Mick Schumacher says he feels fully fit to race but understands the Haas decision to withdraw his car from the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix.

Schumacher had a massive accident at Turn 10 in Q2, hitting the concrete wall at around 150mph, registering an impact of nearly 35G and requiring precautionary scans at a nearby hospital. He was released on Saturday night with no injuries and says he feels able to race if the car was ready, but appreciates the Haas approach of protecting the car given how tight parts can be early in a season.

“Yeah I feel alright, not too sore either, just shows the safety of these cars these days, to be able to walk away from this,” Schumacher said. “I think 20 years back from here people wouldn’t be able to do that so thank you very much to everybody involved in the safety.

“It’s interesting because most of the time when you have an accident or you think something is going wrong time changes a bit, it feels a bit slower, I saw the wall coming towards me and knew I could prepare for impact. [It’s] Unfortunate as I had the car for Q3 but we’ll have to do it for Melbourne.

“A combination of a few things [led to withdrawal], in particular car preservation. We want to be able to race in Melbourne, and if let’s say something else happened in today’s race that might not be the case. I definitely want to get those points and I’ll get them in Melbourne.

“I feel fit for it, but obviously car preservation and parts are important if we want to be racing in Melbourne.”

And Schumacher – who is present at the track on Sunday and wants to help his team with his car repairs – says his crash was actually triggered by a small moment in an earlier corner that then led to him getting off-line in Turn 10.

“It seems like we had a small slide going through Turn 9 which then upset temperatures in the tire and also in terms of positioning and then coming towards the curb I was 20-30 centimeters wider than I wanted to be.

“That meant the rear of the tire dropped over the curb and that meant the rear bottomed out because these days the cars are so low that the moment we touch a curb as high as here we lose contact to the ground and there is nothing holding us back from spinning.

“I think I saw a few other guys in other teams had similar issues, except for them they were able to catch it, and in my case I wasn’t.”