While Nicolas Latifi suffered the embarrassment of hitting a substitute driver in the same car in Italy, Mick Schumacher’s humiliation in Brazil was not much better.
Schumacher started at the tail end of the field, while teammate Kevin Magnussen brought Haas joy by claiming a shock pole position for the sprint race. Both drivers had punctures on slick tires at the end of Q1, but Schumacher was unable to get up to temperature in time, and ended up nearly two and a half seconds behind his team-mate.
This was far from a normal reflection of their relative performances, but it was not time for Schumacher, who was confirmed to be out of the team after that race weekend. A year ago, Schumacher was the team’s best driver and beat former team-mate Nikita Mazepin by the same points in some wet qualifying.
Mazepin’s departure from the team midway through pre-season testing, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine prompting Haas to sever ties with his father’s company, Schumacher suddenly found a new, more experienced and faster teammate in the form of Magnussen. This provided both a learning opportunity and a tough new challenge.
Magnussen produced Haas’ best result away from home for four years in his debut season. Schumacher, who lost half a second to Magnussen in Q2, was hit by Esteban Ocon shortly after the start and finished out of the points. The following weekend in Saudi Arabia, Schumacher’s condition worsened, and he crashed his car in the race and missed the race.
While Magnussen scored points in three of the opening four races, a narrative quickly developed as Schumacher did the same. Nine races in him were still at zero, but he added another expensive crash in Monaco and after hitting Alonso in Imola 10, the luck was sometimes against him. He qualified on the third row in Canada and was running seventh when a hydraulic failure forced him out.
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Unexpected success at Silverstone came when he struggled with incorrect steering in qualifying and started 19th on the grid. From there, he moved up to eighth in the race. He followed it up better by claiming sixth in Austria, urging Magnuson, who felt he was holding the team, to pass and his team-mate moved forward after suffering an engine problem.
It looks like Schumacher is finally on his way. However, amid complaints about his performance at Haas, and particularly the damage tally he produced, he failed to build on that progress and, despite reaching the checkered flag in every remaining race, was never again in the points.
It would be easy to exaggerate the difference in performance between the two drivers this season, as Magnussen has only increased his points tally by three points at a time. They were separated by just three cars on the grid at the Grand Prix from their pole position in Brazil. Schumacher’s race ended with a careless move by Daniel Ricciardo, although Schumacher did the same to Latifi at the end.
Schumacher’s performances alongside Magnussen meant that Haas could not make a compelling case to keep him. Crashes early in the season didn’t particularly help the cause and Magnussen scored more than twice as many points. But that wasn’t a problem: Schumacher spent many laps ahead of his team-mate and was often ahead when both cars took the checkered flag, and it’s easy to imagine how another team might look at those results and decide if it’s worth it. Another chance.
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Non-representative comparisons were omitted. Negative value: Schumacher was fast; Positive value: Magnuson was fast.
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