Former Scuderia Ferrari technical director Ross Brawn admitted that watching Mick Schumacher make a “tough job” of winning the Formula 2 title in a tense season finale reminded him of some of Michael Schumacher’s messier championship-clinching drives.
Now Formula 1 chief, Ross Brawn worked with Michael Schumacher during all his seven championship winning seasons across the Benetton and Ferrari teams. He earned fame as the “mastermind” behind Michael Schumacher’s seven world championship titles
“Congratulations to Mick Schumacher for winning the F2 title,” said the former Ferrari boss – “I’m delighted. He’s a great lad and has worked really hard at it. Carrying the Schumacher name is not easy. It can open some doors, but it also brings a lot of pressure and Mick’s handled it remarkably well. It was deja-vu seeing him making such a tough job of winning it because his dad was the same! I can remember one or two championships where it was a case of ‘it’s OK Michael, just finish sixth in this race and we’re fine’ and then he would go out and try and hit everything he could find!” – he added.
As we recently explored, Michal Schumacher had a habit of getting slightly sketchy once he’d clinched a championship early, but both of his titles we mentioned were actually sealed with smooth drives. The exception that’s surely lingering in Brawn’s mind was 2003.
As for Mick, he qualified only 18th for the F2 feature race on the Sakhir Outer circuit after a late red flag and a controversial clash with Roy Nissany. That put his 14-point lead under threat from fellow Ferrari junior Callum Ilott who qualified in ninth.
However, a well executed strategy starting on the harder compound tyre and switching to the soft at the end yielded a strong comeback for Schumacher who finished sixth – only one spot behind Ilott – after penalties were applied to Schumacher’s future F1 team-mate Nikita Mazepin.
Schumacher entered the last race needing to finish sixth to win the title, but an early lock-up diving for second place at Turn 4 flat-spotted his tyres on the opening lap and Ilott put him under intense pressure shortly after.
Prema driver Schumacher was forced to pit, dropping him to the back of the pack, but Ilott had been trying so hard to overtake Schumacher that he’d destroyed his tyres meaning he couldn’t bag the points needed to overcome his title rival.
“I’m a bit disappointed with my performance,” Schumacher admitted – “Nevertheless, I think we’ve done enough over the whole year to give us that opportunity to have a race to be as bad as it happened to be. My goal was to win the last race, I think we would have had the pace. Unfortunately, I did have a big lock-up into Turn 4. I think I just overestimated the grip and thought that I had more grip than then there was really and therefore I locked up. After that, it was really just trying to stay in front of Callum, trying to slow them down as much as I could, try to really just collect everybody behind me. At some point it was the safest and probably the best decision to come in to pit.” – he explained.
Ross Brawn added: “It did feel rather familiar! And my heart was in my mouth at times, but it all came good at the end. While he didn’t finish in the way he would have preferred, he’s had a great season with some great results and I look forward to seeing him in F1 next year.”
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