The water leak Mick Schumacher suffered on his car in Friday's first practice session was caused by "heavy bouncing" around the bumpy street circuit, with Haas chief Guenther Steiner describing the problem as "strange".
The session lasted for just a few minutes for Schumacher, before the young German was told to pull over and stop his car by his race engineer. Water had been pouring out the side of his Haas and onto the track, and he was not able to re-emerge for any practice around the Baku circuit until the next session.
It was not ideal preparation for a young driver under pressure. Schumacher is still yet to score a point in Formula 1 and is one of two drivers yet to do so this season. To make matters worse, he has crashed his car several times – bringing hefty repair bills for a team with a small budget.
This time the disruption was not his fault, but that will have been no less frustrating for Steiner who wants to see more from the German, now in his second season with the team. Describing what had happened, he said: "FP1 started badly with the water leak on Mick’s car – he couldn’t go out – which is not good at a track like this.
"Something strange happened and actually we're lucky the same thing didn't happen to Kevin [Magnussen] as he was very close to having it happen as well, so we fixed it for FP2. FP1 was actually pretty good – we then made some changes for FP2 and we didn't perform as we planned to perform, so we need to go back to the drawing board a little bit overnight and see what we can do for tomorrow to be able to get some performance into the car."
Meanwhile, Schumacher was left to bemoan the fact that his plan for the day had been "wrecked" by the issue as he explained what had caused the water to come gushing out the side of his car. "It seems that the problem with the water leak came from the heavy bouncing that we suffered in the first lap, and it just wrecked the plan," said the son of seven-time world champion Michael.
"It's the first time physically that I do feel the effect of it, it's quite harsh on the body and also on the car, so it's definitely something to think about for future events. This track in general is quite light on tires except for obviously the surface temperature being quite high. It will be interesting to analyse deeper today, so we have a good overview for the race."
