If Nicholas Latifi suffered the embarrassment of being beaten to a points finish by a substitute driver in the same car as him in Italy, the ignominy Mick Schumacher experienced in Brazil was little better.
While team mate Kevin Magnussen brought joy to Haas by claiming a shock pole position for the sprint race, Schumacher started from the tail end of the field. Both drivers had a crack on slick tyres on a drying track at the end of Q1, but Schumacher wasn’t able to get his up to temperature in time, and ended up almost two-and-a-half seconds off his team mate.
This was far from a typical reflection of their relative performances, but it was unhelpfully timed for Schumacher, whose departure from the team was confirmed following that race weekend. A year earlier, Schumacher had been conclusively the team’s better driver, and beat previous team mate Nikita Mazepin by similar margins in some wet qualifying sessions.
Mazepin’s enforced departure from the team halfway through pre-season testing, as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine prompted Haas to sever ties with his father’s company, meant Schumacher suddenly acquired a new, much more experienced and faster team mate in the form of Magnussen. This offered both an opportunity to learn and a tough new benchmark.
Magnussen set the bar high from the off, delivering Haas’ best result for four years in his first race back. Schumacher, who was knocked out in Q2 after lapping half a second off Magnussen, was hit by Esteban Ocon soon after the start and finished out of the points. It got worse for Schumacher at the next weekend in Saudi Arabia, where he missed the race after smashing up his car in qualifying.
While Magnussen picked up points scores in three of the opening four races, a narrative quickly developed around when Schumacher would do the same. Nine races in he was still on zero, but while he had added another costly crash in Monaco and hit Alonso after qualifying in the top 10 at Imola, luck had gone against him at times too. He qualified on the third row in Canada and was running seventh when a hydraulics failure put him out.
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The breakthrough came at Silverstone, unexpectedly, as he laboured with a misaligned steering wheel in qualifying and started 19th on the grid. From there he climbed to eighth in the race. Better followed in Austria where he claimed sixth, urging the team to let him past Magnussen…
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