Kevin Magnussen made history yesterday by claiming his and the team’s first pole position, and while he didn’t stay at the front for long it was still a successful sprint race for the Dane and the team.
Magnussen maintained his lead for the first few laps, but after that he was quickly overtaken by Max Verstappen and George Russell. That led to the Dane being overtaken by the faster cars, and on lap fifteen he was overtaken by Scuderia Ferrari‘s Charles Leclerc. The final overtake came later when he was passed by McLaren F1 Team‘s Lando Norris for seventh place.
Magnussen was happy with his result from the day and admitted that this was the best he could do after pulling out a shock pole position on Friday.
“I really enjoyed today – and we got a point, and that’s also a very important point given our battle for eighth with AlphaTauri. We knew we weren’t going to win this race and that wasn’t really the aim. It was all about enjoying staring from the pole position and then really trying to get a point out of it.
“The dream was to try and finish ahead of Lando (Norris) just behind all the big cars, that didn’t quite happen, but we’re still happy with the point for eighth. We start from there tomorrow and that’s a position we’d be very happy about in regular qualifying. So, we start from inside the top 10 and hopefully we can go for points tomorrow too.”
Mick Schumacher: “We have a lot of potential”
Mick Schumacher was in form for Haas F1 Team after an extremely disappointing display in qualifying on Friday.
Schumacher had a good opening lap, that was key to having a good race and whilst he was helped by the retirement of Alex Albon and the issues with the BWT Alpine F1 Team, he made a number of key overtakes on lap one. Due to the ten-second time penalty of Aston Martin Aramco Cognizant Formula One Team‘s Lance Stroll, the German driver crossed the line in twelfth.
Schumacher is currently fighting to keep his Formula 1 seat, but it looks as if he will be replaced at the end of his contract by Nico Hulkenberg after numerous reports. However, until anything is confirmed, the German driver will continue to try and impress and show Haas that he is the driver they should be sticking with.
“We had a good opening lap which definitely helped get us into position and our pace didn’t look too bad either, so we were able to fight a bit. We had a small issue with the engine, so that’s something we need to look at, but we’ll find out how much pace we lost through it.
“We’ve started further back before and got into the points so if everything goes well, I’m sure we have a lot of potential.”
Credit: LAT Photo