For one thing, he had to get used to the car, which he had never driven at racing speeds before. According to Ted Kravitz:

Evidently the Ferrari F60 is a very complicated car to operate. There are many buttons and dials to turn and twist: Kers harvest and usage settings, brake balance and bias levers, fuel and oil pumps, front flap adjusts and the usual revs, throttle and mixture settings.

I’m not sure if he is implying that the F60 is more difficult to get used to than other current F1 cars. But whatever, it is certainly new territory for Badoer who is used to driving cars in the relatively tranquil environment of the test session rather than the intense spotlight and razzmatazz of a grand prix weekend. To deal with all of this in the first time he’s properly driven the F60 — and in his first race for ten years at that — is undeniably a big ask.

Luca Badoer must have been as shocked as everyone else when it was announced that he was to race in Valencia. It is typical of Badoer’s luck. F1 has shat on this driver for his whole career. I would highly recommend his biography on F1 Rejects for a full overview.

He may not be F1 championship material. But he is the 1992 Formula 3000 champion, having beaten Rubens Barrichello, Olivier Panis and David Coulthard among others in the process. So he is no fool.

But in F1 he never got the proper chance to demonstrate his abilities, being stuck with back-of-the-grid teams Scuderia Italia, Minardi and Forti — and despite usually having the upper-hand over his team mates on the racetrack, politics often meant he found it difficult to move ahead in his career.

You might have thought that signing with Ferrari to become their test driver in 1998 would have seen an upswing in his fortunes. In a lot of ways, Badoer must be the unsung hero of Ferrari’s success since then. He is the test driver who has helped develop cars capable of winning Championship after Championship following a twenty year drought for Ferrari.

Normally a team’s test driver would be the first choice to step in if a driver needs replaced. Inexplicably, when Michael Schumacher broke his legs in 1999, Ferrari opted to look outside the team. They placed Mika Salo in the car, when most observers expected Badoer to get the nod. Subsequently, Badoer stayed on with Ferrari having been promised that he would be the reserve driver.

Since then, Ferrari has had a remarkable period of driver stability. Between 1999 and 2009, Ferrari changed drivers only three times (Irvine replaced by Barrichello, Barrichello replaced by Massa and Schumacher replaced by Räikkönen)! At no point did any driver have to be replaced at short notice. No space for Badoer ever emerged. One must imagine that after twelve years waiting, he would have given up believing.

Then Felipe Massa was injured at Hungary. In the year that there was a radical change in technical regulations which is said to be the biggest in 25 years. In the year that testing is banned. In the one year that Luca Badoer had never driven the Ferrari car. And when the next race was at a brand new circuit which he had never visited.

Of course Luca Badoer didn’t get the call. Michael Schumacher did instead, and the media could barely contain their excitement. Schumacher is a seven times World Champion, but still people openly wondered: is Schumacher up to the task? Can he get used to the new car? Is he fit enough? At 40, will he be too old? In the end, it turned out that Schumacher couldn’t do the job because of the injury he picked up while racing Superbikes in Germany.

So it was down to Badoer to shoulder the responsibility of making something out of the pickle that Ferrari found themselves in. Of course, the media won’t be lining up with the same excuses that were already being served up on Schumacher’s behalf before his comeback. This was despite the fact that there are actually quite legitimate reasons for Badoer to be off the pace. Badoer is not much younger than Schumacher, and is the oldest driver on the grid. But that is not an excuse apparently, despite the fact that it supposedly would have been for Schumacher.

Instead, the media has spent its time openly laughing at Luca Badoer, almost willing him to do badly. The schadenfreude soaked through the reports as the journalists gleefully reported Badoer’s four pitlane speeding offences on Friday, a symptom of the fact that the pitlane speed limit is substantially higher during test sessions and Badoer needed time to adjust to the new braking points required.

All I can say is, Badoer is not the one who parked his car at Rascasse, but never mind. Of course, the journalists were just taking it out on Badoer because he isn’t Princess Schumacher so they lost their “fairytale” story that is so desperately needed to sell a turgid circuit like Valencia.

I found the gulf in opinion between the journalists and the drivers very interesting. While the journalists were busy thinking up oh-so-witty nicknames like “Look-how Bad-you-are”, the drivers in contrast felt sorry for the situation that Badoer found himself in. Jarno Trulli described Badoer’s situation as “impossible”. Lewis Hamilton said that Badoer has “done a good job just to keep it on the track”, while Kovalainen shrugged: “I don’t know what else you could have expected.”

The split was also demonstrated on the Chequered Flag podcast. David Croft mocked, “even Yuji Ide had more promise” (which is totally untrue — Badoer has already achieved much more in his career than Ide could ever hope for). F1 Racing‘s Bradley Lord said, “Badoer approached this race as a test — and he failed this one.” Ha-very-ha. Anthony Davidson had plead to his bloodthirsty journalist colleagues, “give him some space!”

David Coulthard summed up the situation nicely: “Who would be Luca Badoer? You wait 10 years for your chance to race for Ferrari and then, despite having no preparation whatsoever, you get slated for not being Michael Schumacher.”

In Checkpoint 10′s excellent analysis, it is shown that Badoer was not actually half as bad as the journalists would have you believe. His qualifying time was 103.4% of the fastest time, when the 107% rule used to eliminate drivers on a regular basis.

He struggled during the race. After a good start, he was obviously spooked by being surrounded by other cars on lap 1 and spun. He then panicked in the pitlane, seemingly allowing Romain Grosjean to overtake him before he crossed the white line. And he had a worryingly erratic second stint. But overall, Badoer showed improvement as the race progressed, and noticeably caught up with Räikkönen’s pace as the race progressed and Badoer became more comfortable.

In sum, yes, Badoer had a very disappointing weekend. But that is mostly because driving standards are so high these days. You don’t have to go far to find real joke drivers who definitely did not deserve to be racing and did a much worse job than Badoer.

I grew up watching people people who paid to get a race seat trundle around up to a dozen seconds per lap off the pace. Hell, you only have to go back a few years to encounter and Yuji Ide, who suffered the ignominy of being stripped of his super license. The last pay driver went when Sakon Yamamoto lost his seat. Driving standards all the way through the grid are very high compared with ten or even five years ago. This amplifies Badoer’s rustiness.

Badoer’s performance in Valencia is the sort of thing that would have been commonplace at the back of the grid in the mid-1990s. You might say that this is not the mid-1990s, but when you consider everything that is stacked against Luca Badoer — his age, his lack of experience, never having driven the F60 before, never having been to the Valencia Street Circuit before, and having to get used to the modern-day race weekend environment — I think he should be cut a bit more slack.

I feel very sorry for Badoer, who has had a very tough F1 career where he has been given the rough end of the stick at almost every turn. It looks likely that Badoer will be replaced come Monza, which would be fair enough if he doesn’t show a perceptible improvement in Spa.

But now Badoer will probably be remembered for these two difficult races where he was thrown in at the deep end, and everyone decided to point and laugh at this man (who, do not forget, is actually putting his life on the line when he goes out to race). I am not sure whether this is better than being remembered for breaking down in tears at his previous European Grand Prix, in 1999.

When it was announced that Michael Schumacher was preparing to replace Felipe Massa at Ferrari while the Brazilian convalesces, the great ideological gulf among F1 fans suddenly re-emerged. I can’t remember seeing such strong reactions on any issue about any subject, let alone F1.

For some people, Michael Schumacher might as well be Jesus. You could produce video evidence of him killing a kitten and he would still be the greatest man on earth. Anyone who says otherwise doesn’t appreciate genius when they see it?

For others, there is nothing that can redeem Michael Schumacher. He is a serial cheat whose team-mates were all hamstrung and whose seven World Drivers’ Championships are among the least deserving ever awarded. You must surely see that he is the most evil man on earth?

My view is slightly more nuanced. He was a bit of both. His record speaks for itself, and he must take credit especially for his ability to build a team around him. But I hated the way he went about racing.

Incidentally, for a fair-minded assessment of Michael Schumacher, I highly recommend James Allen’s book, The Edge of Greatness. I always thought James Allen as a commentator was too biased in favour of Schumacher, but his book displays a very measured and nuanced assessment of his qualities as a driver, and his failings as a sportsperson.

I must come straight out and say that I have never been a fan of Michael Schumacher. Never. And for me, his talent was tainted by his tendency to bend the rules whenever he had the slightest opportunity.

I don’t even rate him much as a racer. For me, his wheel-to-wheel skills were rather poor, and he disguised this by being overly aggressive. That was why he often panicked under pressure, such as at Jerez in 1997. If he found himself in the midfield, he sometimes had very clumsy races indeed — his botched move on Takuma Sato at Suzuka in 2003 springs to mind.

Schumacher was famous for relying on Ross Brawn strategies to “overtake in the pitlane” rather than try to make a genuine overtaking move. I highly doubt that Schumacher would have won as many Championships if refuelling wasn’t legal. I won’t lie: 2000–2004 were my least favourite years of watching F1 since I first fell in love with the sport in the mid-1990s.

Since Schumacher left F1 I do feel as though I have started to enjoy F1 a lot more. Even though some of the drivers are not perfect in terms of their adherence to the rules or their spirit of fair competition, it feels a lot less like a dark cloud such as Rascassegate will come rumbling over the hills at any moment.

Now, of course, he is back in F1 and it has changed again. It amuses me greatly that even weeks before his first grand prix back is due to start, he already sought ways to cheat, to unfairly gain an advantage over his competitors. It says it all about him in one action.

Williams are not my favourite team either, but they were totally right to block this blatant infringement of the rules. Just a couple of weeks before, Toro Rosso’s new driver Jaime Alguersuari was refused a similar request, and he did a perfectly adequate job. Quite why a supposedly great 7 times World Champion needs to practice so much is not clear to me.

Ferrari’s enormously arrogant statement in retaliation against the blocked request sums up why I can’t stand the team so much. Apparently they think the red rule should still exist. What happened to that spirit of cooperation they were supposedly so keen on? I guess now that the Concorde Agreement is signed, cordial relations are not so important any more.

It is clear that the testing rules need amending. I have been saying so for a long time now. But until a new set of rules are agreed upon, everyone needs to adhere to them, otherwise you may as well just rip the rulebook up (some would argue Ferrari have ripped up the rulebook and written their own anyway).

This is all a sign that Michael Schumacher does not intend to simply go through the motions. I had wondered quite what was in this comeback for Schumacher. I saw easily why Ferrari were interested. But what could possibly have motivated Schumacher?

After all, he potentially has so much to lose. With his wife and kids — and we know his wife is concerned because he says he has made an “arrangement” with her that health is the top priority — he surely doesn’t want to be doing something so dangerous. He cannot possibly need the money, and he certainly doesn’t have anything else to prove (unless he wants somehow to prove that he can be a good sportsperson, but that opportunity has already been shot).

He also risks being embarrassed because of his waning ability. At 40, he is the oldest driver to compete in F1 since Nigel Mansell in 1995, and let us not forget that Mansell’s last period as an F1 driver was not exactly a roaring success. And after two and a half years out of competitive grand prix racing, there is every chance that he will be rusty during his forthcoming races.

But now we know what motivates him — it is his sheer, ruthless competitiveness. He may have initially agreed out of “loyalty” to Ferrari, but once he’s a driver again he is up to the same old tricks, looking for the slightest advantage wherever it may come from.

Of course, many would say that this is what sets him apart from everyone else.

Now, call me an old cynic, but if I had a pound for every time a driver or team has told a little fib in the steward’s office I would not need to write this blog but would be watching qualifying with my feet up on a rattan chair in some tropical bolthole. Oh wait… I am in a tropical bolthole. Never mind. Anyway, here’s a couple of possible examples. When Honda were found to have extra fuel tanks stashed all over their car, did they, on being asked, immediately ‘fess up and prostrate themselves in front of a tut-tutting world. Hardly.

When Michael Schumacher decided that the area in front of the Rascasse in Monaco would make a perfect parking spot, did he admit that he fancied wrecking the following Fernando Alonso’s final quick lap? No, probably not.

The fact that he was dumped to the back of the grid by the stewards in that instance suggests that they thought he was telling a small white lie in his assertion that there was a problem.

And did we get public apologies, expulsions and sendings home? Not a bit of it. They just got on with the job in hand. In fact, Schumacher delivered one of the outstanding drives his career to climb from 20th to fourth that day.

But nowadays McLaren’s transgression is treated like a betrayal of trust of Judas-like proportions. The wailing and gnashing of teeth going on at Sepang just goes to show what a small parish F1 is, where the smallest incident is amplified to deafening proportions. It has the smack of chap melodrama.

It’s an interesting point. But there is a key difference in the McLaren case which must not be forgotten. In the case of Honda’s dodgy extra fuel tank, and Michael Schumacher’s Rascassegate, those were instances where they broke the rules and then had the spotlight turned on them.

At this year’s Australian Grand Prix, it was McLaren themselves who went off to the stewards. It wasn’t that McLaren broke the rules and then had to defend themselves, as was the case with Honda and Michael Schumacher.

McLaren tried to make out that Toyota and Jarno Trulli had broken the rules when they hadn’t. That is completely different. Here we have a situation where one team has deliberately set out to deceive the world by accusing a rival team of breaking the rules when they hadn’t. And all for the sake of one measly point, at that.

It’s not just the lying that got McLaren into trouble. It is the dirtiness of the trick. It’s the greed. It’s the hypocrisy.

“Let’s play this by the book” indeed!

I’ll tackle these incidents in the order they happened on the track. The first was the incident that Lewis Hamilton got a drive-through penalty for. The Brit was judged to have forced cars off the racetrack.

Clive reckons that Hamilton is totally in the clear here. I’m afraid I have to disagree and I think Clive is being a bit disingenuous because he has chosen his screen-caps selectively.

If you watch the video you can clearly see that Kimi Räikkönen spends a lot of time going straight trying to avoid Hamilton when undoubtedly he would otherwise be turning into the corner. Indeed, at one point Räikkönen even moves slightly to his left, away from the apex of the corner, to avoid the out-of-control Hamilton. Arguably this set up a chain of events throughout the first corner as everyone tried to avoid each other.

Hamilton is right to point out, however, that he was not the only person to brake late. While he was by far the worst of the lot, Kovalainen was also too late on the brakes and arguably the Ferraris and a few other cars were as well.

And here is the thing. This is normal first corner stuff. We see this sort of thing several times a season. In fact, it is a surprise whenever all the cars make it cleanly through the first corner. While Hamilton unquestionably compromised the Ferraris and a few other cars, this is nothing we don’t see on a regular basis. For me, this is a complete racing incident; simply an occupational hazard of being in the first corner of a race.

It is not as though Hamilton gained any advantage from the whole scenario. If memory serves, when the whole thing shook out he ended up in 6th place. Hamilton had a shockingly poor start and he panicked. He paid the price, and that was penalty enough in my view.

What is interesting to me is that there is a far more obvious instance of someone barging another driver off the track in today’s race, when Robert Kubica was defending aggressively against Räikkönen. Now I thought that was good racing and I would not have liked Kubica to have got a penalty for that, but I think Kubica had a clearer intention to push someone off the circuit than Hamilton did.

Hamilton ended up nestled behind Massa who seemed to be struggling to keep the McLaren driver at bay. On lap 2 Massa overcooked it and left the door wide open for Hamilton who duly took advantage. However, the recovering Massa skipped over the chicane and tapped straight into Hamilton. The Brit was sent into a spin and had to rejoin at the back of the field while Massa went off into the distance.

This is a more difficult incident to judge because clearly Hamilton was disadvantaged from what was arguably an avoidable accident while Massa gained by cutting across the chicane. I don’t think Hamilton was completely blameless however. Even though Massa was out of shape coming into the entry to the chicane, Hamilton must have known that Massa would still be right there on the exit.

As such, Hamilton could have left more room for Massa. You can well say that Hamilton didn’t need to because he was ahead and Massa skipped the chicane. But for me, the pair were clearly racing. I think there must always be some leeway for a driver to come off the circuit if he finds himself in a pickle coming up the a chicane. I defended Hamilton for doing this in Belgium, so I will accept Massa’s right to cut the chicane as he did.

So Hamilton could have left more space for Massa, while Massa could have backed off a bit. Both could have avoided the accident, but neither chose to take the evasive action. For me, this is a 50–50 incident, the definitive racing incident.

However, given that it was 50–50 and Hamilton came out worse, I can see why the stewards may have wanted to penalise Massa. If I were a steward I may have felt that I needed to penalise Massa. But if I penalised Massa, I would probably have to penalise Hamilton for the first corner incident to balance it all out. I fear that this is what the stewards did.

What they should have done, though, is say, “racing is racing, let’s just carry on.” Seemingly, racing is no longer allowed in Formula 1.

As if we needed any more proof that there is something seriously wrong with the processes in Formula 1, then came the penalty for Bourdais. Now, I went to bed after the race had finished to catch a few more hours of sleep. When I woke up, the first thing I did was check BBCi to see if the stewards had penalised anyone. I had a bad feeling in my waters about it. It’s come to something when you can no longer trust the stewards to leave a reasonable race result the way it is.

When I saw that Bourdais had been penalised, I was disappointed, but I can’t say I was surprised. In fact, I kind of expected it. That shows just how bad the situation has become.

For my money, there is absolutely no way that you can say that Sébastien Bourdais was in the wrong in any way, shape or form whatsoever. He had come out of the pits minding his own business. Felipe Massa was the one who turned straight into him as if there was no-one there. Massa was the one who moved in the direction of Bourdais, who was ahead and racing for position.

From the one and only television angle we have seen so far, it looks as though Bourdais was on the kerb and he had nowhere else to go. Bourdais himself says, “I don’t know what I was supposed to do basically. I could have unrolled the red carpet and given him the corner. That is the only thing I could have done.” From the evidence we have seen so far, I have to agree with him.

Like the Hamilton first corner incident, this is something we see time and time again throughout the season, literally on a race-by-race basis. This is something that we see in almost every race, and it has become part of the sport to see who comes out in front when one person is exiting the pits and the other was on the racetrack.

The stewards’ explanation for penalising Bourdais is apparently that he “did not back off enough”. Why should Bourdais have backed off? He was racing for position. Presumably he was supposed to defer to the precious Ferrari. If ever you wanted clear evidence of a “red car rule” at play in F1, this is it.

For me, the Japanese Grand Prix is yet further proof that Formula 1 has become far too bogged down in penalties for the sport to remain credible. This is the “choose your own result” culture, where stewards and fans alike have begun nitpicking every little minor misdemeanour on the track in an attempt to justify their own favoured race result. Formula 1 is no longer a competition of racing. It is a competition of bureaucracy.

From what I have been reading on respected website Grandprix.com, the job of FIA steward has become a jolly for Max’s mates under Mosley’s leadership. It seems to be brimful of Mosley’s allies from the WMSC and those who voted for him in the General Assembly. The steward’s job is seen as a “perk”. There have even been instances where there have been stewards who have never even watched a grand prix motor race! And boy, can you tell.

The story of the latter half of this season has been bungled steward’s decision after bungled steward’s decision. This ranges from the Bus Stop controversy to the Rosberg incident in Singapore to today’s unmitigated mess. It is easy to construct conspiracy theories, but I think this is as much down to incompetence as anything else. But what else can you expect when the FIA has a thoroughly poisonous person as its President, filling the steward’s job with his chums no matter what their level of expertise is?

This nanny state F1 needs to be stopped. The powers that be are currently obsessing themselves with increasingly bizarre ideas such as the “Curse” / KERS system, standard engines and a spec series. Well if you ask me the cars aren’t the problem because the on-track action this year has been top-notch in my view.

The real problem with F1 is that we can no longer have confidence in a race result until several hours after the chequered flag. Any number of increasingly unpredictable penalties can be meted out for flimsy reasons. Max Mosley has filled the steward’s room with a bunch of bureaucrats who don’t like racing but love pretendy court cases. Mosley likes gets a thrill out of punishing people in the bedroom, and his cronies love to dish out the punishments at a grand prix. I imagine these people just get a massive kick out of going around the place thinking, “I changed that race result.” Well I am sick of it.

There needs to be a culture in F1 where we can sit back and let the drivers get on with it. Racing is racing. I am not saying get rid of all penalties. But the stewards need to seriously look and think to themselves, does this really merit a drive-through? Too often nowadays drivers are penalised for petty reasons, and the amount of penalties given out goes up and up all the time.

I was listening to the BBC’s Chequered Flag podcast earlier today and they made a brilliant point. No-one came away from Dijon in 1979 saying that anyone should have been penalised. People just sat back and enjoyed the excellent racing. Today pathetic people would say, “oh he went off the race track”, “he caused an avoidable banging of the wheels”, “oh he got barged off”.

It does amaze me that the powers that be claim to be doing everything they can to encourage good racing and overtaking. But when any good racing ever does happen, a driver gets penalised for it! Okay, maybe drivers take risks every so often. But that is the point of overtaking! An overtaking move is supposed to be a risky manoeuvre! It wouldn’t be special and important otherwise. If drivers are penalised for taking risks, we might as well pack up, go home and give up on motor racing completely.

Punishments have a place in F1. But there should be much more of an arms-length approach. Drivers should be penalised only for egregious attempts to gain an advantage and for instances where there is a clear intention to pull off a dangerous manoeuvre. If we are talking about Schumacher in Jerez 1997 or Rascassegate, then throw the book at them. But Hamilton today? An honest mistake that was punished enough by natural events on the racetrack.

Unfortunately, Formula 1 has become a judged event, as open to interpretation and abuse as figure skating. It ought to be a sport where the winner is determined by what goes on on the racetrack, not in the stewards’ room. Sadly, those days are long gone and my patience with Formula 1 is wearing thinner by the race.

There could hardly be a greater contrast to last year’s race at Fuji. We had a stonking last-lap battle between Kubica and Massa where they were barging each other, banging wheels, cutting chicanes and using run-off areas all over the shop. And that was great fun racing and it was rightly left alone by the stewards. Today, a Formula 1 driver will get a drive-through penalty for as much as giving his rival an evil stare.

I was amazed by what Fernando Alonso did in qualifying. It really was a dirty tactic worthy even of King Dirty Tactic himself, Michael Schumacher. But I could not help admiring the genius of it. It was not dangerous like Rascassegate, and Alonso had the brains to work out exactly how long he needed to stay in the box so that he could get a lap in but Hamilton couldn’t. I have to admire the cleverness of it.

While Alonso’s stunt looked bad on television, it has since transpired that it was a kind of ‘tit-for-tat’ payback for Hamilton breaking team policy by leading the train in the fuel burn phase when it was Alonso’s turn. Apparently they take it in turns so that the advantages even out, but Hamilton’s competitive side got the better of him and he became greedy.

The fallout has been nasty in the extreme. It looks as though all kinds of relationships have been ruined. Of course, Hamilton and Alonso seem to have had a proper falling out now. Alonso’s relationship with the McLaren team looks dead and buried, with strong rumours that he has decided he will move to another team for next year. Even the relationship between Hamilton and Ron Dennis has gone sour, with reports of an exceptionally angry exchange of words on the team radio.

It is difficult to know who, or what, to point the finger at. It looks as though Hamilton instigated it, but should it be a surprise when an extremely competitive individual grabs every opportunity he can? Alonso could have risen above it but his “payback” was harsh.

An interesting theory links back to one of McLaren’s biggest weaknesses — the lack of flexibility in their strategies. We have seen some poor strategy from McLaren this season, with notable backfires in Monaco and Canada.

Clive at the excellent Formula 1 Insight blog reckons that McLaren’s undoing was their decision to stick to their original strategy so rigidly when they could have just adapted it to cope with what Hamilton had done. Let’s face it. Asking a competitive driver with the adrenaline pumping to let his team mate through is surely like moving a mountain.

There have even been plenty of people blaming the qualifying format, and I certainly sympathise with that view as well. If it wasn’t for that ridiculous fuel burn-off phase then none of this probably would have happened.

I struggle to understand why McLaren as a constructor was penalised in the way it was. I can fully understand why Alonso was moved back five grid positions. But why McLaren were unable to score Constructors’ points, and suffered the humiliation of being barred from the podium ceremony, I do not get. (Incidentally, does this mean that officially Hamilton won the race in a non-existent car?!)

Some of the commenters at F1Fanatic reckon that McLaren was punished for not acknowledging that Alonso was in the wrong. But if that is so, surely the penalty is rather harsh?

In fact, given McLaren’s large lead in the Constructors’ Championship, and the fact that we are nearing the end of the season, it looks suspiciously as if it was designed to artificially bring Ferrari back into the hunt. After all, even with this penalty, McLaren lead the Championship by 19 points. Without the penalty, that would be a downright intimidating 34 points.

This has further increased the perception that penalties handed out in F1 are inconsistent and unfair. F1 Insight made reference to the random penalty generator, and that was before we learned what the punishment actually was.

This situation is understandable in one sense, because I don’t recall anything like what Alonso did happening before. The closest comparison was Rascassegate, but most agree that this is not as serious as that. Like I said, the five place penalty was probably about right, but where did the FIA pluck the McLaren punishment from? They really do make it up as they go along.

During the commentary, Damon Hill quipped that the FIA were one step away from introducing the Naughty Chair. Michael Schumacher certainly made the podium his personal “naughty step” once or twice in his career. Maybe it would be better just to put the drivers on a stand and let the crowds throw rotten tomatoes as they see appropriate. It would certainly avoid all of this random penalty business.

Still, Ron Dennis has hinted that McLaren may not appeal the decision. Perhaps this is wise because, (rightly or wrongly) the media seems to want to see McLaren punished for the Stepneygate goings-on (even though it was not their fault) and for perceived bias against both Alonso and Hamilton (yeah, biased against both drivers — that’s the media’s logic for ya).

Perhaps it would be wise for McLaren to take this on the chin, then use the three-week break to lick their wounds and rebuild bridges. When Ron Dennis was interviewed on ITV after the race, he looked absolutely shattered — emotionally drained and fed up with the events of the past few months. I hope he has a good holiday, because he undoubtedly needs it. As Sidepodcast noted:

…you do have to ask what big Ron has to do to catch a break these days? The poor man lurches from crisis to crisis, firefighting at each turn, yet none of it is a result of any wrongdoing by the man himself.

Finally, a word on Pitpass, who have once again completely blown this whole thing out of proportion by yet again predicting the death of F1. They said that after Rascassegate and it was of course nonsense. This is fantastic entertainment, and there is no doubt that recent events have got people interested in F1 like never before.

I don’t buy that. Michael Schumacher is famous because he is a good Formula 1 driver. Formula 1 isn’t famous because Michael Schumacher was dominant. There are probably a great many sportsmen who are dominant in their field, but are completely unknown because their field is anonymous. Formula 1 was big before Michael Schumacher and it will be big after Schumacher. It might even be bigger in his absence as we see closer competition.

Michael Schumacher is unquestionably the most successful Formula 1 driver in history. He was just one victory short from having as many wins as the two next most successful drivers (Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost) put together. Dizzyingly, he has won more than a third of the 250 races he has entered.

He also has more pole positions, more front-row starts, more fastest laps than anyone else (and actually more than the next two drivers — Prost and Nigel Mansell — put together), more podiums than anyone else, led more laps, scored more points and — of course — won more World Championships than anyone else. Put simply, he has achieved every record worth setting, and then some.

What is also incredible about Michael Schumacher is that he has looked capable of winning every single World Championship since 1994 (apart perhaps from 1996 when he was driving a dog of a Ferrari — and he even managed to score a good few race victories in that).

But these records are just lists of numbers. You can argue that a lot of this is just down to the nature of modern-day Formula 1 racing. In the 1950s and 1960s there were far fewer races per season — sometimes in the single figures compared to today’s eighteen in a season.

So what about Schumacher’s actual racing? This is where there is great debate about Michael Schumacher’s status as one of the sport’s true greats. The phrase “flawed genius” is a bit of a cliche, but it might as well have been invented for Michael Schumacher. It is difficult to think of a more controversial driver. Almost all of the most negative publicity in Formula 1 over the past decade and a half has involved Michael Schumacher in some form or another — last year’s exploding Michelin tyres at the US Grand Prix being the exception.

It was beginning to feel as though Schumacher was mellowing in recent years. And then came Rascassegate, where Michael Schumacher controversially parked his car on the track during qualifying at Monaco to prevent Fernando Alonso setting a faster time.

You can clearly see his movement in the steering wheel — he starts to steer left in the middle of a right turn. Jackie Stewart said, “This was too blatant. When you see it in slow motion, turning the wheel one way and then the other, he had plenty of time to do something.”

The incident brought back a lot of bad memories from the past decade. The July issue of F1 Racing magazine listed some of Schumacher’s transgressions. The list is long.

• Britain 1994 — Disqualified and banned for two races after failing to take his stop-go penalty for overtaking on the warm-up lap
• Australia 1994 — Crashed into Damon Hill to ensure victory in the 1994 Drivers’ Championship
  
• 1994 season — Suspect software found on the Benetton that Schumacher drove
• Brazil 1995 — Accusations that Schumacher delibrately put on weight for the twice-yearly weight check so that he could race underweight
• Belgium 1995 — Blocking moves lead to the introduction of the ‘one move’ agreement where drivers can only move once to prevent being overtaken
• Europe 1997 — Drove into Jacques Villeneuve in an attempt to secure the Drivers’ Championship. “You’ve hit the wrong part of him my friend!,” said commentator Martin Brundle. Williams put Villeneuve’s car on display to show the mark left by Schumacher’s tyre.
  
• Britain 1998 — Wins the race in the pit lane by taking his stop–go penalty after crossing the finish line
• Canada 1998 — Forces Frentzen to leave the track by abruptly joining the racing line after a pit stop, leading to the introduction of the pit lane exit line that cannot be crossed
• Belgium 1998 — Accuses David Coulthard of “trying to fucking kill me” after crashing into the back of the Scot
• Austria 2000 — Following a shunt, manoeuvres his car into a dangerous position in an attempt to get the race red-flagged and re-started
• Austria 2001 — Team-mate Rubens Barrichello forced by Ferrari to pull over to let Schumacher through on the last corner
  
• Germany 2001 — Once again moves his car into a dangerous position in an attempt to get the race red-flagged — this time successfully
• Austria 2002 — Barrichello again forced to let Schumacher pass on the final corner — this time for the win. The spectators were furious. This leads to the “ban” on team orders
  
• USA 2002 — A failed attempt at a “manufactured dead heat”. Some say it is payback for Austria. Once again, the fans are furious — and of all places, the USA is the one place this should not happen
• Europe 2003 — Successfully encourages track marshals to push his beached car back on to the race track
• Britain 2004 — Deliberately spins in quali 1 to miss the rain expected in quali 2
• Australia 2005 — Yet again helped out by marshals who choose to ignore Nick Heidfeld who is also beached
• Monaco 2006 — Rascassegate

The BBC has another list here.

What you have here is a man who is determined to win at all costs. Not all of these incidents were methodically planned in advance. Many of them happened when Schumacher was under great pressure. These decisions were made quickly. Schumacher is a quick thinker, and he knows how to make the best out of a bad situation. Unfortunately, it has left this otherwise outstanding driver with a somewhat tarnished reputation; a reputation as an ruthless, intimidating cheat.

Many argue that this is what you need to become a seven times World Champion. You need a bit of aggression, a do-or-die attitude, a notion that you must win at all costs. It’s just unfortunate that this trait has overshadowed his achievements.

People point at the fact that Ayrton Senna was hardly a clean racer either. He was known for stooping to low levels in order to win, probably most controversially when he crashed into his own team mate and championship rival, Alain Prost in order to win the Drivers’ Championship. Jacques Villeneuve might be known for his outspoken rants, but I think he had it spot on when he was asked about Michael Schumacher in an interview for the September issue of F1 Racing.

Michael simply isn’t a great champion because he’s played too many dirty tricks and because he isn’t a great human being. Yes, Senna played dirty tricks, too, but he did it with more class, more integrity. When he took Prost out at Suzuka in 1990, he said he was going to do it before the race. So, unlike Michael, who ridiculously insisted he was innocent at Monaco this year, Senna said, ‘Yes, I did it. But I told you before the race that I was going to do it.’ That’s very different from what Michael did at Monaco and Jerez [in 1997] and Adelaide [in 1994]. Senna wasn’t lying to his fans. Michael was.

Another dimension of the Michael Schumacher debate that has cropped up this weekend is the fact that it is difficult to remember any great overtaking manoeuvres that he has made. I was thinking the same thing myself before this weekend. Schumacher is certainly quick at getting a car around a circuit, but when he actually has to race other cars? That’s more tricky.

But in retrospect I think that might be an unfair criticism. Even today we saw a few great moves from him. Nevertheless, it has to be said that Ferrari and Michael Schumacher preferred to make gains in position through having a superior pitstop strategy rather than taking a risk on the circuit. This might be the prudent thing to do from Schumacher’s point of view, but it is a very unattractive way to win a race.

Then add in to the equation all of the races that Schumacher has won from pole position. This is another one of Schumacher’s incredible records. He has done it a staggering 37 times. Sometimes it was all too easy for him to win races, particularly in 2002 and 2004. The dominance is not good for the sport. I cannot remember a great deal of the early part of this decade.

When Schumacher hasn’t had such a dominant car it has sometimes felt like he is a bit rusty at actually racing. Nevertheless, Schumacher’s ability to make his way through the field so easily if he happened to start at the back of the grid for whatever reason is pretty much unparalleled. As far as overtaking goes, I’ll give Schumacher the benefit of the doubt.

Another, kind of related, criticism of Schumacher is that for most of the time he has been in the best car. This was certainly true for some seasons. But were the Benettons of 1994 and 1995 really the best cars? Damon Hill and Jacques Villeneuve benefited more from their utterly dominant Williams cars in 1996 and 1997.

The Ferrari of 1996 certainly wasn’t the best car in the field. Ferrari might have had the prestige, but it was in a horrendous barren spell which had seen little substantial success for the team since the 1970s. And Michael Schumacher can certainly take much of the credit for building Ferrari into a team of world beaters by the 2000s.

But it is true that Michael Schumacher has had little real competition. Formula 1 in days gone by has had so many greats — Prost, Senna, Clark, Stewart, Fangio and so on. But the past ten years has been a barren spell, Schumacher aside of course. Maybe this is genuinely because Michael Schumacher is simply head and shoulders above everybody else.

But really, where was his competition? In the 1990s the closest he had to a championship rival was Damon Hill, and Hill can hardly be considered one of the sport’s very greatest. And Jacques Villeneuve certainly can’t. After Mika Häkkinen won his back-to-back titles in the late 1990s, Michael Schumacher literally had no rivals for years. Now we have a crop of young promising drivers — Kimi Räikkönen and particularly Fernando Alonso look as though they have great futures ahead of them.

We’ve seen a few good seasons of Alonso versus Schumacher, so you can’t accuse Schumacher of running away as soon as the competition got tough. But everybody will remember the way he would never allow a competitive driver to be his team mate. The list of Schumacher’s team mates is hardly a hall of fame: Johnny Herbert, Eddie Irvine, Rubens Barrichello, Felipe Massa. Then there is the fact that the entire Ferrari team was built around Schumacher’s Championship hopes. The team would do everything in its power to manipulate the result even if it meant a gain of just one point for Schumacher.

Now that Kimi Räikkönen has joined Ferrari, Michael Schumacher has jumped ship. There was an opportunity for Michael Schumacher’s talent to be measured against a genuinely quality driver racing in identical machinery. But Schumacher denied the fans a chance to judge his ability in a competitive environment. So we’ll never know. What a great shame.

Schumacher didn’t like racing. He only liked winning.

So will Michael Schumacher mainly be remembered for his amazing skill or for his questionable tactics? I think the fact that the debate even exists means that we already know the answer.

Update: Schumi comes under fire from Hill.