Guenther Steiner insists his Haas team "didn't need to do bullying" despite complaints from Formula 1 fans accusing the team of mistreating Mick Schumacher.
Haas decided at the tail end of last season to replace Schumacher with a more experienced driver in the form of Nico Hulkenberg. The younger German simply hadn't scored enough points, and damaged his chances of getting a new contract with some expensive crashes.
But it took several months for that decision to be made, with the team waiting to be the last on the grid to confirm its 2023 driver line-up. It meant Schumacher had no other race seat to go for after losing his own, and left him uncertain about his future for several months.
Plus, the new series of Formula 1: Drive to Survive shows that the team were considering a change from a very early point in the 2022 season. The Netflix cameras showed team principal Steiner and owner Gene Haas expressing doubts about him in several conversations.
"We give him a year to learn, what does he do on the second day? He f***ing destroys the car, just because the other guy is faster," Steiner said after Schumacher's Saudi Arabia smash. The former F2 champion is also referred to as a "dead man walking" and "in over his head", while one team member suggests "getting rid" of him.
In reaction to watching that footage, some fans feel the team was being overly harsh on the racer. But Steiner has refuted any claims that Schumacher was bullied, telling RTL that it was "nothing out of the ordinary".
He said: "We don’t need to do bullying, because after all he was our driver. I can also absolutely understand Mick's fans. In the heat of the moment you sometimes say something that you might say differently an hour later, but that wasn't bullying at all."
Schumacher is now a reserve for Mercedes while he waits to see what options might appear for a 2024 race seat. He was in the paddock last week for pre-season testing in Bahrain, where he and Steiner bumped into each other – but they didn't chat beyond a simple greeting.
Steiner said: "When I saw him last weekend, I said hello to him. We didn't speak to each other. It's a good thing because of the distance between us in the paddock and the toilets, we don't always run into each other."
