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cornering speed. Benetton protested that the skidblock had been damaged when Schumacher spun over a kerb, but the FIA rejected their appeal. These incidents helped Damon Hill close the points gap, with Schumacher leading by a single point going into the final race in Australia. On lap 36 of the race Schumacher clipped the guardrail while leading from Hill. With his race over by then, he steered towards Hill's path as the latter was passing him, forcing a crash that took Hill out of the race. As neither he nor Hill scored, Schumacher won a very controversial championship, the first German to do so (Jochen Rindt raced under the Austrian flag). In 1995 Schumacher successfully defended his title with Benetton. He now had the same Renault engine as Williams. He accumulated 33 more points than second-placed Damon Hill. With team-mate Johnny Herbert, he took Benetton to its first Constructors' Championship and became the youngest two-time world champion in Formula One history. The season was marred by several collisions with Hill, in particular an overtaking manoeuvre by Hill took them both out of the British Grand Prix on lap 45 and again on lap 23 of the Italian Grand Prix. Schumacher won nine of the 17 races, and finished on the podium 11 times. Only once did he qualify worse than fourth; at the Belgian Grand Prix, he qualified 16th, but went on to win the race. After Schumacher left Benetton at the end of the year, the team won only one more race before being bought by Renault in 2000.
In 1996, Schumacher joined Scuderia Ferrari S.p.A. for a salary of $50 million over 2 years, a team which had last won the Drivers' Championship with Jody Scheckter in 1979 and which had not won the Constructors' Cup since 1983 with drivers René Arnoux and Patrick Tambay at the wheel. He left Benetton a year before his contract with them expired; he later cited the team's damaging actions in 1994 as his reason for opting out of his deal. A year later, ex-Benetton employees Rory Byrne and Ross Brawn, who had been Technical Director at Benetton since 1991, and who was one of the key members behind Schumacher's title successes with the team in 1994 and 1995, decided to join Schumacher at Ferrari. This increased Schumacher's motivation to build a more experienced and
Ferrari