Haas team boss Guenther Steiner has claimed his team really strongly considered retaining Mick Schumacher for the 2023 Formula 1 season.

Towards the end of last season, Haas announced they would say goodbye to Schumacher from 2023. In his place will be Nico Hulkenberg, who makes his return to Formula 1 after spending two years on the sidelines as a reserve driver at Aston Martin. Hulkenberg will thus become Kevin Magnussen's teammate, but Steiner said that strong consideration was given to keeping Schumacher with the team for another season. Thus, much of the second half of the season was only actually thinking about the line-up for 2023. "Absolutely," Steiner said when asked by Motorsport Week whether he was seriously considering keeping Schumacher on for another year. He added that Schumacher junior has shown a lot of improvement over the season, which is why making the final choice took so long.

Brazil

The highlight of Haas' 2022 season came at the penultimate round in Brazil, when Magnussen took advantage of changing conditions in a rainy qualifying session and clinched the team's first pole position. Steiner claims that if Schumacher had grabbed the top spot, it would not have changed anything about the line-up. "Nothing would have changed. Because you cannot make this decision based on one emotional race or one qualifying result, that would be wrong either way."

Schumacher has since signed a deal with Mercedes' F1 team and will be a reserve driver in 2023.