BENETTON FORMULA enjoyed a meteoric rise from an underdog clothing brand selling “bras and panties” to winning world titles with Michael Schumacher.

The team’s former chairman, Alessandro Benetton, has lifted the lid on their glittering run from outsiders to title contenders.

Michael Schumacher won two world titles with Benetton

Alessandro Benetton was chairman of the F1 team for a decade

Alessandro and Schumacher partied in cowboy hats after the German won his first world title with Benetton in Adelaide in 1994

Benetton also won a constructor’s title while Alessandro was chairman
Alessandro served as chairman of Benetton Formula for a decade from 1988 to 1998 and oversaw two world titles with Schumacher as well as a constructor’s crown.

It was a time when the likes of motorsport giants Ferrari, McLaren and Williams all had at least one world title to their name in the early 1980s.

Meanwhile, Italian fashion brand Benetton’s exciting adventure with F1 began in 1986 when Luciano Benetton decided to take over a team for around £2million.

Alessandro who features in a the new “Benetton Formula” documentary which is available to view on Sky and streaming service NOW in the UK, told SunSport: “At the beginning, we were funny people,

“We would bring colours. We would have great cuisine because we had an Italian cook who would do the best pasta.

“We had fashion models in the pit lane so everybody was happy about our presence, but we were viewed as kind of like background characters who just added colour.

“People liked us but they would say ‘look at Benetton, they’ve got the mechanics with pink shirts. They spray colours on the cars.’

“When we would go to the race people were like okay, let’s see now what Benetton are going to do at the next Grand Prix.

Benetton went from t-shirt manufacturers to F1 world champions
Gerhard Berger (right) secured Benetton’s maiden win in 1986Credit: Giuliano Del Gatto
“People would smile at us but then once we became competitive, that attitude changed.”

Benetton’s rivals sat up and took notice of them when all the pieces of the jigsaw came together.

Gerhard Berger bagged the team’s first victory and another podium during their first-season

Two years later and Alessandro was thrust onto the scene as a fresh-faced 25-year-old with flopping locks and a dream to help motorsport’s rebels with a cause.

It was in the early 1990s that the team really clicked into gear having earned the signature of a certain Michael Schumacher.

Not many were familiar with the Schumacher name when he made his debut for Eddie Jordan’s rookie team at the Belgian Grand Prix in August 1991.

Schumacher got to grips with the twists and turns of the iconic Spa track by pedalling a few laps on a fold out bicycle.

He qualified in a whopping seventh but his race was short lived and after surviving a hairy lock up early on he burnt his clutch.

That didn’t put off Benetton though, with team manager Flavio Briatore getting straight on the phone to Alessandro to discuss signing the German driver.

Alessandro continued: “Flavio told me that could be our next driver. Both of us were thinking about the same fact, but in reality, very quickly we were already working on bringing him on board.

“My first chemical reaction with Michael was that he was quite impressive as a driver.

“What was impressive was his maturity given his young age. He had this attitude that he was not scared about the big guys.

“He was not intimidated by the strong personality, his colleagues, the drivers that probably he had been watching on TV until a weekend before.

“And now he’s sitting there and you would expect somebody to be a bit timid, he was not. He was focused on the car and he was just about performance.”

Benetton and Schumacher would go on to become a match made in heaven.

Both started out as the quirky, new kids on the block, but were fearless when it came to facing the big guns.

Schumacher also revolutionised F1 with his gruelling training regime and strict dieting.

Alessandro added: “He went hand in hand with our attitude which was not arrogant, but confident enough to try new things.

“The main thing that he would get across was that he was very demanding and that he could afford to be very demanding because he was demanding on others just as much as he was on himself.

“I think we found each other at the right moment. He also gave courage to us in the sense that we knew that we had an incredibly good driver.

“It was simplifying the equation in the sense that we had the best driver. So now it was a matter of having the best chassis and having the best engine.”

Schumacher became world champion for the first time in 1994, the same year that Ayrton Senna and Roland Ratzenberger tragically died at Imola.

It had been a mouth-watering prospect that year to have Senna and Schumacher duking it out in what appeared to be two different cars each capable of winning races.

The deaths of both Ratzenberger and Senna remain etched in the minds of every motorsport fan and F1 has never been the same

With the loss of Senna, it looked as though the Schumacher juggernaut would be impossible to stop, but it went down to the wire with Williams’ Damon Hill.

When Schumacher was crowned champion in the season finale in Adelaide, Benetton celebrated in style, partying in cowboys hats until the early hours.

Alessandro said: “It was a lot of fun. It’s like some sort of liberation when you get to the end that you have made so much effort.

“That party was really a celebration of professionalism, respect and friendship.”

When asked what is the main message he wants people to take from the documentary, he added: “There is an Italian writer that says, ‘by the time you find the answer, somebody is going to ask you a different question.

“That represents very well what we did. I hope we can inspire future generations as well.”