Now that today’s Monaco Grand Prix is in the record books, with Michael Schumacher finishing a very respectable fifth after starting from the back of the grid, we can look at the question that has been on everyone’s mind… did Michael Schumacher deliberately stop his car on track at the end of qualifying to ensure that he would win the pole?

FIA President Max Mosley said that he wouldn’t go so far as to call it cheating but that armed with all of the information the race stewards, who are fair-minded people, had made a fair decision. He further stated, “You’ve got to take the thing in its context, in the heat of the moment when you are desperately trying to get on the front row of the grid and you’ve got a split second to make a decision.” So there you have it, Mosley doesn’t think it was cheating because Schumacher would have had to think quickly if he was going to cheat. I’m not entirely sure what this implies but perhaps Mosley didn’t have long enough to think about this statement.

However, I do agree with Mr. Mosley that I don’t think Schumacher was trying to cheat. Even though I am not, and never have been, much of a Schumacher fan I think that he is much too smart to make such a blatantly stupid move on purpose. He is the most successful driver of our time and, with all of his experience, if he had really wanted to hold up the field he could certainly have figured out a less obvious way of doing it.

There was a time in the past when I would probably have thought differently, and there may be an element of Karma in the way that Schumacher was judged this weekend, but I don’t think that this was one of Formula One’s better decisions.