09/06/2022
NEWS STORY
In the wake of his Monaco crash, Guenther Steiner has warned Mick Schumacher that the incidents have to stop.
Though clearly talented, well into his second season Mick Schumacher has hardly set the world of F1 alight, certainly not when one considers his pedigree.
Indeed, were he on the Red Bull roster, the Austrian outfit's Lord High Executioner, Helmut Marko would have undoubtedly given the youngster his marching orders by now.
Originally being groomed by Ferrari, the question now is not whether the German will ever race for the team with which his father won five titles, but whether he can retain his place on the grid.
Other than the lack of results, the youngster clearly struggling to match the performance of teammate Kevin Magnussen, there have been far too many crashes.
Before Monaco there was his clash with Sebastian Vettel in the final stages of the Miami Grand Prix, not forgetting his qualifying crash at Jeddah.
It has to stop, warns Haas team boss, Guenther Steiner.
"It's just not possible to continue like this," he told the media in Baku today. "And he knows that.
"He's also crashing into a wall at some stage," he added. "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," the Italian admitted. "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, 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."
As a result of the numerous incidents, just seven races into the season the American outfit has already exceeded its damage allowance.
"We have passed that allowance, we passed that in Jeddah," he admitted. "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," said Steiner. "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."
Check out our Thursday gallery from Baku, here.