How Schumacher Jr earned his Haas F1 chance

Stooped by the side of his car in parc ferme, Mick Schumacher drew his hand through his open visor, struggling to fight back the welling tears. A frantic final round of the FIA Formula 2 season on the Bahrain outer loop had begun with him qualifying a lowly 18th, before he fought back to sixth in the feature race. Then he'd locked up on the first lap of the sprint race and was forced to pit due to the resulting flat-spot. But he'd held on to be crowned champion.

It was not a title success that clinched him a graduation to Formula 1 for 2021, for that had already been agreed weeks earlier and announced by Haas three days before his coronation. But for Schumacher, it was a statement. For all of the weight of expectation faced as the son of a seven-time F1 world champion, he had made his mark all by himself against a fiercely competitive F2 field.

"If you bring a championship title on your CV into F1, it's always great," he says. "I have one in F3 and have one in F2. To be able to win those championships with great competition, it's been a great challenge. The better the competition, the more you develop as a driver."

Schumacher entered the 2020 season facing the sternest test to date of his credentials as a future F1 driver. The experienced Callum Ilott and Guanyu Zhou were tipped as title rivals, while talented rookies such as Robert Shwartzman and Yuki Tsunoda posed a fresh threat. The fact that almost one quarter of the F2 grid came from the Ferrari Driver Academy meant Schumacher also had in-house competition to contend with for a place with one of its affiliated teams.

The fashion in which Schumacher started 2020 did little to suggest a title bid was on the cards. By the time he recorded his first podium of the year, in the third round at the Hungaroring, fellow FDA members Shwartzman and Ilott had already notched race wins to sit first and second in the championship respectively. By the end of the following event, the first Silverstone race weekend, Schumacher lay ninth in the standings, 40 points back from leader Shwartzman.

But from that moment onwards, Schumacher delivered the kind of consistency that championships are built on. A 15-race streak of points, which only ended at the final event, allowed him to rise up the order as his rivals faltered. A brace of podiums at Spa in late August put him within range of Shwartzman and Ilott, before a first victory of the year at Monza from seventh on the grid gave Schumacher a real chance in the title race.

The revised schedule forced by the COVID-19 pandemic condensed three quarters of the season into just 11 weeks but, with momentum building, Schumacher found the run of races to his benefit.

"I was very happy that it was so intense," he says. "There was so much rhythm in there, it was just really nice. You always manage to take the positives and negatives from one weekend, and try and improve those in the second weekend and so on."

"We had everything to lose, we knew Callum was quick and he was going to move forward. We ended up P6 with the fastest lap. I never thought that we would manage to go so far forwards" Mick Schumacher on recovering from P18 in Sakhir

During the successive Spa, Monza and Mugello weekends, Schumacher went from fringe title fighter to contender, before a second victory of the year at Sochi made him the favourite. In that period, Ilott had scored just one feature race podium, while Tsunoda and Shwartzman both had four non-scores.

Picking the key factor in his title success, Schumacher cites "definitely the consistency". "That's what managed to bring us the points advantage that we had arriving in Bahrain, and then it was all about managing that," he adds. Unsurprisingly, he didn't want to lose that momentum in the two-month break following the Sochi round.

"After two days, I was like, 'OK, when is the next race?'" he jokes. "You're in such a rhythm, you're trying to always focus on the next one, and then suddenly you had that two-month break where basically nothing was happening."

Behind the scenes, plenty was happening regarding Schumacher's future. Ferrari held a private test at Fiorano for its three leading F2 drivers with a 2018 F1 car, in which Schumacher impressed. Although a planned FP1 outing at the Nurburgring with Alfa Romeo was scrapped due to fog, Schumacher had done enough for Ferrari to place its chips on him as its 2021 F1 graduate.

As Alfa Romeo leaned towards retaining its drivers, Haas became the only real landing spot for Schumacher. Plans were put in place for him to partner fellow F2 driver Nikita Mazepin, who was on course for a superlicence and would bring considerable funding to the team. Ferrari kept hinting that an announcement would be made before the end of the F2 season, again pointing towards the championship battle not impacting its decision.

Ilott was left resigned to missing out on an F1 graduation, but the Briton made clear upon F2's return in Bahrain that he would not bow out of the title race quietly, and scored his fifth pole of the season with his Virtuosi Racing car. (Schumacher, by comparison, did not qualify on the front row all year and had an average starting position of 7.91.) With second in the Bahrain feature race, Ilott trimmed Schumacher's lead to 12 points, only for him to make a mistake in the sprint event and run into Jehan Daruvala, leaving him scoreless and extending Schumacher's lead to 14 points.

In the days leading up to the season finale on the Bahrain outer loop, Haas formally announced Schumacher in its line-up for 2021, partnering Mazepin. "I'm really happy that everything is announced and confirmed now," he said at the time, calling it "a dream come true". But he made clear his immediate priority was sewing up the F2 title: "My great focus is definitely still to win the championship. Once that is done, then I can focus on what I have to do next."

That focus was tested when Schumacher was left 18th on the grid for the final feature race of the season following a qualifying collision with Roy Nissany. But a stunning fight through the field to sixth place, just one position behind Ilott, allayed his fears of losing the title. It is the display that Schumacher picks as his stand-out race of the year.

"We had everything to lose," he says. "We knew Callum was quick and he was going to move forward. We ended up P6 with the fastest lap. I never thought that we would manage to go so far forwards."

Even with Schumacher's final-race error and run to 18th, Ilott could not deliver the top-two finish needed to snatch the title away. It was breathing room Schumacher felt he had earned: "We had done enough over the whole year to give us that opportunity, to have a race to be maybe as bad as it happened to be."

It's a position his serial-winning father Michael knew well: claiming the title while affording occasional bad races, such as his mishap-laden run to eighth that clinched the 2003 world title at Suzuka. Such comparisons have naturally been rife throughout Schumacher Jr's career to date, but he takes heart in the fact that the results have proven his status is not due to his surname.

"It's quite clear that I've been under the spotlight since a very young age," he admits. "Nevertheless, it's something that I've been able to get used to, and would say that I'm able to deal with pretty well. The results speak for themselves. So I think I will do the same as usual next year, and we'll just try and keep the same rhythm."

"Next year is really going to be about managing our expectations and really be open-minded on every aspect with everything happening" Mick Schumacher

Things will change for Schumacher upon his graduation to F1. He will go from a frontrunning F2 Prema operation to a Haas squad that has struggled for the past two years and is braced for a "transition year", to quote team boss Gunther Steiner, in 2021. It hardly breeds much confidence for a rookie season in which Schumacher can make a huge impact, but he is realistic of the adjustment that will take place.

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"It's mainly just understanding your goals, and setting your goals accordingly to what you think is possible," he says. "Next year is really going to be about managing our expectations and really be open-minded on every aspect with everything happening.

"If you say, 'OK, Q2 is our goal', maybe it is hard to reach, but if we reach it, then it's like a win for us. So I'll take it as that to not only observe ourselves, but also to show to the others that we'll always keep fighting and give our best."

Such a mentality has served other rookies joining backmarker teams well in recent times, best shown by George Russell's stand-out displays for Williams. Schumacher has a multi-year deal with Haas, ensuring he will be around for the 2022 regulation change, when it hopes to clamber back up the order. And if Schumacher can develop at the same rate as he has across F4, F3 and F2, where he has taken a notable step in performance for his second year at each level, it could coincide well for him to truly make a splash in F1.