Blog: Over on the BBC website, there is a piece by F1 editor Andrew Benson, whose blogs and opinion columns seem to attract comments exhibiting cloying sycophancy or feather-spitting vitriol, with nothing in between.

His latest piece revolves around an ever-controversial topic – that of the motorsport monolith that is Michael Schumacher, and the responses therein are as borderline sectarian as ever.

If you’re not aware of the great man’s achievements at the pinnacle of racing, here’s a brief summary:

Seven world championship titles, two more than the next closest contender in history, Juan Manuel Fangio, and also two more than the combined number of titles lifted by the four other world champions on the current grid.

Ninety-one Grand Prix wins, one short of the total of Alain Prost and Ayrton Senna’s victories combined.

Sixty-eight pole positions, again a record.

That he is statistically the most successful driver the sport has ever seen is not open to question. That he is the best is, of course, subject to debate.

Having retired from Formula One on a high at the end of 2006, there was feverish excitement when he announced he would be returning for three years with the new Mercedes team, world champions at the time, starting in 2010.

Schumacher’s performances are constantly under scrutiny because, with that level of achievement as a precedent, anything other than victory isn’t really on the menu each Grand Prix weekend. It’s like the Beatles releasing a new LP in 1973 and saying ‘If it makes the Venezuelan Top 40 we’ll be happy.’

This piece may have the invidious whiff of a polemic about it and for good reason: I personally never liked Schumacher. I hated his soporific domination of the sport and the fact that my compatriot Eddie Irvine was forced to play second fiddle to him for four seasons (although most of the time he was miles behind anyway).

I also loathed his recourse to winning at any cost, instantly putting me in the same pigeonhole as people like Stirling Moss who think that sportsmanship is important and men wearing straw boaters should open car doors for their lady friends. So I was glad to see the back of him.

However, I cannot deny the man’s staggering raw talent. So when he decided he was coming back, I was older and wiser and have to admit that I was quite pleased. With three seasons having passed, plenty of time for the Bionic Man to require a squirt of WD40 in his joints, the scenario looked all the more interesting. How would he compare to the likes of Hamilton and Vettel?

Well, we all know. Not very well.

I don’t care for the plethora of excuses that the army of Schumi-lovers have trotted out to explain this: he’s old, the cars have changed and his Mercedes isn’t in the same league as the Red Bull or McLaren, and so on.

These are all valid arguments. But in his first career Michael was only behind his team mate, regardless of whom that may have been, on the occasions when they were queuing for the canteen. Nowadays, with equal equipment, he is outclassed by his young team-mate Nico Rosberg more often than he returns the favour.

Michael never needed excuses before, but now he reaches for them at the drop of a Deutsche Vermogensberatung cap. 2010 was the first full season in which he had recorded not a single win, pole position, podium finish or fastest lap.

A year ago I compared Schumacher to a father bursting into his son’s 18th birthday party and trying to prove that he’s ‘still got it’ by downing shots of Jagermeister and gyrating with any women in attendance. Kind of sad.

Schumacher, no matter what anyone says it, has not still got ‘it.’ ‘It’, in his case, being peerless success and the unnerving ability to dominate his team-mate to such an extent you get the impression they’d give him their last pair of clean socks if he asked for them. Yes, he is still an excellent, solid driver, but so is Nick Heidfeld.

In last weekend’s Canadian Grand Prix, we saw the first flash of what made the old Schumacher so great. I will admit that I wanted him to finish on the podium, for reasons of nostalgia if nothing else. But he slid to fourth in the closing stages. How much of this was down to him personally is probably negligible, but I maintain that one decent performance does not a successful comeback make.

I made a comment on Mr Benson’s F1 blog to the same effect and was immediately accused by another user of being ‘incredibly ignorant.’

Ignorant of what? The unwritten rule that requires everyone to mouth platitudes about a comeback that has quite clearly been embarrassingly substandard?

I’ll brace myself for the responses.

Richard Craig runs his own F1 blog and has written for Autosport magazine as well as the F1 Black Book