In the run up to Mick Schumacher's sacking from Haas F1 at the end of the 2022 season, one of the criticisms from team boss Guenther Steiner was regarding Mick's supposed tendency to crash and cost the team a lot of money. As a fan of Mick (and his father), I thought some of the criticism felt harsh at times even if Mick's performance was admittedly lackluster.

Let's take a look at the data, comparing Mick to 2022 teammate Kevin Magnussen and other drivers from Haas F1's history. In the database I am using, we can't see how many crashes there were in practice and qualifying sessions (just from races). Mick did have some crashes in these sessions, so this is a limitation to be aware of before we dive further into the analysis. Additionally, we don't know the dollar figure associated with repairing any of these crashes that we do see in the race results data.

From what we've looked at (keeping in mind the limitations I mentioned earlier), I don't see Mick having a "crashing too much" problem so much as a "leaving points on the table" problem. Evidently, team principal Guenther Steiner didn't see the crashes as the primary issue either.

Ultimately, I don't have any basis to dispute the claimed costs of Mick's crashes, nor do I have any real way of comparing costs incurred by Mick crashing to those of other drivers. However, I think the issue is sort of a red herring. There simply wasn't much upside to Haas keeping Mick and using their resources to develop him since he was still underperforming vs. Magnussen. He wasn't fast and clean enough in the present, and if he ever developed into a high-caliber F1 driver, it would likely be another team like Ferrari reaping the benefits of Haas' risk-taking with Mick.

I think it will be interesting to see how Hulkenberg performs in 2023, in terms of both points vs. KMag and how frequently he crashes out of races. Let's take a look at one last visualization.

I don't think we can necessarily expect Hulk to crash out less often than Schumacher did, but I do think we'll see him generally be much more on the pace with Magnussen and battling for points with greater frequency.

Thanks for reading!