From the Pulpit

The midday sun was shining brightly and my friend was reading the Sunday papers in his garden. By his right hand was a tall glass of gin 'n' tonic, over plenty of ice, with a hefty dash of Angostura bitters and loads of lemon zest, just how he liked his G&Ts. Lunch was beginning to smell good.

Nearby, his seven-year-old son was racing the neighbour's kid round and round on their bikes. It was a hot day - too hot for mowing lawns, for example. So the peals of children's laughter - oh, and the clink of ice cubes against cold glass - were the only sounds my friend could hear. Idyllic.

Suddenly, one of his son's shouts brought him up short. Cutting a corner, and overtaking his playmate in so doing, the lad cried: "I'm going to cheat - like Schumacher!"

My friend says he can't remember ever talking to his seven-year-old about Michael's many skirmishes with Formula One fair play, and he was therefore sufficiently disturbed by the fact that a normal healthy English kid would cite Schumi as the archetype of cheating in 21st century sport that he related the story to me the next time we met.

The saddest thing about this little story is that we all know exactly where my friend's boy was coming from. And so it was that, on the Monday following the 2006 Italian Grand Prix, the headlines in not only English newspapers but newspapers everywhere were overwhelmingly of the 'Flawed genius retires' variety. And the valedictory stories that followed examined the 'flawed' bit in every bit as much detail as they wallowed in the 'genius' bit. Sad.

No, make that very, very, very sad. How could things have come to this? How could the fresh-faced 22-year-old who, at Spa-Francorchamps in 1991, his first ever Grand Prix, had qualified Eddie Jordan's beautiful Jordan-Ford 191 so brilliantly, end up loved and hated in almost equal measure 15 years later?

How is it that, a decade-and-a-half after that astonishingly auspicious F1 debut, our 37-year-old seven-time champion has become an object of open derision among not only a sizeable minority of F1 fans and a sizeable majority of F1 pressmen, but also, indubitably, among the overwhelming majority of his fellow F1 drivers?

The good name of Ayrton Senna, who was just as brilliant and every bit as ruthless as Michael has been, has been protected by his untimely death - what Jacques Villeneuve calls "the James Dean factor". Thankfully - and with just three races left in Michael's F1 career, and with F1 as safe as it is these days, I feel pretty confident in writing this - Schumacher will enjoy no such protection.

In fact, his reputation will probably get worse before it gets better, as mechanics and engineers and goodness-knows-who-else one by one retire and, in their memoirs, begin to blow the whistle on ruses - lets call them "nefarious, various" - that may or may not have been hatched and even enacted at Benetton and/or Ferrari these past 15 years.

But we'll cross those bridges when we come to them. In the meantime, let's look at Michael's here-and-now. Let's look at, for example, why it was that, a few minutes after he'd made his live-on-TV farewell speech at Monza, I overheard, in the paddock, one driver stage-whisper to another: "Did you hear Michael's speech? I nearly puked." And let's look at why the other driver didn't argue with that at all, but readily agreed.

Let's look, indeed, at the extraordinary fact that, as I said earlier, Michael Schumacher has become an object of open derision among the overwhelming majority of his fellow F1 drivers.

Flashback to August 25, 2006. We're in Turkey, and FIA race director Charlie Whiting is chairing the drivers' briefing, as he does at every Grand Prix. That evening, one of the drivers present gave me a blow-by-blow account of what went on. This is it:

Whiting whistles through the regulars - 'Please watch out for the blue flags, guys' etc etc - before coming to Any Other Business.

'I want to raise a point,' says Pedro de la Rosa.

Pedro de la Rosa (McLaren) and Michael Schumacher (Ferrari) in the 2006 Hungarian Grand Prix © XPB/LAT

Everyone present knows what Pedro's point is going to be, and they aren't about to be disappointed. What follows is a polite but fearless criticism from the veteran Spaniard of the veteran German's race tactics at the previous Grand Prix, in Hungary.

'We've dealt with that, Pedro. It was a racing incident,' says Whiting, trying to keep the peace.

Suddenly, all hell breaks loose.

Nick Heidfeld: 'If it was a racing incident, then why did you back off and let Pedro back past you after you'd cut the corner, Michael? That showed you knew you'd done something wrong, or you'd have stayed ahead of him.'

Everyone: 'Exactly, yeah.'

A pause. Silence.

Alex Wurz: 'Doesn't it bother you that everyone here - some of us with 50, 100 or, like you, even 200 Grands Prix behind us - agrees with Pedro and no-one with you, Michael? Doesn't that make you wonder that perhaps you might be wrong?'

Rubens Barrichello: 'Why don't you say something, Michael?'

Not a word from the seven-times champion.

An angry atmosphere pervades the room. Ralf mutters something to his brother, in German, a language my source cannot speak. I don't therefore know what Ralf said, or what Michael replied, save that it clearly annoyed him. His answer, barked out of the side of his mouth to his little bro, also in German, was icily curt.

Jarno Trulli (his voice shrill with fury): 'Okay, well, let's build a bloody wall at that corner for next year, shall we? That way, no-one will be able to cut it. Then we'll see whether you'll finish the race, Michael. Okay?'

Michael (pointing at Trulli): 'Shut up, you, or else.'

Whiting intervenes, and manages to restore calm. The meeting breaks down. And, as the drivers emerge - and now it's my own eyes that are the witnesses, not my source's, for I was in the paddock as the meeting ended - it's noticeable that our heroes are walking in groups of twos and threes, chatting conspiratorially.

Only Michael is on his own, marching purposefully past any reporter who might seek to waylay him, his face a rictus of enraged discontent, his mouth pursed into the shape of a cat's anus (his trademark paralinguistic trait when he's genuinely livid).

Okay, end of anecdote. There are just three races still to run in Michael's Grand Prix career. Yes, good manners will dictate that his last three drivers' briefings will be comparatively civil affairs, the widely vilified penalty handed down to Fernando Alonso by the Monza stewards notwithstanding.

Michael Schumacher clinched the championship record of Juan Manuel Fangio in 2002 © Reuters

And, over just three weekends of Schumi-watching, there won't be time to solve the riddle we've all failed to get to the bottom of these past 200-odd races: namely, why and how is it that a man who is happily married to a loving wife, who has two great kids, who can sometimes be touchingly courteous to autograph hunters (I once saw him crouching to sign the race programme of a disabled teenager, and there he remained, hunkered down at wheelchair height, chatting to the lad for 15 long minutes), who gives oh-so-munificently to charity (Schumi's US$10 million donation was the largest by a private individual to the Tsunami Relief Fund), can also be capable of such base and boorish behaviour during Grand Prix weekends, both on the track and off it?

In the Times newspaper of Friday September 15, the usually excellent Simon Barnes wrote a column (cleverly entitled 'Remembrance of Dings Past Will Cast Doubt Over Schumacher's Greatness') that attempted to answer this vexing question. But Barnes's answer was muddled, for it sought to compare Schumi to Marcel Proust, the French intellectual, novelist, essayist and critic. "Can you say that 'A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu' loses its claims to greatness because the author financed a male brothel? Most people would say no, certainly not," wrote Barnes.

Well, yes, of course. But the analogy is hopelessly skewed. What Proust did in the sack - or, more exactly for the purposes of our argument, what arrangements he made for his associates to do in the sack - should of course have no influence over how his greatest literary works are perceived. Or, to put it in a nutshell, Proust's private life has nothing to do with how we should regard his public life. Or, even more succinct, his life shouldn't downgrade his works.

But there's nothing wrong with Schumi's life, by which I mean his private life. No, his private life is a paragon of virtue. It's his public deeds, in other words his works rather than his life, which are so unsatisfactory. He is a Jurgen Klinsmann (German footballer, gentleman, but inventor of the penalty dive), not a Proust. A flawed genius, in fact. And the secret of how he got that way is locked somewhere in the coils of his psyche, or perhaps his soul, unlikely ever to see light of day.

Michael and I have never been friendly. F1 Racing, the magazine for which I have now been editor-in-chief almost 10 years, has always been far too forthright about his failings (as well as his extraordinary gifts) for that to be possible - for, as far as Michael is concerned, you can only be for him or against him. He divides the world's population that way.

Perhaps one day, many years from now, he and I will be able to sit down and thrash it all out over a pie and a pint. But I doubt it. In fact, I don't suppose we'll ever speak again. And I doubt that, if we do, either he or I will be any more certain than we ever were what this strange, troubled, talented, silly man was all about.