Haas team principal Guenther Steiner hopes that Mick Schumacher’s first points in Formula 1 will arrive “sooner rather than later,” and does not want the German to start pushing too hard.
Since his arrival into Formula 1 with the Haas team last year, Schumacher has now gone 27 races without scoring a single point.
By contrast, his new team-mate Kevin Magnussen has returned from his year out and finished in the top 10 on three occasions in the first six races so, while the VF-22 is a lot more capable than last year’s iteration, Schumacher has not quite been able to extract the desired results from it yet.
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The 23-year-old has out-qualified the Dane three times though, so he is hardly doing a bad job with the Haas, he just needs to put those finishing touches on the weekend.
Steiner affirms that his driver needs to focus on that, and not become over-zealous in his attempt to finally put points on the board.
“What I’m more worried about is desperation setting in and him over-driving. That could happen,” he said.
“He knows he is very close. He just needs to be patient.
“Last week was a good week and the week before was a good week and it (a top 10 finish) never happened. At some stage, it will happen because the car is good enough.”
Given the tightness of the midfield battle this season, the Italian highlights the importance of both drivers getting results.
“We need to make points, and we need to make points with two drivers as well,” added Steiner.
“Hopefully, it will happen sooner rather than later.”
Schumacher ended the Spanish Grand Prix 14th after completing a two-stop strategy, and found that those doing three stops had quicker pace.
This was because looking after the tyres for longer stints had too big an impact on pace as the heat degraded the rubber, so the German was left ruing the strategy.
“I think it was because we are not in the points now. The strategy was a bit different than expected,” he said after the race.
“We now simply have to look at how we arrived at such a strategy and why we then did not react to it. In the end, you are always smarter in retrospect.
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“That’s why we will work on it as a team and see what we can improve.”
Schumacher sits 19th in the Drivers’ Championship after his tumultuous start to the 2022 season.