Everything seemed to indicate that Mick Schumacher had high chances of adding his first points in the category in three months at the 2022 Formula 1 Japanese Grand Prix, but a risky bet with the strategy took the young German driver to the back of the standings. .
Mick Schumacher made a good start, moving up five positions in the first lap and that put him in tenth position, that is, in the points zone, before the event was stopped due to rain after several incidents that caused the red flag .
When the race resumed, with better weather conditions, the German stayed on the track with the extreme wet tires while all his rivals stopped to ride the intermediates, as they were much faster.
The Haas F1 Team driver managed to get into the top three, in podium positions, thinking that a safety car could come out in the following laps due to the track conditions and the new intermediate tires of the rest of the drivers, but that Safety Car never came to fruition and his gamble ended all his chances at Suzuka.
Mick Schumacher finally gave up and pitted for intermissions on lap 11, six laps later than Sebastian Vettel, who was the first, along with Nicholas Latifi, to pit for intermissions, a gamble that took the German veteran to the sixth place finish.
Once the race was over and after a question about whether the team took that risk because it had nothing to lose, Mick Schumacher disagreed: “I wouldn’t say that. I mean, we did have something to lose : we were in a position to points, so yeah, it’s very unfortunate.
“I don’t know if you can say it that way, but we didn’t react fast enough, because we did see that people were stopping. I think in hindsight it’s always easier to give an opinion,” he added.
The German from Haas recognized that his race would have been very promising if the long-awaited safety car had arrived, but that did not happen and he regretted finishing outside the points.
” Things would have been very different and we would have been very happy. But right now, as none of that has happened and things are the way they are, we have lost a great chance of getting points ,” he concluded.
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