Felipe Massa believes Mick Schumacher’s surname is a “burden” for the young driver.
Mick is the son of seven-time world champion Michael Schumacher, and has began his own Formula 1 journey with US team Haas. The team have struggled with performance and reliability all season, and have failed to pick up a single championship point.
Schumacher has not come under great scrutiny, partly due to the poor quality of his car and partly due to the erratic driving of his teammate, Nikita Mazepin.
“In general, the name Schumacher is a burden for Mick,” Massa told Die Welt. “It helps him to get sponsors and he gets a lot of support. But people expect things he can never fulfil. The pressure is extremely high.
“The Haas is the worst car in Formula 1, he doesn’t have the best teammate – if he had someone who had more experience he would be able to measure himself much better. We’ll have to wait until he has a better car and a better teammate.”
Schumacher will remain at Haas next season and the team’s hope is they can step up and challenge the midfield teams when new regulations for 2022 potentially shake up the grid.
He recently appeared in a Netflix documentary about his father in which he spoke emotively about Michael’s serious injuries from a skiing accident in 2013. Mick was skiing with his dad at the time of the accident, aged 14.
“Dad and me, we would understand each other in a different way now because we speak a similar language, the language of motor sport,” he said in the documentary. “We would have much more to talk about. That’s where my head is most of the time. Thinking that would be so cool. I would give up everything just for that.”
