F1: the comeback that never was

If Formula One wanted a diversion from the potential horrors of a serious accident, the announcement that Michael Schumacher would return, even if only for a few races, was that diversion.

But Massa's recovery has, thankfully, proceeded better than anyone thought possible when the hole in his helmet was found to have been over a hole in his head. Initial fears for the performance of his left eye were also proved to be unfounded. So instead of going to Paris for monitoring and possible operations, he flew to Brazil where he is already planning his return to an F1 cockpit.

In the meantime, the fuss over Schumacher's drives in an outdated F1 car which we first reported several days before it was generally spotted, and his attempted manipulation of the rules to be allowed to test a current car (opposed, quite rightly in my view, by Williams) have dominated F1 coverage, even pushing news of BMW's withdrawal and the signing of a new Concorde agreement off most sports pages where F1 has to compete with dozens of other sports for a fraction of the space dedicated to soccer.

But all along, we said that Schumacher was not fit enough to take the drive. His play-date at Mugello caused him obvious pain. And now, it's been confirmed despite (or, perhaps, in part because of) a punishing training regime he put himself through once the drive was booked. But now, acting on doctor's advice - one newspaper reporting that the doctor told him there was "no chance" of a return to Formula One in the light of his age and a neck injury sustained whilst riding a motorbike - Schumacher has said that he will not, in fact, return.

That puts Ferrari's nearly-man, Luca Badoer in the hot seat. If Formula One has any equivalent to Japan's salarymen, Badoer is it. He's been a Ferrari test driver for ten years. In fact, a former F1 driver, he's not raced in the series for a decade but he has raced in many other formulae over that time. But he's never raced a Ferrari F1 car - and he's 38 years old.

Some commentators and bloggers are suggesting that Schumacher realised he couldn't win and therefore chickened out. That, in my view, is a ridiculous opinion. In fact, the damage to his neck is not muscular - it's fractures and, after five months, they are not properly healed and physiotherapy cannot be fully done until it is. The decision to even test was frankly dumb: but in the emotional turmoil of seeing his protege in a coma, albeit induced, he did something that he is not famous for - he made an emotional decision. He said, when agreeing to take the drive, that his decision was dependent on the outcome of testing and medical opinion. That was not a get-out. There is no doubt: put the man in a car and he'll drive the wheels off until something breaks: the car, his opponents or, in this case possibly, his neck.

And even if his neck could survive the punishing street circuit at Valencia with its bumps over the bridge, the harsh reality is that a crash could, easily, have put him in a wheelchair.

No one could accuse me of being a Schumacher fan. Yet, curiously, this decision actually makes him seem, almost, likeable. Who would have ever thought he could be vulnerable.

The people who will be most disappointed are the estimated 10,000 people who rushed to buy tickets for the Valencia GP when MS's return was announced. With luck, the FIA will reverse the Alonso ban for the Valencia race so that the Spanish fans have someone to cheer.