Mick Schumacher may have suffered from letting the pressure of Formula 1 "get to him" in his final months with Haas, according to Damon Hill.
The young German spent two years with the team in F1, but it proved to be something of a false start to his F1 career. After mulling over his team's driver lineup for 2023, team boss Guenther Steiner decided to replace him with the much more experienced Nico Hulkenberg.
Schumacher's first F1 season was extremely difficult in an entirely uncompetitive car. But Haas improved in 2022 and team-mate Kevin Magnussen got plenty of joy, but still the son of the seven-time world champion was only able to score points at two race weekends out of 22.
Those struggles to score points, combined with several expensive crashes, meant Schumacher did not do enough to convince Steiner that he was the future of Haas, and now he finds himself on the periphery of the sport, and without a race seat for the 2023 season.
Looking back on the German's struggles, 1996 world champion Hill suggested he may have buckled under the weight of expectation. "I think Mick was under a lot of scrutiny, a lot of pressure and I think that it got to him the end," he told the F1 Nation podcast.
"I don't know where he gets his advice from but I think he probably found it was harder than he thought, Formula 1. There are other aspects to it, which you only get from years of being in the sport which I think Nico Hulkenberg has had and, therefore, he can concentrate on delivering for the team.
"That's why the team ultimately need people who can just do the job without putting them under stress." Explaining why he had taken the decision to drop Schumacher, team boss Steiner made it clear he needed to make sure Haas' interests were the priority.
"Mick can [become] a good driver, or he's already a good driver," he admitted. "But he can get better. But how long does it take us? Because he's growing with us, he cannot make us grow. We said, 'How can we do that?'
"We looked around and we knew Nico – we had a few discussions in the years before with him and it never materialised that he came to work with us – so obviously there was the respect there. He was on the market, he hasn’t driven now full-time for three years, [so we wondered], can he do it?
"He drove two races [with Aston Martin] this year, and he did do pretty well. We evaluated what is better for the team and in the end it came out that it is better to get an experienced driver to make the team move up quicker. Because a Formula 1 team is one of those things – you need to go quick, otherwise you lose momentum and you stay behind."
