Pietro Fittipaldi will be called upon to race for the Uralkali Haas F1 Team during the 2022 Formula 1 season should Mick Schumacher be asked to step in at Scuderia Ferrari.
The Brazilian, who raced twice for the team at the end of the 2020 season in the Sakhir and Abu Dhabi Grand Prix in place of the injured Romain Grosjean, has been confirmed as the official reserve driver for Haas again in 2022.
Schumacher, who will be competing in his second season in Formula 1 this year after stepping up last year on the back of winning the FIA Formula 2 championship in 2019, will share the reserve driver duties at Ferrari with former Alfa Romeo Formula 1 Team ORLEN driver Antonio Giovinazzi.
And Schumacher will race for the Scuderia should either Charles Leclerc or Carlos Sainz Jr. be unavailable for any reason on one of those weekends where the German is playing understudy.
Guenther Steiner, the Team Principal at Haas, says he would be happy for Schumacher to drive for Ferrari should he be needed, but that move would make reserve driver Fittipaldi very happy.
“I’m happy for Mick and I obviously spoke about it with Mattia,” said Steiner to Racer. “What it means for us is that Pietro will be very happy!
“In the end, this is part of being a partner and part of what we agreed to do. Obviously if you have a good car and want an experienced driver, Pietro’s done a good job for us before.
“I mean, the possibility that the reserve driver gets to drive the car, if you look at the statistics they are very, very slim. But if it happens, I’m good with that.”
Steiner points at the performances Fittipaldi put in at the end of 2020 where, without any meaningful testing and with no wheel-to-wheel action all year long, he finished seventeenth and nineteenth across the two weekends.
“We never have to forget what he did two years ago when we put him in the race car after Romain – he did a fantastic job,” Steiner added. “We can’t ask for more.
“We don’t need to make a big thing about who to get in — we have shown loyalty, he has shown loyalty, and that is how we work.”