Michael Schumacher is like Tolkien: he perfected his art to such a degree that he killed his field.

That is, of course, premature; F1 is still going, and fantasy books have rebounded in recent years, but F1 viewing figures are dropping steadily, and The Lord of the Rings was such a definitively perfect genre novel that nobody has ever topped it and probably nobody ever will. It seems to me that Schumacher is so good he’s destroyed F1 as a competetive sport, and thus as entertaining television.

Perhaps Mercedes and BMW will form their own tournament and F1 will be forced to take a few decades off, much like the Star Trek franchise soon will be. Or maybe the fans flocking from motorsport will never come back, and the world will be spared from Formula One’s travelling circus of pollution, for which the atmosphere would have Michael Schumacher to thank.