Schumacher's Return is a Great Anti-Climax

Four races into the Formula One season, proof is gradually accumulating that Michael Schumacher is no longer the unconquerable driver he once was.

Michael Schumacher-seven-time Formula One champion's much-hyped comeback is quickly proving an anticlimax. In its place of being carefully thought out, it is beginning to look like the futile idiocy of a middle-aged man who got bored in retirement and who missed racing's adrenaline buzz but who also made the mistake of joking himself that he still has that old magic.

At 41, Schumacher is viewing his age. There's no slip-up how the close face-squeezing fit of his race helmet groups and accentuates the telltale wrinkles around his eyes. The racing corrosion is proving upsetting, hard to shake off. If not he can quickly get back up to speed, F1's most successful driver could, at this rate, go the entire season without winning a race.

Young drivers have easily had his measure, even in the rain where Schumacher's sure touch of the wheel, controlling the love of risk and steady nerves once made him so hard to beat. The feeling of quasi-invincibility that once surrounded Schumacher hasn't followed him out of withdrawal. Now, he simply looks ordinary, a chilly fact that McLaren's Lewis Hamilton indirectly acknowledged this weekend.

"It's just as thrilling as racing with any other driver" was Hamilton's ho-hum answer when asked what it is like to compete against the German who owns a big chunk of F1's records.

The most derogatory evidence of Schumacher's beg off is that his teammate Nico Rosberg, 17 years his junior, is driving brilliantly in precisely the same car.