Never work with your heroes. Except if you're Sam Bird, who from 2010 to 2013 rode shotgun amid Michael Schumacher's final Formula 1 hurrah.

During his rookie GP2 season in 2010 Bird, who drove for ART Grand Prix, only won one feature race. But he gained many fans along the way, pulling off some epic recovery drives, notably at the Barcelona round when he fought back into the top 10 after an early front wing change.

Among the admirers that day was Mercedes team manager Ron Meadows, who knew Bird a little from karting days when his own son, Michael, was a rival. After the Monza GP2 round that September, Meadows called up asking if Bird would be interested in the season-ending F1 rookie test at Yas Marina.

Bird bit Meadows's hand off and did a very competent job sharing the track with then-F1 hopefuls Sergio Perez, Daniel Ricciardo and Jules Bianchi. Also on track that day were his future fellow Formula E rivals Antonio Felix da Costa (Force India), Jean-Eric Vergne (Toro Rosso, the team he'd also race for in F1), Oliver Turvey (McLaren), as well as his sporting manager while at McLaren, Gary Paffett, also then driving a McLaren F1 car.

That Mercedes chance - and the deal to become test driver that followed - was important to Bird, not just because it gave him a first real foot on the F1 ladder. But also because it also enabled him to develop a relationship with his great racing hero, Schumacher.

Initially in awe of the seven-time world champion, who was coming back for a second bite at F1 with Mercedes, Bird developed a strong friendship with Schumacher - although their first real meeting was comically inauspicious.

"I'd kind of met him before playing football in the charity match at Monaco and stuff like that," Bird tells The Race. "But then all of a sudden I'm there in my new Mercedes kit as a driver at the rookie test in Abu Dhabi, and I'm about to have my first meeting as a team member.

"But before I do, I quickly nip to the toilet. I approach the loo and the indicator says green, so I push the door open and there he is. It's Michael, but with parts of Michael I'd not been expecting to see!

“Anyway, we had this meeting and Ross Brawn says: 'Look, everybody, we've got young Sam Bird here and he's going to be shadowing us this weekend and doing the rookie days for us and be our reserve. Please make him feel welcome. And, If you need to find him, he'll be hanging around outside the toilets'.

"Michael had obviously teed that up with Ross, and that kind of started it off, breaking the ice. Michael came over, gave me a hug afterwards, said, 'Welcome to the team'."

From that point on, Bird and Schumacher got along extremely well and developed a rapport which, Bird says, "meant the world to me, because he was just such a generous person".

While Schumacher's famous interpersonal skills were well-known to those in the inner circle, Bird found them standing out time after time in their few years working together.

"His ability to galvanise and get the team around him, and his ability to mould the team that he wanted around him, was sensational," says Bird.

"I obviously saw him working when he was towards the end of his career, he was early-40s then, plus he didn't really have the car. But there were glimpses of raw speed, like the lap he did in 2012 in Monaco [that would've earned Schumacher pole had a penalty not been carried over], which was stunning.

"Nico [Rosberg] was very articulate and great with working on the car with the numbers and extracting more performance-wise, probably out of the software side, but Michael's interpersonal skills were just incredible and he extracted a lot from that side of his armoury."

This aptitude of Schumacher's often manifested in going into everything to do with the team and the car in forensic detail. One day in 2012, Schumacher's final F1 season, completely encapsulated it.

"There was a rookie test in [September] 2012 and I was doing it," recalls Bird.

"Really early in the morning, Michael called me up and he said, 'I'm coming to Magny Cours later this morning, I'll just drop the kids off at school first'.

"He was super interested in the Coanda-effect exhaust that we were going to be testing there for the first time before Singapore and he just didn't want to hear about it: he wanted to see it in action.

"His jet lands at 9.30am just before I head out of the pits, and Michael heads straight for the track, along with my dad - which was surreal - to study the way the exhaust was making the car handle. He stayed for a few hours and then was off to pick the kids back up from school."

Bird also got to study and appreciate Schumacher's actual driving style in the years he worked with Mercedes, enabling him to sketch out this fascinating illustration of Schumacher's practical style in the latter stages of his career.

"Michael was very sensitive with the brake pedal, and then he would want the car and the brake to rotate well, to then get back on the power, which I think is why he was so good in the traction control area," reckons Bird.

"He could get it turned in so early, and then get back on power quite quickly and quite well, and then use the systems to drive and blast out of corners.

"He had a very good feel, sensitive in his reflexes. When I looked at Lewis's [Hamilton] data, it was just so clean that the brake shapes were always mega and perfect. Michaels weren't the same. There would be dips and troughs in the brake shapes, it was like he was feeding the rear of the car, moving around and very aware and sensitive to that."

For the young Bird, watching Schumacher at close quarters fed him with several skills for his future career, one that took him to the cusp of the GP2 title in 2013 and then a strong presence Formula E and World Endurance Championship - which included 12 E-Prix wins and the LMP2 title in 2015.

"What I took from Michael was just building relationships with people within the team," says Bird.

"That was the main thing for me. And I suppose, as well, not being afraid to ask questions. If Michael wasn't sure of something, he would ask the engineers: 'What can I do to improve? Where can I change things at this corner or that braking point?'

"There was never any, 'I'm a seven-time world champion, I know everything'. He was always looking to better himself and hone his skills."

That attitude helped mould Bird into a successful professional racing driver, something he remains to this day - now with Nissan as its Formula E reserve, 15 years later. It is a time and experience that Bird will never take for granted.

"I never put him on a pedestal to his face, even though he is on a pedestal for me internally, but I never made that clear to him," Bird says of Schumacher.

"When you were in his circle, my God, what a lovely human being he was.

"I am super fortunate and lucky that I've worked with him, and that it wasn't a disappointment; far from it. I think some people meet their heroes and they're let down by it, or it doesn't go very well. I worked with my hero, and he was just the best."