James Lawton: Schumacher the man of steel delivers a champion's farewell

For many years this phenomenal performer has exerted icy control over his emotions and his ambitions. It is the main reason he is still alive

It is probably not the right time to separate Michael Schumacher the stereotype from the consummate racing driver who long ago drove into the company of Fangio and Moss and Senna. If a man cannot choose his own way to react to the death of his mother, what is he free to do in that part of his life which is supposed to be most impregnably private?

The complication here is that a straw poll of all those who know anything at all about this phenomenal performer would probably have voted around 99 per cent that he would race in the shadow of his loss. For one thing, the assumption fitted easily into the most frequently distributed picture of him: cold, ultimately practical, a machine as much as a man.

Jean Todt, Ferrari's team leader and someone who knows better than most the level of Schumacher's obsession to win, was almost certainly mindful of this when he addressed the issue quite pointedly when facing the world on his driver's behalf after the victory in Imola.

Said Todt: "Michael has shown so many times that he's a wonderful driver and now he has shown he is a man. It is a shame that sometimes people don't want to understand that."

It could be said, of course, that Schumacher does not normally encourage the process too actively. Indeed, it is quite the reverse. A few years ago in Jerez he attempted to deny Jacques Villeneuve his world drivers' title by the brutal recourse of heaving him off the track. He failed but, as no doubt he anticipated when the idea first leaped into his head, suffered no harsher fate than a meaningless loss of the points collected over a completed season – and a comical order to appear in a Road Safety campaign. That was a bit like getting George Bush to sponsor an anti-litter week in downtown Baghdad, but Schumacher complied with his tongue in his cheek and his eyes, like those of a zealot on hold, fixed on the middle distance.

Sentimental Schumacher is not. A man with blood in his veins? To some extent and, because of his style, which includes a clipped and almost weirdly precise English, we have to take Todt's word for it. But to presume that the brilliance of his work, the slavish insistence on perfection, somehow precludes the normal passions and pains of life is a crudity of thought Todt is perhaps right to dispute.

The most relevant question was whether Schumacher could fulfil his professional obligations in a way that did not imply, even in the most glancing way, any lack of respect for a mother he plainly adored and who, as he has often said, gave him immense support as a youthful go-karter.

He did that as he does all else around a racetrack. He raced, after being at his mother's hospital bedside in Cologne, and he won. In doing so, he entirely justified something that is not always quite so guaranteed – that he was doing what was exactly right in the circumstances. This, given all we know of the lady, was entirely consistent with the enthusiastic support she had given him – and all her pride in his extraordinary career. Schumacher's nature, we also know, would have demanded maximum confidence that he could say a proper farewell with the kind of grand prix victory – his 65th – which always made her so proud.

A few years ago England's rugby union wing three-quarter Ben Cohen faced a similar but far from identical dilemma when his father Peter, the victim of a violent assault in the night-club he ran in Northampton, died a few days before his son was due to appear in a big match at Twickenham.

Cohen's first instinct was to play in the match because it was, he believed, what his father would have wanted. But he was talked out of it by his uncle George, England's football World Cup winner. Ben recalls: "He said that my father would only want me to do my best for England and that at the time I couldn't be sure of how all the different pressures would affect me. I might suddenly find myself unable to meet my responsibilities to my coach, my team-mates and, ultimately, my country. It was good advice – and I took it."

Schumacher felt no need for such advice. For many years he has exerted icy control over his emotions and his ambitions. It is the main reason he is still alive.

On Sunday he had to walk carefully the line between respect for his mother and his professional obligations. That he should have met both requirements so brilliantly should have provided not a debate but routine celebration of one of the greatest competitors in the entire history of sport.