Stop Taking the Michael.

SO,

Is it just me or is Michael Schumacher taking the piss a little bit?

While he may have achieved legendary status in Formula One, with his innumerate Championships for both Benetton and obviously Ferrari, he seems to still be milking both his former employer and Italian Motorsport in general for whatever he can get.

At 11am this morning, Schumacher jumped off Moto GP World Champion Casey Stoner’s Ducati GP7 to the applause of all around him, as he had set a time just five seconds slower than recent Valencia race-winner Danny Pedrosa around the Spanish circuit.

What I want to know is what Ducati gained out of this?

Ok, there is the exposure of running Herr Schumacher - a demi-God in Italy - on one of their machines, but saying that an ex-F1 driver, no matter how legendary, rode your bike is hardly going to shift 1098s out of the showroom.

So apart from the huge cost of fuelling and booting an 800cc race bike, and the risk of sending out an incredibly valuable machine onto the circuit for two race distances (the German completed 58 laps), Ducati proved nothing, except a willingness to bend over and squeal for Michael Schumacher.

Schumi’s 1.37.89 lap may have impressed, but it just showed his wanton lust for self indulgence now that he has supposedly ducked out of Motorsport, and willingness to exploit the soft spot Italian’s have for him for his own gain.

He said: “I didn’t expect anything, I just wanted to be quicker than last time and I achieved this.

“I’m just doing this for fun. I don’t want to race,”

And this proves my point. He is just having a laugh in his retirement at other people's expense. But not just satisfied with riding the Duke, he has now set his sights on enjoying the machine that he supposedly ‘chose’ not to race this season.

It was announced – while he was still lapping the GP7 - that he will drive the F2007 at Barcelona next week.

Why?

A spokesman for his old employer said: “It’s half for fun, half for technical reasons.”

If you retire from your job at a bakery, you don’t occasionally turn up and eat cakes to see if they taste good. Schumacher ruled himself out of motorsport for the foreseeable future.

He should go home to his castle and his slippers and stop wasting race team’s money on his little self-indulgent lust for ‘fun’.