Timo Glock on Mick Schumacher: ‘You have to look at Haas, they didn’t make it easy’

格洛克认为在米克Schum哈斯的角色acher’s departure from the team cannot be overlooked, as not every issue was his own doing at the team.

After a lengthy decision-making process by Haas, team principal Guenther Steiner opted to place the experienced Nico Hulkenberg alongside Kevin Magnussen next season, after Schumacher had three significant crashes in the year which ate into the team’s budget, and scored 12 points compared to 25 for his team-mate.

But given the speed he showed alongside Magnussen in the second half of the year in particular, calls from around the paddock from the likes of Sebastian Vettel and Esteban Ocon came to keep Schumacher in his seat for another year, but the team ultimately plumped to hire Hulkenberg instead.

Steiner explained his reasons behind making the decision to drop the younger German from the team in Abu Dhabi,telling media including PlanetF1:“尼克被司机和三个或三个four teams before, experience [is key] and experience takes time to make, and in the moment, we don’t have time, because we want to move forward.

“We don’t want to be where we are. Now, we want to get better.

“It is not Mick’s fault that we are where we are and we only have ourselves to blame, but we need to come up again and there is a shorter way by taking a guy with a lot of experience, which has done this in multiple teams.”

But former Formula 1 driver Glock feels Haas were not blameless in why their partnership with Schumacher did not work out to its fullest extent, either.

He wrote in hisSky Deutschlandcolumn: “The way in which Haas has dealt with this topic in the past few weeks and months is difficult for me to understand. In my opinion, Mick always had a very good speed.

“Of course there are times when he made mistakes. You learn from that. But he was always in the situation where he was told that he must not break the car under any circumstances.

“If you add up how many times Mick had technical problems during free practice at the weekends, then you have to take a good look at Haas.

“They didn’t make it easy for Mick either. Not everything went perfectly there.”

As for Schumacher’s next step, a potential Mercedes reserve role could materialise in time for 2023, with team principal Toto Wolff having expressed a desire to keep the Schumacher name in Formula 1 and bringing it back into the Mercedes stable.

Read more: Mattia Binotto reflects on Sebastian Vettel’s Ferrari ‘failure’ and decision to axe him