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Schumacher, Steiner disagree over Haas sprint race calls
Mick Schumacher says he shouldn’t have been fighting with Lewis Hamilton because he felt he was the quicker Haas driver in the Sprint at the Austrian Grand Prix, but Guenther Steiner insists that wasn’t the case.
Kevin Magnussen was leading Schumacher by under a second for much of the shorter race, with Hamilton close behind the German. With Schumacher able to get DRS from his seventh-placed teammate, it prevented Hamilton from launching an attack until Magnussen pulled over a second clear and the Mercedes could then use DRS himself to overtake Schumacher.
“I think it’s something to be discussed,” Schumacher told Sky Sports. “The battle with Lewis was fun but in the first place it shouldn’t have happened.
“I think that we could have had points today but for some reason or another we weren’t allowed to do that, so something to be discussed,” he added. “We were told to keep position, even though I felt like I was quicker.”
While Schumacher believes he should have been allowed to go ahead of Magnussen, Steiner says the impression that the second car was quicker is simply down to Austria’s three DRS zones, meaning the team didn’t consider a switch of position.
“No, because it wouldn’t have worked, because he wasn’t faster,” Steiner said. “Obviously you are faster because you are in DRS. We spoke about this before the race -- I explained to them: If you come out after the start behind each other, the second one thinks he is faster because you are 0.9s of a second faster because of the DRS effect, but that doesn’t make you faster because as soon as you go in front the other one is 0.9s faster, then as soon as you let someone by with Lewis so close he would sneak by as well and then get us after.
“We monitored very well if he was faster or not. We’ve got a guy in the corners just doing that as a full time job, so we monitored everything and we did the complete right thing because otherwise we would have gone out of the points with both cars or maximum maybe only achieved one point.
“It’s unfortunate he couldn’t keep Lewis off any longer but fighting with Lewis Hamilton is pretty good and he did a very good job of holding him off so Kevin could go and bring the points home.”
Chris Medland
While studying Sports Journalism at the University of Central Lancashire, Chris managed to talk his way into working at the British Grand Prix in 2008 and was retained for three years before joining ESPN F1 as Assistant Editor. After three further years at ESPN, a spell as F1 Editor at Crash Media Group was followed by the major task of launching F1i.com’s English-language website and running it as Editor. Present at every race since the start of 2014, he has continued building his freelance portfolio, working with international titles. As well as writing for RACER, his broadcast work includes television appearances on F1 TV and as a presenter and reporter on North America's live radio coverage on SiriusXM.
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