Michael: Too good?

Indianapolis: Niki Lauda says he would have walked away from Formula One had he been as dominant as Ferrari’s Michael Schumacher.

“No way. I mean, I would have got bored,” Austria’s three times world champion, now the Jaguar team principal, told a news conference ahead of Sunday’s US Grand Prix when asked if he could have envisaged winning as many races as the German. “Winning all the time, I would have started to do something else with my life.

“But nevertheless, he’s really the best, as long as I can think of racing, by producing results and his consistency in always being better every year, he is by far the best from my point of view. Because nobody else could do this so far.”

Lauda won the world championship with Ferrari in 1975 and 1977 in an era when driver fatalities were frequent and dominance on the Schumacher scale was unthinkable.

But he walked away from the sport in 1979, saying famously that he was fed up with going around in circles and wanted a change.

(Reuters)