Haas team principal Guenther Steiner asserts that Mick Schumacher “cannot keep” crashing as the American side try to stay within the confines of the $140 million budget.
Schumacher has written off two cars this season with enormous shunts in Saudi Arabia in Monaco, and the damage was so bad in qualifying in Jeddah that he was unable to take any part in the race.
The 23-year-old snapped the back of the car off in Monte Carlo when he lost control in changing conditions.
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The main thing from both of those incidents was that the German walked away unscathed, but Steiner typically only has so much room for compassion for his drivers, and he warns that Haas’ budget is certainly not thanking Schumacher for his incidents this year.
“I would say so,” he told GPFans when asked if he would need to sit down for some “serious conversations” with Schumacher.
“We would have a serious conversation because at some stage we will run out of parts and we cannot keep up making them.
“Again, as much money as you throw at it, you just physically cannot keep doing it.
“So we need to make sure that here [in Baku], nothing happens.
“We have passed [our repair budget for 2022]; we passed that allowance in Jeddah.
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“We are in front of the allowance. I would love to be in front of the amount of points we have scored but we are in front on crashes.”
Schumacher wonders if his accident in the Principality may well have been down to an issue with the car that caused it to spin out of control, but he ultimately accepts that he likely just ran the car over a damp patch.
“It came out of the blue,” he said.
“And I spoke to other people. Most of the feedback that I got said it does look really weird. So obviously, we can’t check if anything broke, actually. But data suggests not, so just seems like a wet patch.
“It was really odd, because also the accident itself wasn’t in any way hard. To have it split in two again is quite unfortunate, because obviously it’s a lot of damage.”
Schumacher is aiming to put an end to his run of 29 races without scoring a single point in F1 by finishing in the top 10 this weekend in Azerbaijan.