A few thoughts on this one.
o If you subtract every result where he was accused of or even suspected of, or even where you personally suspected him of, cheating... and leave what was left as his legacy... could you hand on heart say that there was any driver better than him over the period of his career ?
o Schumacher and his team rode right on the edge of the envelope and occasionally went over it. So many others did too and you don't need to go back that far - Jenson Button ran with an illegal fuel tank and was banned for a period of time. Fernando Alonso ran with an illegal mass damper system which was acknowledged to have won him a championship. In the early 1990s, the electronics on the cars were so complex that the FIA readily acknowledged that they were incapable of knowing whether they were legal or not ! How many drivers then were running cars beyond the envelope I wonder. When you go further back to the 1980s and earlier, the level of scrutiny was far less than today and it doesn't take a genius to recognize that brilliant engineers like Colin Chapman [whose capabilities were far more advanced than the organizers] were constantly dancing on a knife edge of legality with every innovation they introduced. To negate everything that Schumacher accomplished because of his suspected infringements in a sport where the risk of infringement is so great and the scrutiny has never been more thorough is to do the guy a gross injustice.
o Schumacher is accused of dangerous driving and putting the lives of others in danger. That he did it is undeniable. Was he the only F1 driver to have done that ? In fact, can we name a driver that didn't at some stage or other put his own and fellow competitors' lives in danger ? We can cite the Senna/Prost incidents, but what of Kimi Raikkonen's trip through a cloud of smoke at Eau Rouge in Belgium... bravery or wrecklessness ? What of the grid going full chat in monsoon conditions into the first corner when they know in advance that they would be unable to stop their cars if they encountered a stationery car at 90 degrees to their direction of travel ? Is that not dangerous driving ? We can say that Schumacher should not have done what he did... and that's quite right. He was severely punished let's not forget, loosing a WDC for one piece of madness... but we need to put this in context. When a Grand Prix driver steps into his contemporary car today he is threading a very fine line between what's dangerous and what's not. You cannot even draw intention into the equation because a driver involved a very wet start will know that they have the potential to seriously injure or kill somebody... they do have the option to pull over and not race. So, again, should all of Schumacher's achievements be scratches because of this ?
Its very difficult to argue that given equal equipment and challenging conditions, Schumacher at the top of his game was peerless... and peerless against a whole plethora of adversaries.
QOT says that the Germans are blind to Schumacher's indiscretions implying that everywhere else in the world he's seen as a villain. I think you'll find that most Italians would disagree with that... and fans in many other nations too. Schumacher's reputation suffered in this country more than anywhere else because he is German. If he was British, I wonder would he be where he is on greatest driver polls taken in this country. I wonder would we feel differently about how we relate his indiscretions against his achievements. If he was dead, would we still concentrate on the tiny number of lowlights and not the mind boggling number of highlights.
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