WE’LL end up sentimentalising him before the season is out, I’m certain of it. Grand old man of racing. What a great champion he’s been. First and last a racer. Redefined the game. Won’t see his like again. A great sportsman. And finally, we’ll agree that he was a rough diamond and that he failed to suffer fools, but at the end of the day, he was, above all, a great servant of the sport of Formula One.

So, perhaps we had better get ready for Michael Schumacher’s farewell tour before it even starts. And we must be prepared to celebrate not a great servant, but a great master. His mastery of the sport of Formula One was so complete that he came very close to actually destroying it.

Michael Schumacher was 37 in January, 13 years older than the world champion, Fernando Alonso. This is the last year of his contract with Ferrari, with whom he won five successive Formula One championships, making seven in all. He was never truly just a champion: he was always weltmeister. The German term has much more bite. This is his 15th season; he will be the oldest man on the grid.

And so the next few months will be something of a lap of honour, in so far as the word can be used of Schumacher. Mind you, the air is still full of brave talk about victories to come. “The joy comes with competitiveness,” he said. “If all the effort is meaningless, it is just frustrating.”

Last season was a joy-free zone for Schumacher. He added a single victory to bring his tally to 84 — and that was in the Silly Race in the United States, the one when all the real racing cars decided not to race. It was not the sort of victory to inspire the traditional Schumacher Podium Gloat.

But this year, Schumacher cut short his traditional Christmas break, and has been reeling off the laps in testing. Schumacher himself is not looking for a grand-old-buffer-drives-off-into-the-sunset sort of season. Adulation is as acceptable to him as it is to anybody, but it is victory that makes the earth move.

He still talks young and hungry: “There’s one thing in your passport and another thing in your body and brain,” he said. “I don’t have a feeling I’m an old man hopelessly lost against these young guys.”

But this is pre-season talk. This is the time of year when every car is a winner and every driver a champion. At the end of last season, there were signs of weariness and disillusionment in Schumacher. And if the Ferrari fails to do what he wants it to — that is, win every race — then the weariness will return. Schumacher doesn’t suffer slow cars gladly either. There is a feeling with Schumacher that the book has been completed, only the epilogue remains to be written and that only at the author’s insistence.

We have the story, it seems, to be complete already, and it is not about decency and generosity and sportsmanship and being a great servant. Schumacher’s is the most stunning story of sheer ruthlessness in the history of sport. This is both to praise him and to dispraise him; but then nothing in life is wholly straightforward.

Sport is about the search for the winner and Schumacher has won more effectively than any one else. He reduced his long-serving team-mate, Rubens Barrichello — now no longer with him — to a forelock-touching servant of the master. So far so obvious, but his real triumph was to reduce everybody else in the pit lane to the same status.

No one in recent times has dominated a sport as Schumacher dominated Formula One. He made it a personal fiefdom, nothing less. He was, importantly, the best driver around. That helps. He was the best in the dry; more importantly, he was the best in the rain. Enough said.

Formula One is a sport set up for total dominance. The best driver gets the fastest car, the fastest car gets to start at the front. It is a format that Schumacher used to make servants of all lesser drivers and of the entire sport. At his peak with Ferrari, he turned Formula One into a five-year celebration of himself. Not terribly attractive, I suppose, although it is a certainty that we would find many splendid things to celebrate in him had he been British.

Sport is a search for the best and being the best in a competition means you must be willing to beat all the others. All Schumacher did was take this basic view of sport at its face value.

If we are to say farewell to Schumacher the driver this year — the most likely outcome, despite what will certainly be a season-long truffling for rumours to the contrary — let us do so without sentimentalising him or demonising him. Michael Schumacher was the best. Alas.

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