The Spanish Grand Prix proved to be yet another difficult weekend in what is proving to be a very difficult season for the Uralkali Haas F1 Team.
The only real positive to take from Sunday for Haas drivers Mick Schumacher and Nikita Mazepin who finished eighteenth and nineteenth respectively, was that both cars were brought home in one piece.
Schumacher was yet again the top Haas, and despite a poor start showed great character and race craft to battle amongst the Williams Racing cars early on, before slipping behind. Schumacher is already looking ahead to Monaco in what will hopefully be a stronger weekend for the Haas driver.
“It could have been better, but we knew it was going to be a tough race for us. Nonetheless we can be happy with most of what we achieved. My start itself wasn’t that great, but I got a good opening lap – I managed to find a good spot to drive around some people that were maybe blocked by some others. On that side of the race I think we can be quite happy.”
“Unfortunately, we knew after that it was going to be quite difficult. We were struggling quite a bit with the rear tires on the C3. We just had to concentrate on our race and maximize what we had. Every weekend has been a bit different, so I go into Monaco next with an open mind and we’ll see how it is there after FP1.”
“It was very difficult today” – Nikita Mazepin
For Nikita Mazepin it was another lonely race, the Russian fell a long way behind teammate Schumacher and even managed to anger Mercedes AMG Petronas Team Principal Toto Wolff, after failing to take notice of the blue flags quickly enough.
Nevertheless it was a mainly clean race for Mazepin, who believes he is learning a lot every weekend, something which is key as his next race will be at the most challenging circuit of them all!
“It was very difficult today – the balance shift was very strange. To be honest, we struggled a lot with mid-corner under rotation in qualifying, and then it went to extreme oversteer on all the sets I used in the race. We need to analyze why the shift was so big – maybe it was the temperatures, maybe it was the wind.”
“It’s every rookie’s job to keep learning in every race, I remember from the junior categories how much more I knew in year two and year three of being in the same series. There’s a lot to be learned. Today was quite a clean race from my side though, no big mistakes, and pretty consistent driving.”
