 24

So, and I felt really bad for two reasons. First of all, because obviously I was not prepared for that.

And second, because of that was exactly the opposite of what was looking for at that point of my life, which was to establish my own path. And that was such a shortcut that did not make me comfortable with. So what to do, what not to do. That was my father's style, you know, he just would throw you in the water and see what happens. And the things were not going very well. So that was the 18, 1988 So we got to 1991 Like you said, you know, I had done some experience by then. And one of the main ingredients that we were discovering, which I think is the highlight of that cycle of experience, was that we had to move, we had to change. We had to continuously looking for new gimmicks and trials in order to escape this position of just being the underdogs and being the people, like you said, people would laugh at because no background, no experience coming from clothing. You know, what would you know about engineering and an engineer and so forth? And so that was a very important element that expressed very well how courageous we were and how we would look outside of a box. So being aggressive in getting a new driver that was just at the beginning and just had done very little was one sign of that context on which we were moving.

Jake Humphrey (4:24)

So when did you first become aware of a driver called Michael Schumacher?

Alessandro Benetton (4:28)

I think Michael discovered himself. He got into the car, no experience, and he gets into the car and he has another driver of the team who's very fast on the laps, De Cesar, and he's so much faster the first lap. So you look at that and you know that the guy has something.

Now, if you ask me if there was another element which was perhaps more personal, it was his personality.

He was very clear to me from day one that he was not intimidated. He was not intimidated by the circuit. He was not intimidated about the fact that he was very young. He was not intimidated by the fact that he had no experience. And he was not intimidated by other champions. That was another important element that was very clear in my eyes that would potentially make a big champion.