Autosport: The Stop Sign

His team must be hoping that he finally sees sense and agrees to hang up his helmet for good.

Here he is, the most talented exponent of his job in the world, with nothing left to prove, multiple world championship trophies to look at and still he's trying to hold back the sands of time. It doesn't make sense. His team know it and his family know it.

Yes they fully understand the passion that makes him want to get in a powerful racing car and drive it to the very edge of his abilities. They know it takes him to a different place, a very addictive place.

But they know also that he's getting a bit old for this, that his reactions cannot be the same as when he was in his twenties, with it all still to do. Combine this with his intensely competitive nature and he's asking for trouble surely?

He's had accidents before. Big ones. But thankfully they left him relatively unharmed. With all the success and all the fruits of that success and still a relatively young man, it's time to call it a day.

He'll have his family around him and he can still be involved in the sport he loves. Just not at the wheel. And he will still have his memories of all those fabulous race wins that began in the early 1990s and extend virtually up to this day.

He will still be able to recall with immense satisfaction that the moment he left the team with which he'd made his name, it stopped winning - for quite some time. And yet the team he joined began winning far more often than it had before. In the super-complex world of Formula 1, that's as near decisive proof of his genius as you're ever going to get.

They say that there are flaws in that genius, that he has weak points. Well maybe he does. But the flaws derive from the very same thing that creates his genius - an almost pathological drive to maximise his immense talent. It makes him do extreme things. But that's what racing is about, surely? You cannot criticise one aspect of him without acknowledging his overall brilliance. It's a package deal.

It has been hard for one of his brilliance not to have felt let down by the team around him when he hasn't won. He's clearly the best in the business, so if he doesn't win it's bound to be someone else's fault.

But while he may have felt that, he certainly has never even come close to suggesting it in public. But we hear plenty of stories of just how hard he pushes the team behind the scenes.

He didn't win immediately in F1. But his brilliance was obvious nonetheless and it didn't take long before the victories began to rack up. The year of 1992 will be remembered as historically very significant when looking back at his career.

But even with such a series of brilliant performances for that team, he still had his doubters. There were those who said he was being flattered by the team, that in reality he was merely very good, but no better than several of his peers. There were tensions within the team centred around him - and he left. He took several key people with him, of course. But that's just the way of things in F1.

What really matters is that he completely demolished the argument that his former team made him look better than he was. If anything, he looked more brilliant than ever in his first season with his new team.

The world championships began to rack up here too, the talent transferred perfectly intact to a brand new environment. The management of this new team gave him more leeway than he'd enjoyed previously, made him feel a more intrinsic part of the whole.

He asked for things that had never been granted to anyone there before - and got them. No questions asked, the management acutely aware of just how much he was bringing to the party. Accommodating his genius was just common sense.

In fact, one wonders if the management didn't in time begin feeling a little uncomfortable about the extent of their reliance on him. For sure, they had a great team around him but still the obvious question formed: what do we do after he's gone?

Maybe the moves they were forced to make to address this question unsettled him, undermined him, who knows? Because he does seem a character that needs to feel cosseted in his team, needs to feel valued. There have been others among his rivals to whom this doesn't apply at all, who were quite happy operating in a war zone within the team. But not this guy.

So maybe the team's need to protect themselves against over-reliance on him was perceived by him as ingratitude - and maybe forced his hand earlier than he planned to. It was an incredibly tricky line for the team to have tread.

But now it's time to call it quits, Adrian. Come on, no more race driving. Just concentrate on building Red Bull a race winner from now on, eh?