Steiner warns Mick: More crashes ‘just not possible’
Haas driver Mick Schumacher sitting in his car in the immediate aftermath of his crash. Monaco May 2022
Guenther Steiner has warned Mick Schumacher that he cannot continue crashing as he has been, one more and they’ll need to have the hard conversation.
Schumacher suffered his second big crash of this season at the Monaco Grand Prix, the Haas driver into the wall at the Swimming Pool section.
He told the media that he believed he had gone about 10 centimetres off line, put a wheel on a damp patch, and lost control of the car.
Even his own uncle, former F1 driver Ralf Schumacher, pointed out that no one else made that mistake, it was just the 23-year-old.
Now Steiner has warned him this has to stop, and if it doesn’t, they’ll need to “see how we go forward”.
“It’s just not possible to continue like this,” Steiner said as per Motorsport.com, “and he knows that.
“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.”
Schumacher’s latest crash meant his run of point-less races is now up to 28, the German sixth on the all-time list of most starts without a point.
Steiner added: “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.”
Unfortunately for Haas, the crash along with the driver’s Saudi Arabian qualifying shunt meant they have now exceeded their repair budget for this season.
Steiner, though, didn’t lecture Schumacher about that as the driver is well aware of the cost of his accidents.
“We have passed that allowance, we passed that in Jeddah,” said the Italian. “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.
“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.”
The crash was estimated at $1 million.
