Mick Schumacher’s race engineer gives insight into working with the Ferrari junior. Mick's race engineer gives insight into working with the Ferrari junior.

Ferrari Driver Academy member Mick Schumacher’s first season in Formula 1 has not been marked by significant results, which was highly predictable given the underdeveloped car of Haas. Yer unusually for a driver in such a low-profile position, his encouraging progress has attracted plenty of attention – and not just because of his famous surname.

Mick’s race engineer, Gary Gannon, was interviewed by The Race and shared his thoughts on working with the Ferrari junior. Here are some of his most important quotes regarding Mick:

“It’s difficult and I don’t think I always have it right, I’m learning with Mick and in general when to intervene and when not to. One race, in Barcelona, we had a suggestion from the previous run. I gave it to Mick very late in the back-off lap and we both concluded it was too late. That information, however valuable it may have been to give us 0.2s by doing a line differently, was too late and disrupted his lap. So it is learning with him how quickly, how late I can give him input and how he can process it. Even in the garage between runs in qualifying, do I need to reset him? Do I need to tell him how much we need to gain relative to some target we have or the car ahead because if you tell him the wrong target then they’ll over push and make a mistake and ruin the lap? We’re constantly learning what the right level is with any driver, but with Mick this year in particular.”

“The surprising thing is the scenarios he hasn’t experienced before. Before the season, we had a huge list of the experiences that we have built up over the years with Kevin, Romain and the other drivers and we tried to go through all those and present them to him. He absorbs all kinds of information, he’s a really good, quick learner but still we encounter scenarios in the race where he hasn’t encountered them before and doesn’t know what to expect. Afterwards, you go ‘ah, if I told him that, things would have gone better’ because sometimes you only have this moment to take advantage of a situation. So there’s been a few of those but generally, if we prepare Mick for something then he’s really good. Like all his race management details, he was already really aware of what needed to happen but he just learns each race a new management scenario. We have to prompt him less and less for things like the tasks he has to do in the car. They are all becoming automatic for him, which is great.”

“The first weekend we just didn’t get the lap together. Because Mick is so good at studying and doing his homework, if you give him another chance he will very much improve if he’s made a mistake or missed an opportunity or if we didn’t give him the right aero balance.So with someone like Mick, the second chances are really big and can give you a big step. We always walk away from qualifying going ‘there’s this much here and this much there’, but if you show him all the things we need to do better and you give him another chance, he will do it. So he’s very clear-minded over where we can make gains and how to achieve it.”

“Mick’s attention to detail is very high. Even in the first race in Bahrain, when he had to do the blue flags, his lap after was quicker than his lap before. Usually, it’s very easy to have a very poor lap after blue flag but he had good attention on these factors from the very first race. He has only improved through the season. His overall awareness, attention to detail and focus throughout the race allows him to maximise those scenarios. It takes a lot of concentration to keep doing these perfect laps every lap, then have these blue and get back to that perfect lap. It is impressive that he’s able to do it.”

“We can’t really judge either driver’s ultimate pace because the car is difficult to drive. Sometimes we have to run less downforce for the circuit efficiency and it makes us very much on the limit. So at a place like Silverstone, the gap opens up. I don’t think we have had a perfect qualifying yet, so I think he’s always improving and trying to get closer to that perfect lap. It’s quite early in the season though and we’re getting closer to that perfect lap. The expectation was it takes him a year to get close to that perfect lap and he’s improving a lot. If you tell Mick to do something in these three corners he will do it. Then there will be maybe two other corners that we need to fix, but we just keep reducing the errors. So he’s very receptive to the feedback and he will clearly respond.”

“He is trying to extract the maximum performance out of all aspects, whether it is managing tyres, blue flag laps, the outlap, first push lap of the race, starts. We are constantly working on starts and trying to maximise all the details of that, so he’s very open to feedback and always trying to maximise all phases. We can’t give him enough info in that regard.”

“He’s very tolerant. Sometimes we are really wary – should we do this with the flap because we don’t want to give him too much understeer? We do it and he’s like ‘it’s a lot of understeer but I can drive it’, so he’s good at making do with what we have given him. Now we actually say you need to push us a little bit more to say ‘I need this from the car as opposed to accepting what we have given him. There’s clear points of the weekend where he has to accept it, like once we get to FP3 he has to accept what he has and learn to drive with it whereas in FP1 he should be saying ‘my limitation is the entry stability in Turn 9’ or something. At the beginning we just focused on driving and then we started adding setup changes and now we’re really starting to precisely understand the balance through the lap and through each corner after each session so we can give him a better car that he can maximise rather than just driving the car we have given him.”