Formula One is dying on its expensively melting tyres, they say. It's the same guy winning all the time. It's just so boring. Justin Hynes assesses the 'Schumacher effect'.
Nerves jangling, brows anxiously furrowed, the Formula One circus will next weekend make its 2004 debut in Europe. The fraying of nerves, the gritting of teeth will occur because there, in the backyard of Ferrari, just an hour's drive from the Scuderia's Maranello base, Michael Schumacher will try to hammer another nail into the coffin of Formula One.
Having won the season's first three races, the notoriously unpredictable early campaign flyways - though less so in the new one-engine era - Schumacher has caused fragile hearts to skip several beats as the season of 2002 is recalled. Then Schumacher, with 11 race wins and a championship title wrapped up by the 11th race of the season. That year, his flyway record wasn't even as positive as this season, recording two wins from three races.
If the six-time world champion continues his victory march into Europe, where greater development opportunities are supposed to bring rivals into contention, then Formula One is in trouble. For once again, the sport's detractors will sigh noisily and sneer with well rehearsed venom. Formula One is dying on its expensively melting tyres, they say. It's the same guy winning all the time. It's just so boring.
Unfortunately they do have a point. It is boring. Monumentally so when Schumacher was able, in Bahrain, three weeks ago, to open up a 10-second gap at the front after just three laps and then potter around for the remaining 70-odd tours waving to his mates, sending picture messages of the nice new circuit to his wife on his sparkly new phone, and giggling away to Jean Todt on the car to pit radio, devising new and ever more fiendish ways to annoy Rubens Barrichello by mucking up his pit stops.
And as he stood atop that podium spraying rose water over his celebrating team, fearful memories of that 2002 mean season came flooding back.
Eleven wins from 17 races. His team-mate winning four of the remaining six. It was a disaster. The wailing went on and on and on. But it was swiftly forgotten as a welter of rule changes and better product from the opposition resulted in a cracker of a season last year.
Schumacher, taken all the way to the final race by McLaren's Kimi Raikkonen. Pushed into nervousness and error by Juan Pablo Montoya in his pretty damn quick Williams. It was, it seems, all a bit premature.
Indeed, ultimately, last year's close fight was perhaps the worst thing that could have happened. As 2003 turned into new year testing and lap times across Europe's test tracks were shattered, wild improbably dreams began to boil in the fevered imaginations of the sport's watchers.
Williams, McLaren, Renault, BAR, all had competitive, maybe even world beating cars. The young upstarts, Montoya, Alonso, Raikkonen, Button, maybe they could finally start beating old man Schumacher.
And at Maranello, the six-time champion and his coterie of evil geniuses, Todt, Ross Brawn, Rory Byrne and Paolo Martinelli cackled like a coven of witches. In the back room their hideous brew was strengthening nicely and when it was unleashed in Albert Park the opposition was decimated. Ferrari, two seconds quicker in practice, quicker in qualifying, quicker in the race.
The bullet metaphors came rushing, proofed against them, faster than speeding varieties of them, oh just shoot me.But while there are some who probably ache for such an eventuality that would be: a) a little melodramatic and b) missing the point.
Formula One, as those who watch with any fervour or genuine interest, has ever been thus. Teams dominate. For long periods. Williams did it in the 1990s, McLaren in the 1980s. Juan Manuel Fangio won fives titles, four of them back-to-back in the 1950s and he's still reckoned the greatest driver ever. Nigel Mansell won nine of 17 races in 1992, wrapping up the title by the time he reached the 11th event of that season.
It is the way of modern sport, and not just Formula One. In soccer, the English Premiership has been reduced to the level of the running joke that is Scottish football. Two teams dominate,Manchester United and Arsenal sharing the last eight championships between them.
Arsenal, undefeated in 32 games, are on the cusp of an unbeaten season. Yet cross-channel soccer is still invested with an impermeable glamour and newsworthiness that few will gainsay. It is the same all over Europe.
In Spain, Real Madrid tussle with Barcelona, Valencia and Deportivo. In Italy, Milan, Internazionale, Juventus and Roma do battle. In Holland, Ajax and PSV. In Germany, Bayern, Leverkusen and Dortmund.
And Scotland? Celtic are 17 points clear of nearest and only rival Rangers. If the same parameter was to be applied to Formula One, Michael Schumacher would already be winning the Monaco GP, while Montoya et al are tooling around Imola.
Rugby, despite the great claims made for it, is of similar one-dimensionality. A world cup of intolerable duration, peppered with scorelines running into three figures as four totally dominant nations (England, Australia, New Zealand and Australia) pummelled the rest, whose only reason for inclusion was to attempt to con the world into believing that rugby is really a world sport. As is cricket.
Tennis. I give you the Williams sisters, who only relinquished their grip on the game because of injury. The men's game has degenerated into a battle of power and ultimate will, rather than skill and finesse.
Sport, refined, honed, analysed and scientifically processed to the nth for its ability to replicate that refinement. In fact, it probably even invented that distillation.
But despite that refinement, Formula One's popularity continues to increase.
And not just within the strangely imagined TV figures emanating from Bernie Ecclestone's office. Domestic figures wax and wane in small increments, but F1 continues to be a major televisual draw in Ireland, regardless of the performance of our "national" team Jordan, with figures approaching 300,000 spread across all the season's events.
The same cannot be said for rugby or soccer, where figures plummet when national sides (and that includes the dreaded cults of Celtic and Manchester United) fail to appear.
Formula One is far from dead. Michael Schumacher may, like Arsenal, Serena Williams, Tiger Woods keep on winning, but to assign a sport's relevance to the simple numbers game of who finishes first is simplistic, blinkered, ill-informed. Just as below the dominant forces in soccer, tennis, golf, rugby or hurling real sporting drama and intrigue constantly unfolds. And in Formula One those machinations are perhaps even more pronounced.
The sport is often criticised for being a business wrapped in sport.
But it is that blend of power and passion that makes motor racing and Formula One in particular the greatest of sports. The behind the wheel duelling at the very edge of control is backed by behind the scenes jousting of political and financial chicanery worthy of Machiavelli.
The stories beneath and behind Ferrari are wrought of the best sporting endeavour. Jordan's head-swimming tale of its approach to greatness, Icarus-like hubris, its fall from grace and its tenacious battle to survive, the ebb and flow of McLaren's fortunes as it reels from double championship Hakkinen days to the frustrations of aborted cares, blown engines and dashed hopes. BAR's days as playboy of the western world abandoned in favour of monastic application and eventual ascension to the nirvana of the podium.
And within the teams, the drivers, written up, written off, bounced back, hounded out, making it, faking it and often missing one shining chance at greatness, denied by splintered shards of time, the finest and cruellest of cuts.
The headiness of petrol fumes and burning gear oil and rubber are inextricably mixed with the exotic incense of money and power.Formula One is everything sport at its most rarefied should be - glamorous,exciting, nerve-jangling, possessed of an other-worldliness us mere mortals can only touch the hem of.
And in Schumacher that other-worldliness reaches its apogee. It is impossible to say whether he is the greatest of all, but a man heading for an unprecedented seventh world championship title is something to be celebrated.
In the midst of so encompassing a reign it is often easy to become jaded by complacency. But when the time comes that Schumacher bows out, to be inevitably hailed as the greatest of all, I, for one, will be glad to say I saw him race, saw him win, marked the mark of greatness.
Formula One, despite the vicissitudes visited upon it by global fair weather television audiences who demand instant and constant satisfaction, is far from over.
It remains the most thrilling, complex, infinitely variable, intense and satisfying sporting experience there is. All you have to do is watch.