Formula 1 fans eyes were on Mick Schumacher making his F1 testing debut with Ferrari this week.

The magnitude of the event, however, doesn’t come close to what happened surrounding his father’s first weeks in the sport back in 1991.

Back then, the 22-year-old Michael had been on a number of F1 teams’ radar for a long period, with none showing any urgency in pursuing the man who would ultimately win a record seven world titles in his F1 career.

Schumacher spent his first year in sport driving sports cars for Mercedes, which isn’t a traditional path to Formula One.

However, Eddie Jordan, who ran Jordan Grand Prix, said: “Sports cars are a dead end, a place for either retired F1 drivers or those who never good enough to make the cut in first place.”

By the end of August that year, Jordan had a problem. His team had an immediate impact at the start of 1991 when they entered F1, but driver Bertrand Gachot would be sentenced to jail for 18 months for spraying CS gas in the face of a taxi driver in London.

This incident meant that the team were short in the driving department and had just over a week to find a new driver to fill their driving seat before heading to Belgium.

Mercedes were swiftly in the picture, who agreed to stump up funds that accumulated around $280,000 to put Schumacher in the car for the Belgian Grand Prix.

A quick test occurred just days before the race at Silverstone in England and it gave an insight into how gifted the 22-year-old Schumacher was behind the wheel. Having never driven an F1 car previously, he was immediately on the pace.

Indeed, team manager Trevor Foster had to call Schumacher into the pits after five laps and ask him to slow down.

The soon to be future world champion sat there in silence wondering what the fuss was about when he was doing his job, driving his car exceedingly fast around the race track.

Schumacher's Grand Prix debut was stunning, but brief. He qualified an extraordinary seventh on the grid where he was more than half a second quicker than his far more experienced teammate.

"None of us could believe what Michael had done," Jordan wrote in his autobiography 'An Independent Man'.

"I would go so far as to say that this probably was the biggest surprise I had during my time in F1."

The race itself was a major let down. The car’s clutch failed as they left the grid, and Schumacher was parking the car just after a few hundred metres on the track. This would be one of the biggest controversies of that era and it would be the last time the German sat in a Jordan F1 car.

After the event, a letter of intent had been signed whist in Belgium that weekend, tying Schumacher to the Jordan team for the long term. Furthermore, one single word had been changed by Schumacher’s legal team, which allowed the German upcoming star to sign a deal with a more established team Benetton.

The first Jordan knew of this was when he received a one-line fax prior to the Italian Grand Prix.

"Dear Eddie, I'm very sorry but I am not going to be able to drive for your team. Best regards, Michael."

Jordan was devastated to lose the upcoming star in the sport.

"I was gutted," Jordan wrote.

"I could not believe how underhand they had been."

"(They) knew the significance of the change to the wording and the whole affair did not enhance IMG's reputation in F1.

"I considered them opportunistic and sly."

The word in question was remarkably one of the most frequently used in the English language: "the".

Schumacher, represented by the IMG group, had changed the letter of intent from: "We will sign 'the' contract in seven days" to "We will sign 'a' contract in seven days."

In this case, it allowed Schumacher to sign "a" contract with Benetton, rather than "the" contract with Jordan, a move subsequently upheld by the courts.

Making it as clear as possible that they simply changed the word 'the' to 'a'.

In context, exactly a year after his debut, Schumacher returned to Belgium at the wheel of the Benetton where it led to his first race win.

Following that victory, another win would follow in 1993, initially leading to his first two world titles back to back in 1994 and 1995.

"What was written says, 'after we drive in Spa we would sign a contract', but not 'the' contract.”

“'A' contract should be under our conditions, not under (Jordan's) conditions," Schumacher's former manager Willi Weber told Motorsport News in 2005.

"So what is a contract? We could sign a contract with him to visit his factory two times a year. That's 'a' contract. It could be anything."

Weber admits they had he been forced to sign 'the' contract, Schumacher would have been stuck at Jordan.

"Yes. Michael would have to stay there one, maybe two years.”

“We may have lost years, because we had seen what Jordan had in (92) and it was a disaster.”