Mick Schumacher didn´t have a Saturday to remember. A 30G impact earlier in FP3 left him out of Qualy and with a grid penalty for changing gearbox. MotorLat had access to a brief online meeting with the young driver where he talked about his day.  

Schumacher explained that his method to reaching the limit of the car doesn´t change “My approach doesn’t really change that much. Obviously you want to be reaching the limit as soon as possible. What´s difficult this year is that our car seems to be quite affected by windy conditions and also by surface overheating which counts on what happened in Fp3 today. For example, turn 11 was never an issue over the course of the weekend and it caught me off guard that I lost the rear end in that corner but looking at it at the data and everything it just seems the windy conditions and overheating increased a little bit more before also because of the track temperature being so high.”

When asked about whether the accident that left him out of the session was a cause of struggling in turn 9, the German explained “the whole situation started in Turn 7 where the exit was already quite on the limit with wind speed which in my case does overheat the surface which as a result had nine in a difficult place already with the rear being partly on the limit but again I kind of understood because it was a place where I´ve usually had snaps already all weekend long…but again coming into turn 11 nearly flat and at that time with the rear wind. I was kind of a passenger and unfortunately the way I hit the wall made things complicated for us to repair afterwards. It´s a very unfortunate moment because we missed out Qualifying again and I´m very proud of how the team managed to get so close I think we were 5 to 10 minutes off getting the car out. It would´ve been enough to have a red flag that we would have been able to do a lap at least”

Comparing this accident to the one he had in France and asked if there was anything that could be done to the car to avoid them in the future the young driver added “Unfortunately that´s one of the things we´re stuck with because of the way we´re approaching this year in terms of more upgrades and everything so it´s down to, I think, me and the team to manage it in a different way probably.  My mental approach is to always give my best and obviously we are a bit adrift to everybody right now so I have to try and find the little bits here and there to be able to be ready then for Qualy and to do that big of a step in Qualy. Unfortunately, today we lost it but I think we had high hopes for closing the gap to Williams again…I think we had the potential to be close to Williams initially”