Haas driver Mick Schumacher has reflected on his opening season in Formula 1, and hopes the team can improve in 2022.
Schumacher entered F1 last year alongside fellow rookie Nikita Mazepin, and out-qualified the Russian 20 times in 22 races.
He achieved Haas’ best result of the season of P13 at the Hungarian Grand Prix, as the American outfit became the first team since 2015 not to score a single point across a season.
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Further, he and his team-mate were not short in the error department, although this is perhaps to be expected in their debut year coupled with the fact that they had to contend with an erratic car.
The German, though, actually felt as though his first year in F1 was not quite as hard as he might have anticipated.
“Not tougher. I think it’s been easier than I expected to be honest,” he said, as quoted by Motorsport.com.
The 2020 Formula 2 champion revealed that the fact that he did not need to worry about his future as he did after winning junior categories was an advantage, affirming that good performances will result in a seat for next season.
“Again, there’s not that pressure of having to say ‘what are you going to do next year?’
“It’s like, if you deliver most of the time you’ll have a cockpit for next year. So it’s all about yourself, really. There’s nothing from the outside that can influence that decision, really.”
However, the 22-year-old concedes that he would have preferred to be fighting for points-paying positions last year.
“You can see it in the way that I would have enjoyed having that pressure of scoring points every weekend, being up there and fighting,” he admits.
“Obviously it puts a different light onto you than if you always drive at the back. Obviously for people that know and understand the sport, they’ll see what I do.
“But for people that are maybe not as into it, they’ll just see me driving in the back and they’ll wonder why, because they’ve seen me winning championships before. So it’s a bit of a different approach.”
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Schumacher is optimistic about 2022 after an immensely difficult 2021 campaign for the team.
“But it’s been good for us. Next year, I think there’s loads to come.”
Schumacher and Mazepin have been retained at Haas for the 2022 season, which gets underway on 20 March in Bahrain.
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