Michael Schumacher’s First GP-Winning Car Is Going Up For Sale

When discussions around the greatest F1 driver of all time arise, one German’s name is never very far away from the top of the list. In a career that spanned 19 seasons, Michael Schumacher racked up 91 race wins, seven World Drivers’ Championships and several of the most dominant seasons the sport has ever seen – and now, somebody is going to get the chance to own the very car that kickstarted that illustrious run.

It’s a 1992 Ford-powered Benetton B192-05, and the very chassis with which Schumacher took his first ever Grand Prix victory at that year’s Belgian Grand Prix. He’d gained the driver at Benetton after an impressive drive at the same race a year earlier as a last-minute stand-in at Jordan for Bertrand Gachot, who was in prison in London after an altercation with a taxi driver.

At the ’92 race, Schumacher qualified third behind the McLaren of Ayrton Senna and the Williams of Nigel Mansell, but a combination of his raw pace, Senna gambling on wet tyres at the wrong time and Mansell suffering engine issues saw the German take victory by a comfortable margin. As well as his first GP win, it was his first of six at the Spa-Francorchamps circuit, which he went on to cite as his favourite on the calendar.

While Belgium would be Schumacher’s only victory in 1992, his consistently strong performances throughout the season still took him to third in the Drivers’ Championship that year, with his first world title coming in 1994. The B192-05 is significant for other reasons, too – it was the last race-winning F1 car with an H-pattern manual gearbox, before the age of the paddleshift properly kicked in in 1993.

When the season was over, the car remained in the possession of the Benetton team, which became Renault in 2001, remaining at the outfit’s Enstone HQ until 2015. It was then sold to LRS Formula, an outfit specialising in the reconditioning and running of nineties and noughties F1 machinery. Sold again to the current private owner in 2016, LRS nevertheless remained involved with the car, giving it a full chassis, engine and gearbox overhaul to bring it back to running order in 2024.

Its upcoming online auction with Broad Arrow, then, represents a chance to not only own a hugely significant piece of F1 history, but one that’s theoretically ready to run in historic race series or demo events. As a result, it’s not likely to come cheap – the auction house estimates a hammer price of €8.5 million – around £7.4 million – when the open bidding takes place between 23 and 30 January.