The 2022 Formula 1 season with Haas has not been an easy one for Mick Schumacher to face. The young Ferrari Driver Academy member, due to a rather disappointing start to the championship in terms of results and performances, especially when compared to that of his teammate Kevin Magnussen, has often been at the center of numerous market rumors. His contract with the American team will expire at the end of the current F1 campaign, 2022 and for the moment there has been no statement to suggested a probable renewal by the team led by Gunther Steiner.
Within the Kannapolis-based team, however, there were staff member who experienced first-hand the progress of the 2020 Formula 2 champion over the course of the year.
Gary Gannon, Mick Schumacher’s race engineer, underlined the characteristics of the driver he has been working with this season and highlighted the steps forward made by the Ferrari junior during the 2022 Formula 1 championship, with six races until the end of the year:
“Mick wants a lot of information during the race” – the Haas engineer said, in a recent interview for the Motorlat website – “so I always talk to him. Sometimes I feel like I’m talking too much, but that’s exactly what he wants and what he needs. Romain [Grosjean] on the other hand was much more aware of what he wanted to do, so I didn’t talk to him much in the race. While Kevin [Magnussen] is somewhere in between.” – he explained.
Mick Schumacher’s lack of experience in the sport allowed his track engineer and the team in general to try to ‘model’ his style, helping him improve race after race:
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“With Mick there’s big impacts we can make on his performance with small bits of information, so it feels very rewarding, especially through this year because we kind of struggled in the beginning and now we’re putting together some good results, building up on everything that we’ve done through the year, so it’s very satisfying. “Mick himself is very mature and capable of managing these emotions and not allowing himself to stay down based on a previous bad result, so that makes us not to feel extra pressure to fix a mistake from the past or something,” he said.
“So a lot of it comes from him, not creating a pressurised environment, and then we try not to create a pressurised environment either. We try to reset if we had a bad weekend or a couple of bad weekends, and then we try to build on when we have anything positive.
“Last race we didn’t score points, but the race driving was very positive. The previous race [at Zandvoort] we got through [to Q3] and had the best qualifying of the two years [with Schumacher]. Even though we didn’t get the results in the race, we just build on that qualifying. It’s always trying to find like some positives to build on, even when we haven’t gotten the results we wanted.” – Haas engineer Gary Gannon concluded.
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