Haas Team Principal Guenther Steiner has warned a “serious conversation” will be required if Mick Schumacher continues crashing.
Mick Schumacher has been cautioned by Guenther Steiner that there will be serious talks if he keeps on crashing. The German driver has been involved in a series of incidents since the start of the 2022 season, and is still waiting to score his maiden points in Formula 1.
This comes after Schumacher collided with the wall at the Swimming Pool segment at the Monaco Grand Prix, marking his second major crash of the season. However, he informed the reporters that he thought he went approximately 10 centimetres off line, hit a damp place with a wheel and lost control of the car.
In the wake of the horrifying crash which left the car in two pieces, not only Haas was displeased while Schumacher continues crashing but also his uncle, former F1 driver Ralf Schumacher, stated that he was the only one who made the error.
Guenther Steiner has now informed him that if the crashes don’t stop, they’ll have to “see how we go forward.”
“It’s just not possible Schumacher continues crashing like this, and he knows that,” Steiner told Motorsport.com, “He’s also crashing into a wall at some stage. It’s also not healthy.”
“Obviously he wants to score points, and if you crash into the wall, you don’t score points.”
“He knows that, so it’s like putting pressure on and telling him you shouldn’t go and crash. I don’t do that. I never do that. Because I think they know that they shouldn’t be crashing.”
“So I think there’s a lot of things going on, but there is not one simple answer. We need to see how we go forward. There’s a lot of things we have to sort out now.”
“This is a sport that’s very competitive. And it’s easy to overstep a little bit your mark, and you’ll make a big damage, especially on this race track, like Monte Carlo, Jeddah, here, Montreal is another one, Singapore, and he just needs to adjust himself not to do what was done in Monte Carlo.”
“But it’s not me telling him five times to make it any better, I think it’s making it worse, because it’s like, I get this, and then maybe you get a counter reaction.”
Haas has had limited replacement components throughout the early stages of the current season, a scenario that could become much more precarious if Schumacher continues crashing in future races.
Speaking about the damage to the car, Steiner said: “The chassis is being repaired, the chassis is actually itself not damaged a lot.
“There are fairings on that we had to replace but it was checked over, the normal check, that’s all good. Engine is also OK, the gearbox is also not OK, and a lot of other parts are not OK.”
Unfortunately for Haas, as Schumacher continues crashing, the Monaco incident combined with the Saudi Arabian qualifying shunt has resulted in the team’s repair budget for this season being overrun.
Steiner, on the other hand, didn’t reprimand Schumacher about it because the driver is fully aware of the financial consequences of his mishaps.
“We have passed that allowance, we passed that in Jeddah, we are in front of the allowance, I would love to be in front of how many points we scored, but we are in front of the allowance for crashes,” Steiner explained.
“We spoke about it, but I don’t go into explaining him how much or how I need to run the team.”
“He reads what you guys write, so he comes to me and asks is it really this amount of money? I said, I don’t know, because I haven’t said it. So you it’s an estimation, but yes, it is this amount of money.”
