Mick Schumacher is under increasing pressure in Formula 1. After his crash in Monaco, he can no longer afford any major mistakes. But the next difficult route awaits in the city course of Azerbaijan in Baku. Haas team boss Günther Steiner has the accident ban.
After the Haas Formula 1 team had to report a large amount of accident damage in the current 2022 season, team boss Günther Steiner points the admonishing index finger at his drivers before the race weekend in Azerbaijan to exercise caution on the narrow street circuit.
Steiner is hoping for an accident-free weekend, especially given that the following race is taking place a week later on the other side of the world in Canada and that the logistics are already causing quite a headache.
Practice, qualifying and the race from June 10th, 2022 to June 12th, 2022
“We only have a few days to set up in Montreal,” he says. “So if you have damage to the car, it becomes even more difficult. So we hope that we will not have any damage in Baku.”
Mick Schumacher in particular has produced quite a bit of kindling on the street circuits this season. In Jeddah he crashed in qualifying, after which he had to retire from Sunday’s race due to a lack of spare parts, while in the last race in Monaco he crashed his VF-22 again into the wall. In both cases, it actually split the Haas in two.
“Baku and Monaco are very different, so it is important to adapt quickly. I think Baku will even feel pretty wide compared to Monaco,” Schumacher looks ahead to the weekend at the Caspian Sea.
“The track actually consists of two different parts, a very fast part and a very tricky and narrow part,” explains Steiner. “I think we made good progress with our car in Spain with the set-up so it should work well in all conditions at the moment.”
“We just have to hit the sweet spot in the set-up and then we can also achieve a good result, as we could have achieved in Spain and Monte Carlo if things had gone differently,” explains the Haas team boss.
Schumacher suspects that there will be “more action and more overtaking manoeuvres” in Azerbaijan with the long straight, although in his opinion the DRS effect is not as strong this year as in previous years.
“You can now drive much closer, so we might not need the DRS anyway to overtake before the first corner.” The German is also optimistic about the weekend in Azerbaijan, as he achieved one of his best results last year with 13th place of the season.
“I really hope that we will have an even better race as our car is much more competitive now. So we should be in a good position for Baku, especially as our car has worked well at every track so far.”
Perhaps the first Formula 1 points for Mick Schumacher are possible next weekend. If it doesn’t work out again, the German will have another chance to end the dry spell a week later at the Circuit Gilles-Villeneuve.
With a linear distance of almost 9,000 kilometers and a flight time of around 13.5 hours from Baku, Canada is geographically anything but a neighboring country of Azerbaijan, which is why calls for a race calendar divided into geographical blocks are getting louder. “It is a great challenge to travel from one continent to the next. It’s going to be a long journey and the team is working very hard to make sure everything works,” says Steiner.
“As far as plans for next season go, it would be great if we could regionally combine the races,” says the Haas team principal. “I know Stefano Domenicali is working very hard on it and it’s going in the right direction next year walk.”
This article was written by Kevin Herman
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The original of this article “Haas boss with a clear appeal to Mick Schumacher: No crash in Baku!” comes from Motorsport-Total.com.
