Glenn Freeman

Pat Simmons said years later that Schumacher leaving hurt Briatore and he felt that the pain of that led to Briatore making some decisions that were not the best things we ever did in reaction.

Those were Pat's words.

But Ben, what do you think of Flavio's logic there to Schumacher?

Win more championships with us and then go to Ferrari and charge them more money.

Now, as we discussed in our season four episode on Schumacher signing for Ferrari, that was a really fun episode.

We looked at kind of the whole driver market through 95 into 96.

And understandably, that all revolved around Michael.

But in that episode, we picked up on, of course, the fact that Benetton decided that the man who should replace Schumacher for 1996 should be Jean Alessi, who came in the opposite direction, travelling from Ferrari to Benetton.

Briatore's hope with this was that in a better environment than Ferrari, with less pressure, Alessi could settle down and deliver on the potential that most people thought was there since he burst into F1 with Tyrrell in 1989 and 90.

And Ross Brawn said in his book years later that Benetton were excited by the prospect of working with Alessi, saying he was a huge talent.

He needed careful management, but we thought he would be a really good asset to the team.

Matt, given where Alessi's stock was in 1995, was there some logic to the view that perhaps he could be moulded into Benetton's next superstar?

It's not obvious.

The Hakkinen's future is not obvious at this point, is it?

Yeah, that's a really good point.

They feel like they are in the same bucket at this point.

Fast but wild.

Can you tame either of them?

I do think it's easy to forget with everything that followed just how good a season it seemed that Lacey had had in 1995.

I think your point, Matt, that